Entry 134-2
Denny Brauer’s Five Best Winter Patterns
Another Productive Winter Bassing Bait - the Jerkbait
Editor's Note: Denny Bra
uer of Camdenton, Missouri, who's won just about every bass-fishing title there is, fishes in all kinds of weather and under many varied water conditions. This week he'll tell you how to catch bass in the winter.
Brauer: My second choice for a wintertime bass-fishing bait will be a jerkbait like Strike King's Wild Shiner. I like to fish it on bluff banks, especially when we have a two or a three day warm front move onto the lake, which will make the bass swim up to the next level in the water column. This type of place is often little secondary points where you have a little wind blowing into those small points. In January and February, you can often really hammer the bass with this pattern.
I like to jerk the bait down and then kill it, work the bait two or three times with two or three fast twitches and then kill the bait and let it sit still. All I'm doing with my harder jerks is keeping that Wild Shiner at the depths where I want to fish it. What I'm trying to do is get the attention of the suspended bass to look at that Wild Shiner. I'm not attempting to take the Wild Shiner out of the bass's strike zone. I'm just trying to give it some action and allow it to sit where the bass can eat it. The worse the weather conditions are, the colder the water is, and the slower I'll work the bait. You have to experiment to see how fast or how slow 
the bass want you to move the bait before they'll take it.
I like to fish the Wild Shiner on 10-pound-test line. I know some fishermen prefer 8-pound test, but I just like 10 pound better. If the bass are biting aggressively, I may even use 12-pound-test line.
