Cranking Deeper Laydowns for Late Summer Bass: Fallen trees along shorelines can harbor the entire food chain and serve as a home to bass. One of the most easily identifiable habitats on any water body, laydowns can be counted on to produce fish.

Whether you're new to bass fishing or looking to smash your PB, the MONSTERBASS Regional Pro Series bass fishing subscription is designed to help you become a better angler and put you on bigger bass more often. Each month, you'll receive a carefully crafted kit of baits hand-selected for where you live and fish, that highlights bass fishing's most tried and true techniques. See which subscription program is right for you.

Check out https://monsterbass.com/ and use code SAVE15YT at check out to get $15 off your first box!

Video transcript:

Speaker 1:
All right, guys. Today, we're going to talk about catching fish on offshore cover. A lot of people think of fishing deep-diving crankbaits in the summer as a brush pile thing, or a rock-on-the-bottom kind of a thing, but a crankbait can be a very effective lure for pretty much any offshore cover or offshore structure. If you've got a ditch, a ledge, an edge, you can work a crankbait, and if you can keep it in the strike zone, you can catch a lot of fish. In fact, one of the number one reasons you fish a crankbait is because it is a lure that will stay in the strike zone longer, create more vibration, and in many cases, just be much more effective at fishing deep. Now, there's a couple things you have to keep in mind when it comes to fishing a crankbait, especially a deep-diving crankbait.

Speaker 1:
For the most part, you want to be able to cast as far as you can, or after the lure hits the water, you want to back off and do what's called, longlining, where you get the bait into the strike zone longer. Let me explain why that is. For about a third of the retrieve, the lure is on its way down, working its way into the strike zone. For about a third of the retrieve, it's in the strike zone, at the depth that it's designed to run at. Then, for another third of the retrieve, it's working its way back up to the angler. A lure that will run deep, that will allow you to keep it in the strike zone longer, is a lure that's going to be much more effective. But, to keep that lure in the strike zone, you have to keep in mind what your cover is, the type, the structure, and all of the variables that lure is going to come in contact with, because that's going to determine the rod that you select.

Speaker 1:
Anytime you fish a crankbait, you're going to want to fish a rod that's got more of a moderate or slow action, but there's going to be times that you want a less moderate action, or a moderate that's a little faster, and maybe even a moderate fast. If you're fishing over shale, ledges, rock, anything hard that lures going to be running into, you want the rod to be able to deflect. When that lure hits that rock, or that chunk, or that log, it can back up. When it does, the rod responds to that. That more moderate action loads a little deeper, it bends a little deeper, and it slings that bait out there a little better. I also like as long a rod as you can get away with. In this case, I've got a 7'6", but I'll go as long as 7'11" and really get that long cast, really get that long, deep dive.

Speaker 1:
Then, when that fish hits it, you've got more rod to give, and especially, when big fish come up from deep, they almost always want to jump. When they get ready to jump, if you've got the weight of that crankbait outside the mouth and they shake their head, that rod acts like a shock absorber. If you get into some softer cover, some milfoil, or other submerged vegetation, and you're trying to run that bait right along the top of it, that's when you want to move to a less moderate, meaning, a moderate fast, or a little less moderate action rod, because what that's going to do is when that bait catches that grass, you're still going to have enough power to rip it free. You're going to be able to get those reaction strikes from when you rip that bait free from the grass.

Speaker 1:
Now, the 1, 2, 3 punch for me is the right rod and as light a line as you can get away with, because line diameter also affects the depth that the bait runs. If you're going to fish a heavy line, you might need to go to a 12-foot crankbait to get to 10 feet. Most manufacturers rate their baits around 12-pound fluorocarbon, 12-pound monofilament, so if you're fishing heavier than that, you're going to run a little shallower. If you're fishing lighter than that, you're going to run a little deeper. Almost exclusively, I'm going to be in the six range with the gear ratio of my reel, when I'm crankbait fishing.

Speaker 1:
One thing I'm a big fan of doing, especially in the summertime, is driving around and looking at my graph, and carrying a buoy with me because live target, and structure scan, and all the fancy electronics in the world are great, but once you back way off of a particular target, if you don't have a visual reference of where that piece of cover or structure is, you're going to have a hard time presenting that lure. Drop that buoy, and then, throw the lure as far past it as I can. Then, either back-paddle, or turn my motor on real low, and just let line out as I back away. Now, it's only going down about an eighth of the retrieve. It's in the strike zone, about six to eighths, and then, it's got one eighth to come back to the top. You keep the bait in the strike zone longer, but here's what I'll tell you.

Speaker 1:
The only thing that you need to be successful, deep-crankbaiting, is you can take a simple app, like the Navionics app, and just find contour lines, go out there, drop a jig to the bottom, see how deep it is. Take off two feet, tie a crankbait that runs that depth, and start casting. You can generally find fish, so you can make crankbait fishing as simple or as complicated as you want it. Once you realize they're not on the bank, and you start to work your way out, and find that first cover, or that second, or third place where they're going to stage up to be more comfortable, because there's higher water temperature, so it's cooler down there, because, again, there's a lot of pleasure boat traffic and things like that, the more often you're going to find success with a crankbait.

Speaker 1:
Guys, listen. If you have not tried deep-cranking on all types of cover, when it comes to finding fish in the summer, you're missing out on a big part of where fish live and a big part of where fish heavily feed in the summertime. Add deep-crank into your arsenal. Do a map study of the reservoir that you're fishing. Figure out where those fish are going to be before you go to the water, and I promise you, you'll start catching more fish during the summertime, when everybody else is thinking about going to the park, or skiing, or doing something else, because they think that the fish have disappeared. They haven't disappeared. They just relocated. Guys, I hope you like this video. Do me a favor, subscribe to the Monsterbass channel for more awesome tips like this, and we'll see you guys in the next video.