lol.
I'll share what I figured out this summer. All observations are from one reservoir where I had a lot of uneducated offshore bass to work with.
There's at least one similarity between KVD and I; we both fish jerkbaits year round! DD jerkbaits were a cold water thing for me until recently although I have been using regular 4-5 feet diving baits in summer for a few years to target bass if/ when they moved closer to the shallows.
Anyway, so I had this great pitching bite going in early/ late spring, both targeting shoreline cover and outside grass edges. (Trust me, I'm getting to the point.) Most if not all bites would come on the fall, especially as the season progressed. Actually, I believe over 75% of the fish I've caught there this year were suspended.
So pretty much on a whim I decided to try some other baits, including jerkbaits, on these suspended bass. Some baits were epic failures btw, including spinbaits. I have a lot of confidence in those for suspended fish, just not here anymore (for now). I caught crappies by the bucket load on a spinbait 90 though.
Early summer, I was catching a bunch (of bass) on shallower baits, the pointer 100 and the pointer 112 seemed to work best. The 110 silent riser worked well too, which of course is not a suspending bait. Not sure why, but neither the regular 110 nor the 110FX caught that many.
Then the bass moved down, and I followed them down with deeper jerkbaits. The 110+1 has been a stellar performer all through. I was still catching them on plastics, but from then on it was about 50-50 between jerkbaits and plastics.
Fish were on key breaks on structure, usually around green grass. I have tried fishing on the bottom at the correct depths (re: thermocline), but strange as it seems, I found it easier to catch suspended bass here.
The big deal about the 110+1 is that it's a DD (medium-ish DD lol) jerkbait that you can actually work like a jerkbait. I believe it goes down to ~8 ft on 12# Tatsu. Megabasses seem to be quite sensitive to line diameter and even line type, so ymmv.
I was marking fish even deeper, in the 10+ ft range, and the only two jerkbaits I could reach them with (that I own) are the Staysee 120SP and the Live-X Leviathan. I caught a few fish here and there on either bait, but they weren't biting it real well (hooked outside the mouth/ hanging on to the rear treble/ swipes with no hookups/ etc).
So I was searching high and low for a DD *jerk*bait. I ended up buying a KVD deep jerkbait. It doesn't rip very well, in spite of what the ad claims (at least mine doesn't). But it jerks pretty well, and it outcaught the other two DD baits put together. I think being able to work it hard and erratically down deep (rather than sweeping and pausing) was important, as was the suspending/ super-slow rising part. I tried moving baits that would (obviously) either sink or rise when paused, and they weren't that hot either.
I didn't catch any giants. I'm not even sure there are any giants in here to begin with. But action was consistent with a *lot* of fun-sized 16"-17" fish, with a few slightly larger ones in the mix. 4 to 5 bass per hour have been about the average.
