Thursday Tips: Pause Your Presentations

The first warm days that foreshadow spring (which will be mixed in this month if you live far enough South) will push game fish such as bass and crappie shallow to feed and you can catch them on flats and around shoreline cover. It's important to remember, though, that the air warms far faster than the water, and a cold-blooded bass and it's cold-blooded forage remain winter slowed even on the warmest, sunniest days. That means the fish usually won't chase meals very far. It also means that a fast-moving lure won't look natural.

Suspending jerkbaits stand out this time of year because you can make them dance and dart erratically and then leave them hanging enticingly in the strike zone. The pause is absolutely critical to such a presentation early in the year, and sometimes finding the right length of pause is the key to catching fish. As a general rule, pause as a long as think is long enough and then pause that long again.

Pauses aren't only for jerkbaits and bass, though. Slow falling lures like a 1/16-ounce Road Runner Pro Marabou work well when the water is cold because you can move the lure with twitches and mix in pauses, with the bait falling slowly through the water column and looking helpless.  Pauses are also central to fishing a "float and fly" for bass, crappie or trout. The float allows a tiny hair jig to hang motionless in the water column between series of jiggles, and most fish take the bait during the pause.

Pausing is tough because you feel like you aren't doing anything and because it limits your capacity to cover water in search of fish. However, at times it's a real key to drawing strikes from fish and definitely yields big rewards.