How To Fish Swimbaits
Swimbaits are easy to fish. The lure will do the majority of the work for you. You just have to know a few basic things to start catching fish on swimbaits consistently.
Depth of the fish: Swimbaits can be fished in all kinds of depths. Some may be setup to fish in 4 to 5 feet of water, while others are rigged with a jighead and you can countdown these baits to deeper depths before reeling them in. Many anglers report good success by finding what depth the fish are located at, then fishing the swimbait 2 or 3 feet above that depth. This will work well when fish are schooled up because the most aggressive fish will come out of the school to grab your bait.
Depth of your bait: Most swimbaits are setup with a jighead and a plastic body. You can control the depth you are fishing based on the weight of the jighead, the speed of your retrieve and how long you wait to wind in your bait once it hits the water. If the bass are schooled up in 12 feet of water, you may have to run that bait 10 to 12 feet deep to catch those fish. If you have a smaller jighead and you are winding in the bait with a faster retrieve, you probably aren’t deep enough to draw a strike. Spend some time with different weights and sizes of your swimbaits in 6 to 8 feet of water. Cast them out, count the bait down to the bottom, then vary your retrieves. Once you get an idea of how to work your bait down 6 to 8 feet deep, then go down to 10 or 12 feet of water and do the same thing. With a few different rods set up and about 15 to to 20 minutes of casting, counting your bait down and varying your winding speeds, you will have a really good idea how to fish your bait at the different depths.
Use these techniques and apply them to fish that you see on your graph.
Type of bait the fish are feeding on: Swimbaits are great baits for catching bigger fish and in a lot of lakes, the bigger bass, pike, walleye, etc. will be finding on certain types of forage more than others throughout specific times of the year. If you are fishing for walleye and there are a lot of perch in the body of water that you are fishing, try a swimbait that resembles a perch. In California, many of the lakes are stocked with rainbow trout and bass in the 5 to 15 pound range feed heavily on these rainbow trout, so a bigger swimbait that resembles a rainbow trout will do well out there.
All of the things that were talked about above are very important for fishing with other lures and baits as well, but for some reason, a lot of anglers don’t fish swimbaits correctly. They just grab one that looks good in the store and they start casting it like crazy. Fish swimbaits at the desired depths where there are fish and match the hatch and you will catch bigger bass more consistently.
Other fish that will hit a swimbait are walleye, northern pike, muskie, salmon and many others.
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