FISHING
BASS SKILLS
magical drain in the hog branch area
where groups of big females were
staged ahead of the spawn. the
water temperature was around 50
degrees.
“that’s the good thing about the
dt series; there’s one for just about
every depth,” bolton adds. “you
have to play around with them to
learn where they run with different
line sizes and long casts, but once
you get it figured out they can really
pay off.”
like bohannan, bolton prefers to
keep things simple when it comes to
color selection. among his favorites
are chartreuse/brown (hot mustard),
red (demon), helsinki shad and pearl
grey shiner.
“if the water is dirty, i’ll lean more
toward a chartreuse or red,” he says.
“red and white kind of crosses
between clear and dirty water.
Chartreuse comes out more in dirty
or stained water.”
Bolton’s winter
crankbaits
Rapala DT4
Rapala DT6
BOLTON’S BEST ADVICE FOR GETTING BIT
For Bolton, the shallow DT4 and DT6 models have a spot on his deck during
the winter and early spring. They work especially well when cranking around
rocks and brush piles on Kentucky Lake and other lakes closer to home during
warming trends.
One key for getting bit around the brush is to carefully choose baits and
match line sizes and line types to make the bait run at the right depth.
Generally, the number of the bait in the series equates to the depth it’ll run, but
changing line sizes can change its depth.
“You can catch them off of rock, but a lot of times they’ll be on brush piles
off these banks in 4 to 5 feet of water,” Bolton says. “That’s when I’ll go up in
line size to 14-pound-test Sufix Advance Monofilament to shallow up that DT6,
for instance. The bigger line will make it run 3 to 4 feet deep to clip the tops of
the brush piles instead of running underneath them and getting hung.”
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FLwFISHInG.com I wInTEr 2020