This past week I got a text from a friend asking what the bass were hitting right now. After I said a few bad words, since he was fishing and I was at work, I sent him a note with a few baits I thought would work but this brought to my attention the occasional need to tell you what the fish are hitting right now. So here is a short list of what I’ve been using to catch fish over the past few weeks.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but it’s been windy lately. The wind has been so rough that we were eating dinner on the deck a few nights back and my tea started white capping. Now that’s rough. With wind conditions this bad you have to choose your baits wisely. You need something that you can stay in contact with and has a lot of treble hooks hanging off it so that if a fish hits it will hook itself since you may not be able to feel it. To combat the wind I’ve been throwing a small jerkbait over grass beds with some success. My bait of choice is a Sebile Koolie Minnow because the hooks are extremely sharp and grab the fish even when I don’t know they’ve hit.

Even when the winds are bad, it seems they always lay down right at dark for just a little while. Lately I’ve been taking advantage of this to throw some topwater baits. If the bass are buried up in the weeds I throw a Stanley Ribbit in there with them and drag them out kicking and screaming. When the fish are cruising over the top of grass flats I’ve been throwing a Sebile Splasher. Tonight I even threw a saltwater Bomber Badonk-A-Donk with limited success. The fish wanted it, they just kept missing but this shows that just because a bait is marked for either salt or freshwater that doesn’t mean you can’t use it for other things.

The heat of summer is about to hit and the bass are going to move deep but right now topwaters and shallow running jerkbaits are working very well, even on the hard hit lakes I fish.