TREBLE TROUBLE
CRANKING STUMPS WITH L E BRUN
The Key: Cast Length
W
hen LeBrun won the All-
American on Louisiana’s Cross
Lake cranking stumps, it really
wasn’t much of a surprise. He’d fig-
ured out and mastered the tech-
nique just 20 miles up the road on
Caddo Lake.
The reason he figured out the
pattern was out of sheer necessity.
He needed a way to catch fish living
around cypress trees and stumps
that didn’t want to bite a Texas rig.
“If fish don’t want to bite, you
need to get them to react,” explains
LeBrun. “That’s what that crankbait
does. They don’t want to bite; they’re
just reacting when it deflects.”
Deflecting square-bills – like a
Bill Lewis SB-57 – off stumps has
50
long been a popular technique, but
doing it off cypress tree roots and
“knees” takes it to another level. If
you think an isolated stump is snag-
gy, try the countless and sporadic
knobs around every cypress tree.
That’s where cast length comes
into play.
“There is a certain distance you
have to cast past a tree with every
crankbait where it will deflect more
often than get hung,” says LeBrun.
“I’m not smart enough to know why,
but I think it has to do with it deflect-
ing better on the initial descent as
opposed to when it levels off.”
For instance, LeBrun will often
only cast 8 to 10 feet past a tree. The
shortened distance allows him more
control of the lure’s path and results
in far fewer hang-ups.
As you can imagine, the goal is
to make the crankbait hit and
deflect off the tree root, prompting
a bass to eat solely out of instinct
and not out of hunger. Because the
fish is striking out of surprise,
though, poor hookups are a reality.
LeBrun makes sure to find a happy
medium in retrieve speed – fast
enough so it will still deflect and
not get hung, yet slow enough to
still give a fish time to react and eat
the lure.
“It’s such a small window for that
bass to eat in,” adds LeBrun.
“Imagine a mousetrap. If you pull
something across it too fast, even if
the trap catches it, it may not catch
it well. Same thing with this. You’re
going to lose fish doing it simply
because they don’t eat the lure well.
“Two things I do to help this are
switch out all my treble hooks to
Hayabusa TBL930 treble hooks and
use a 7-foot Fitzgerald Fishing Bryan
Thrift Square Bill rod, which has
enough tip to not pull out the hooks.”
FLWFISHING.COM | MAJORLEAGUEFISHING.COM | APRIL-MAY 2020