Northwest Fishing Reports

I'm trying to break out this year, from fishing my "Go-to" Senkos. I've had success so far with throwing spinner baits, no difficulty there obviously. (talking about large mouth fishing)
I am wondering about in what kind of enviroment is a swim bait best fished? I've got a handful of really sweet looking swim baits in all sizes. One is this little jointed fish about 3-4 inches. Great lifelike movement through the water.
Obviously with 3 treble hooks it is no good around lilly pads, however that is kind of where I usually target largemouth.

It just seems weird to throw a swimbait out in the middle of open water? Or is there a certain time of year on those?

Anyplace where you would fish a crankbait.

With the proper swimbait you can fish it in any kind of weeds and pads. Those would be the kind that you insert a single hook and texas rig it like a worm.

And they do work on Smallmouth.

exposed hooks - Outside weed lines, over rocks, inside weedlines, over weeds, outside/alongside pad lines, beside/along docks.

texas rigged - same as above, and skip under docks, hop or dragged on the bottom, thru pads, over/on top of pads, down in the submergent weeds, skip under trees and brush, flip into brush.

I rig most of mine through the 'side' of the swim bait instead of the 'back', so that if the swimbait had fins like a real fish it would come out of the side of the bait by the pectoral fin area and then just skim bury the point in the plastic to make it weedless.

Not like this


Like this

but coming out of the side of the bait (like where the two colors meet at the pour line)not out the belly or back. It works especially well with the PowerBait hollow belly swim shad.

The Quadfather wrote:I'm trying to break out this year, from fishing my "Go-to" Senkos. I've had success so far with throwing spinner baits, no difficulty there obviously. (talking about large mouth fishing)
I am wondering about in what kind of enviroment is a swim bait best fished? I've got a handful of really sweet looking swim baits in all sizes. One is this little jointed fish about 3-4 inches. Great lifelike movement through the water.
Obviously with 3 treble hooks it is no good around lilly pads, however that is kind of where I usually target largemouth.

It just seems weird to throw a swimbait out in the middle of open water? Or is there a certain time of year on those?

But Senkos work so well! I just picked up masses of them for largemouth. I like the powerbait swimmers, they stay on the hook better. I know, me giving you advice on bass right? I like them when they're heavy enough to rig weedless and slink them through the pads and skip under docks. I got a nice large mouth earlier this month trolling a powerbait one really slow along the dropoffs on lake roesiger. floated really slow along the line where I marked the fish, and gave it a twitch every once in a while. But this was when it was really cold.

I'll take a look for those, Nate.
I just really want to catch something on these swim baits. I am talking about swim baits that are more like an actual small fake fish,etc. Not the style that someone posted a pic of, above in this thread. I suppose i will try skipping this thing under docks. It is just to awkward to fish a bait with 3 trebbles around lilly pads.

I've always had the best luck with the hard plastic swim baits off of rocky points at least at Curlew lake. Or fished over weed beds with a steady retrieve. Had a few decent largies last year. I kind of bought in to the swimbait hype the last few years and bought more than I need- but it did give me a chance to test quite a few, there are a lot of garbage swimbaits out their that are hard to ever get them to run correctly.

StrikePro has some nice ones, the Cabela's real fish are ok, some sizes are better than others and they hang up on their own hook a lot, Savage Gear has some very good ones. I didn't like River2Sea, I had a hard time getting them to stay upright. Also, the Strike Kings ran well but seemed to fall apart.