By Jonathan LePera
Special to BassFan
(Editor's note: This is part 2 of an occasional 2-part series on cold-water swim jig tactics. To read part 1 about Tom Monsoor's tried and true technique, click here.)
For anyone who knows Mark Zona, Bassmaster television analyst and host of Zona’s Awesome Fishing Show, he’s obsessed with building a better mouse trap. It doesn’t matter the technique or the bait, whatever may have worked well yesterday, he wants something even better for tomorrow.
When faced with water temperatures in the mid-30 to mid-40-degree range, he’s found himself content, but not satisfied with the results that swimbaits, blade baits and jerkbaits produced. Eventually, he incorporated a swim jig into his cold-water arsenal and the results have been mind-blowing.
“The cold-water swim jig deal comes from the successes and failures of everything I just said and trying to build a better mouse trap,” Zona said. “Nothing is as powerful as this swim jig deal that I’ve found. It’s, by far, the biggest cold-water big-fish tactic that I’ve used and I’ve been fishing a deep diving jerkbait since I was 15. The swim jig destroys it.”
The Bait Connection
Zona has found that whether he’s fishing in Alabama, Indiana, Missouri or at home in Michigan, when the water is at its coldest without being frozen, baitfish get very tightly packed and don’t move around a lot.
“Bait has very little movement,” he said. “The only thing that bait does is it has a tendency to go way more vertical. It suspends, then it goes near the bottom.”
He’s been known to make his own path through some skim ice a time or two with his Nitro, but the moment the ice comes off a lake, he’ll hit the water and turn on his Humminbird units and look for one key indicator – a wad of bait that resembles a perfectly vertical palm tree. That’s when he knows he’s cracked the code.
Plumes of bluegill in frigid cold water relate to outside grass lines and stack up from the bottom and extend 6 to 10 feet upward or they’ll suspend 3 feet off the bottom. During this time of year, Zona has caught largemouth with the tail of a bluegill stuck in its gullet.
“Bluegill are homebodies; they don’t migrate a ton in cold water and are easy prey,” he said. “This is what every ice fisherman, two weeks prior to this phenomenon happening, was trying to find with their flasher. I would drop cameras around those plumes of bluegills and while they might be very dormant, there’s always a hunter around those plumes of bluegills. Normally, they are all getting along, everyone is in a good mood until the window opens and the largemouth attack.”
Zona readily admits this pattern is not a numbers deal. If he can get five to eight bites by the end of the day, he guarantees they’ll be good fish, but it won’t be a catch-fest.
Clarity, Presentation are Critical
Zona stresses that at least three feet of visibility in the water is a must. Twenty feet is a best-case scenario. He’ll target largemouth feeding on the bluegill plumes in the 10- to 25-foot range.
“I don’t look for points,” he said. “I want an outer feeding flat where bluegill are in their wintering positions in 10 to 20 feet of water. I don’t want any fast break. I want featureless feeding shelves outside the grass and where those bluegills winter.”
Zona casts a 5/16-ounce Strike King Tour Grade Swim Jig as far as he possibly can on 12-pound Seaguar AbrazX fluorocarbon. Line any heavier kills the natural swim of the jig, he says. He thins the skirt by half, but does not trim the length of the skirt as he likes the bulk.
Candy craw and bluegill are the only colors he throws paired with an 3.75-inch Strike King Rage Swimmer in ayu and pro blue red pearl patterns. The marriage of the two allows Zona to have full control over his retrieve speed. His preferred combo for this technique is a Daiwa Tatula SV (7.3:1 ratio) casting reel paried with a 7-foot, 3-inch Daiwa Tatula Elite Brent Ehrler multi-purpose casting rod.
“I’m really able to slow that bait down,” he noted. “I’m going to bring that thing through that plume. I want mine to hover 1 to 3 feet off the bottom. It is so painful how slow you need to retrieve this.”
Zona casts it out as far as he can and lets it get to the bottom. He then slow-rolls it the majority of the way.
“For the first five feet when it hits the bottom, I’ll slow roll it and kick it with the reel handle,” he explained. “Or when I know it’s swinging like a pendulum back to the boat, I’ll kick it like I would if I were flaring an umbrella rig and drop it back down real quick.
