(Editor's note: The following is the first in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)
If you’re going to pull Jason Christie out of his tree stand or away from his beloved basketball games during the coldest months of the year, you’d better give him a good reason to do something else. On the lakes near his Oklahoma home, that sometimes means winter bass fishing, which can be a feast-or-famine scenario. If you’re on them, you can load the boat. But if you’re not, all you’ll catch is a cold.
That’s why Christie, a self-described “simple kind of guy,” has developed a road map to narrowing down his options before frostbite sets in.
“The biggest thing you have to keep in mind is deep water,” he said. Of course, “deep” is a relative term. On a lake like Sam Rayburn, it might be 15 to 20 feet, while on Kentucky Lake it could be as much as 50 to 60 feet. He’s especially fond of finding deep water structure close to spawning areas, which he believes contain “the greatest numbers of fish and the greatest numbers of big fish.”
When breaking down a lake in the winter, he’ll fish an entire creek arm or an entire ledge. Sometimes the bass will be confined to one section of his explorations. Other times they’ll be scattered. Sometimes that scattering seems random, but by punching in a waypoint on every bite and then zooming out the display on his Garmin unit, sometimes those apparently random bites fall neatly into a pattern that he can replicate.
Ideally, he’ll find areas that offer a combination of depths and contours, allowing fish to change with changing conditions. For example, fish relating to a ledge may want access to shallow cover.
“It seems like when it gets really cold, the fish will set up in that turn there, and when it gets warmer, they’ll slide up there on that shallow water on the point and eat and move around,” he explained.
That means that as a tournament week progresses, he’ll take note of how the fish change from day to day or even from hour to hour.
“The fish may still be relating to the same kind of areas, but … starting to travel,” he explained, based on wind, changing water temperatures and even the movement of baitfish.
On a lake like Kentucky Lake, ledges rule, but in the wintertime Christie fishes them differently than at any other time of year. He’ll set up directly on the ledge, for example with his trolling motor in 40 feet of water and his back graph in 15, and then cast right down the line. That’s his “prime Roguing hole,” he said of his favorite jerkbait, and while it might seem odd to throw a lure that dives 8 feet over 20 or 25, it works. As the day warms up, he often finds that the bite gets more aggressive and consistent, and the fish “float up” in the water column.
Finally, he urges anglers to stay open-minded. For years he stayed deep exclusively in the wintertime until he could resist the allure of the skinny water no more. Sometimes now he’ll find himself in 6 feet of water burning a Bandit crankbait and loading the boat.
“The bigger ones own the bank in the winter,” he said.
