Entry 157-1

How to Catch January Bass with Randy Dearman

Fish Fast this Month

Randy DearmanEditor’s Note: Randy Dearman, avid fishermen and professional angler, of Onalaska, Texas, has fished professionally for 20 years. He works as part of Strike King’s Pro Fishing Team and has competed in seven Bassmasters Classics.

The month of January can be one of the best times of the year to fish, and this month is definitely one of the best months to fish and catch a really-big bass. But good fishing in January is pretty much restricted to the South. In many areas in the North, you’d have to ice fish to catch bass this time of year. But when warm fronts move through the South this month, the bass will move out of that deep water into the shallow water and feed, and they’ll be easy to catch.

The females will be full of eggs and eating a lot to put on weight for the spawn. These bass are sort of like pregnant women. They put on a lot of weight just before they deliver. You can have some of the best big-bass days of the year during January, which is often when those big bass will school up like a pack of hungry wolves on the prowl.

Randy DearmanThe good news is that the bass will hit a wide variety of baits in January, but my all-time favorite January bait is the Strike King spinner bait. You can cover plenty of water and locate schools much quicker with a Strike King spinner bait than you can with any other lure. The water clarity in the lake I’m fishing will help me determine the color of spinner bait to fish. The sun and the clouds or the lack of clouds will also play a major role in color selection.

I like 1/2-ounce Strike King spinner bait. In clear water, I’ll use a willow-leaf blade, and in stained water, I’ll fish a Colorado bait because it will put off a louder bump. In 2006, I’ll be fishing Strike King’s Perfect Skirt spinner bait because it’s new and unique. It’s hard to come up with anything new for a spinner bait, but this new skirt has a built-in trailer that keeps you from having to add a trailer to your spinner bait. This skirt eliminates the problem of the trailer’s flipping up and going over the hook and preventing the hook from penetrating as deep as it can.

Randy DearmanStrike King has also come up with some new color combinations for the skirts to give the impression of a bait with a blue back, silver sides and a white belly. We’ve never been able to do this before with a skirt. In the past, if you had a three-colored skirt on your spinner bait, all three colors were mixed-up. But with these new skirts from Strike King, you can have one color on the top of the skirt, a different color in the middle of the skirt and another color on the bottom of the skirt. I think that these skirts are as big a change to the spinner bait as when we went from only having Colorado blades to using willow-leaf blades on spinner baits.




 

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