I do a lot of fun fishing this time of year – some of it’s to start getting myself ready for the Bassmaster Classic and the upcoming Bassmaster Elite Season, but regardless of my day’s objective, it’s cold on the lake. Recently, our morning temperatures here on Oklahoma’s Lake Tenkiller have been in the low 30s with daytime highs in the 50s.
Despite the chill, I actually enjoy cold weather fishing for a few reasons:
- It’s kind of related to the summertime ledge fishing. As long as you can find some fish, there’s going to be several there.
- You may fish three or four hours, not catch anything, then find a wad of them and catch 25 pounds. That actually happened to me recently. Fishing wasn’t very good but I found one little stretch with fish, and I went up and down that stretch and caught a giant bag for the wintertime.
- When you do get a bite, the size is usually above average. The fish are fatter now than they are pretty much all year long.
Now, we hear the term "lethargic" a lot, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. To me, that just narrows down the strike zone.
I mean you’re not going to be able to burn a spinnerbait and pick up a fish 5 yards on each side of that cast. You’re going to have to, first of all, throw something a little bit slower, and you’re going to have to get close to them to get them to bite.
Water color has a lot to do with this. The lake that I live on is pretty clear so you can get them to travel a long way to bite, but you can’t be moving fast.
For example, a jerkbait is good in the clear water that I fish at home. They can sit there and watch it and then go get it.
There are days when they’re aggressive for wintertime and you can move it pretty good, but there are other days when they don’t want to eat and you have to let the bait sit for a long time and beg them to bite.
The thing about wintertime is that it differs every day. There are hardly ever two days the same, so you have to relocate the fish every day. They’ll be in the same area, but they might not be on the exact same piece of cover.
The two things that really seem to affect the winter bite the most are water temperature and moon phase. Water temperature doesn’t change drastically in the deep of winter. It takes a decent warm front to warm it up, or it takes a lot of cold nights to drop it any more than it is.
I spend a lot of days fishing in the wintertime, and I think that it’s almost backwards from what a lot of people might think. Where I live, some of the days that are really cold – it’s snowing, it’s dark outside, low-light conditions – those are the days that the fish really seem aggressive. They move shallow and you can catch them cranking and doing a lot of things.
But then there are days that are sunny and warm and you think, “Man, it’s an awesome day to go fishing.” But those are the days that it’s tougher to catch them. I like the cold, nasty days because that’s when it seems like they get really aggressive.
Now that’s the lake I fish, and I’m sure it varies on different lakes around the country. If I was in a river system fishing shallow stumps and logs, I’m sure I would want some sun. But the lake I live on is pretty clear, so anytime you can get some overcast skies, the fish bite better.
I also think that, in the wintertime, the moon has a big effect on the fish. If you get a full moon, it seems that the fish move shallow. Maybe not like two feet, but they get right into that 5- to 15-foot range. It’s almost like they’re up there eating crawdads. And on the new moon, it seems they get out deep and eat shad.
A couple more points I think are important for wintertime fishing:
In the cold water, you can get away with using lighter line than you would during the warmer months. Usually, during the Elite season my average line is 17- to 20-pound. But in the winter, I use 8, 10 and 14 a lot. You have a lot better feel with these light bites and the water is clear – so lighter lines are good.
The other thing is that the fish don’t fight nearly as hard in the winter months. You have an initial run of 3 to 4 seconds and then they’ll just come up and wallow on the surface. I’ll also use lighter hooks because it takes less effort to set the hook and there’s not as much risk for opening hooks.
Because I’m fishing for bigger fish, I use a lot of bigger baits this time of year like a 5- or 6-inch YUM Money Minnow or a 5 1/2-inch Smithwick Rogue. I’d rather go out and catch five big ones than 15 small ones.
A lot of the fish I catch will have a giant gizzard shad’s forked tail sticking out of their mouths.
I think they’d rather eat one big meal than race around trying to catch a bunch of smaller meals.
I catch a lot of 3-pound fish on 5- to 6-inch baits in the wintertime. There are days when I only get five to six bites and there are other days when I get 20 bites. Regardless, it’s all fun because these are above average fish that help keep me warm on a cold winter day.
