Crankbait Techniques

 A crankbait is very useful in covering a wide amount of water in a short period of time, which is very helpful if you are fishing a body of water that you are not familiar with, or when you need to cover a lot of water while finding where the fish are.A lot of emphasis is placed on what depth a crankbait should be worked at. In general, the heavier the line you are using, the shallower a crankbait will run. The more rapid you reel in a crankbait, the deeper it will go.Keeping your rod tip up will make it go shallower, placing your rod tip down will make it go deeper.
In general, the shallow zone for a crankbait could be defined as shallower than 6 feet. A crankbait used at this depth of water should have a smaller, more vertical lip. Crankbaits worked at medium to deep depths should have large and more horizontal lips. The deepest running crankbaits may have a lip as long as the body of the bait, and it will be almost horizontal to the body.

Even though a faster retrieve will make a crankbait go a lot deeper, you should consider finding the speed at which the fish will strike the bait, what that means is you need to find a crankbait designed to run at the depth that you want,and at the speed the fish wants. If you need to slow down your presentation to trigger a strike, you should use a crankbait designed to run deeper to keep it in the "strike zone" depth. If the fish are striking at a faster bait, you should run a crankbait that is designed to run more shallow.

It works best if you have crankbaits bouncing off things, this will most always anticipate a strike.Crankbaits bouncing off of structure and rocks causes a change in direction and speed, this change is what triggers a fish into striking the crankbait. When their is no change in direction, this encourages a fish to follow the lure. When you're in open water, try to encourage a strike by changing speeds, and directions of the lure.

In clear water, most likely fish are relying on their sight for finding food. A fast moving bait with a natural color should be used. For less clear water, fish rely a lot more on motion (vibration) to find their food. You should use larger crankbaits with rattles to create the motion.

You can tweak a crankbait to run straight, and there are times you want to tweak it to run to the side. If you are fishing along a dock for example, it would be best to try and push the crankbait further under the dock than a straight-running crankbait will go. To change the direction, slowly bend the line tie wire one way or another. Make small adjustments rather than large ones, and test run the crankbait in open water so you can see what change you've made to it. Keep tweaking until you get it to react the way you want.

Gone fishin'