“What I’ve learned is the trigger for that initial five feet or when the bait is near the end of its cast as it approaches the boat, you’ll pull one of those big ones through those plumes of blue gill and he’ll track it and wait for that bait to do something. So, I’ll flare that bait. Big fish will cream it or nip at it. Keep a continuous retrieve until the rod loads, and then pull back on them.”
Where It Started
If you ever corner Zona and press him to identify some of the best anglers he knows away from the professional tours, Greg Mangus makes the cut. It’s through their shared obsession with bass fishing that they hatched a cold-water swim jig pattern, but some might suggest Mangus led the way.
Mangus is a long-time tournament angler and owner of C-Flash Crankbaits. He first stumbled onto the cold-water swim jig deal while out fishing with friends from Ohio. It was the first week of November and a Silver Buddy blade bait had been producing nicely before the bite shut off. One friend switched to a swim jig and slammed a 4-pound bass.
Mangus thought nothing of it and moved to another part of the lake. He switched to a square-bill crankbait and while he had his fill of largemouth up to 2 1/2 pounds, his friend with the swim jig was consistently catching brutes in the 4- to 6-pound range.
The Recipe
Mangus had never heard of a Keitech, the previously not well-known bait that enjoyed a cult-like following among pros, that his buddy had on the back of his jig. Once his friend left for home, Mangus’ wheels started turning.
Over the next three years, Mangus and his partner made routine trips to the bank to deposit checks they’d collected from late-season and ice-out tournaments they’d won.
“Obviously, it works pretty darn good,” Mangus said.
Once fall temperatures dip below 50 degrees (after turnover basically), bass will begin the transition to their wintering areas.
“The bait fish, in that transition period, tend to get in small places like a hard spot on a tiny isolated point,” he said. “It could be a relatively more fertile area on the way to where the fish winter, which are typically areas that are more gradual in their depth changes and areas where the flats are relatively deeper, but not extreme.”
Mangus fishes the same areas that bluegill fishermen would ice fish, targeting flats with 8 to 15 feet of water, but not deeper than 20.
“When they get in there, you can generally catch them until it ices up,” he said. “The wintering areas were more likely to be thick green weeds because they’re typically in the deeper flats, but not a flat so deep that the weeds don’t grow.”
Most of the time it's a bottom-related scenario.
“Once they’ve left their wintering areas, I’ll look for inside turns on big flats where they might spawn or mouths of channels or in the channels,” Mangus said.
Once spring arrives, both bass and bluegill will be in that same area and while part of the lake might have ice on it, Mangus will be fishing an open area where it’s possible to catch 80 to 100 fish.
“You tend to catch them in more fertile areas but not on top of the flat initially,” he added. “They tend to be on the break, inside turns basically, but fertile areas where there are more weeds in that area.
“When you find them, the big ones tend to bunch up. I’m probably going to spend my time in areas where they’re going to spawn.”
The Jig
Mangus ties his own jigs on a head he pours with a Do-It bullet-head mold, the only difference being that he uses a 4/0 long-shank Gamakatsu jig hook that he says was custom-designed for Gary Yamamoto.
In colder water, bluegill and shad colors work best. At other times of the year, black/blue and perch, a chartreuse pattern that he ties, work also. He’ll always match the trailer to the skirt color normally with a Keitech Swing Impact FAT ranging in size from 3.3 to 4.3 inches. He’ll also mix in a Poor Boys Kiss Craw. To hold the trailers in place, he’ll add his own wire keeper.
Most often, largemouth will want a presentation very low in the water column that is ticking along the bottom. At times, he has triggered bites by cranking the reel handle quickly, three or four times, and letting his jig drop, especially when they are set up on a steeper break. Bites will vary from a hard thump to a feeling of added weight.
“They’re pretty aggressive,” he said. “Again, I don’t catch a lot of little ones with that bait.”
He likes a high-speed Lew’s reel (6.4:1 or 7:1 ratio) to catch up to fish that charge toward him and once he feels the weight of the fish, he’ll drive the hooks in with a hard sweep-set of a 7-foot, 8-inch medium-heavy Dobyns Extreme casting rod laced with 12- to 15-pound Seaguar AbrazX fluorocarbon line.
