Entry 180-2
Mark Davis on Crankbaits
Part 2: Choosing the Crankbait Size
Editor’s Note: One of the most-versatile lures in a bass fisherman’s tackle box is the crankbait, and one of the most-knowledgeable Strike King Pros on crankbait fishing is Mark Davis of Mt. Ida, Arkansas, past Bassmasters Classic winner and nationally-known angler. There’s rarely a time or a place when crankbaits won’t produce bass, if you know how to select and fish them properly.
Question: Mark, you said that depth and size go together when you choose a crankbait. We talked about how to change the size of the crankbait and make it fish to a depth of water it wasn’t designed to fish through. Now, we want to talk more specifically about how you select the size crankbait you use.
Davis: There are only two lures that can best imitate almost any prey a bass feeds on - the jig and the crankbait. The jig can look like a bream, a crappie, a shad or a crawfish, which are the types of baits we try to make a jig look like when we’re fishing. I know bass will eat blackbirds, baby turtles, frogs and a wide variety of other foods, but these are not their major foods. The major forage of bass is sunfish, shad, other baby bass and crawfish, at least in the South. Besides a jig, a crankbait can look like all those prey fish.
I know you may cast a crawfish-colored spinner bait, but it still doesn’t look like a crawfish. A crawfish doesn’t have blades that flash and spin. A plastic worm can’t look like a shad or a crawfish. 
So, we have a jig and a crankbait that most resembles the food bass feed on most of the time. To more perfectly imitate the baitfish bass feed on, we have to consider the size and the color of the lure, how we retrieve the lure, and where we fish the lure. If you’re fishing standing timber in open water for suspended bass, you don’t want a crankbait digging the bottom; you want a crankbait that will imitate a shad or a sunfish that’s swimming in open water. But if you’re fishing around rocks, wood or mud, you may want a crankbait that imitates a crawfish. So, as you see, the crankbait can imitate various types of baits to the bass, depending on where and how we fish it.
The speed at which you fish that bait also determines what the bait looks like. For instance, a crawfish doesn’t swim as fast as a shad does. So, you won’t reel a crawfish-colored crankbait very fast. You really want to just start, stop and bump the bottom with a crawfish-colored crankbait to better imitate a crawfish.
You also want to make sure your crankbait is the same size as the bait on which the bass are feeding. 
In other words, if you have small crawfish in the lake you’re fishing, at the time you’re fishing, and you’re using a crankbait to imitate a crawfish, you want to use a small crawfish crankbait. If the shad in the lake are about 5-inches long, and the bass are feeding on that size shad, you’ll want to use a crankbait that’s about 5-inches long.
When you factor in the water temperature and the clarity of the water, you can better determine the size crankbait you want to fish. As I mentioned earlier, in cold water with inactive fish, you want to choose a small crankbait to catch these bass. If you’re fishing in warm water and/or muddy water, you’ll want to use a larger crankbait. So, there are several factors, other than depth, you need to consider when choosing the crankbait you’ll be fishing.
Contents:
- Part 1: How to Select a Crankbait
- Part 2: Choosing the Crankbait Size
- Part 3: Choosing the Crankbait Color
- Part 4: Mark Davis on Cochran, Grigsby and VanDam
- Part 5: Mark Davis on Brauer and Hackney
