Spring Swim Jigging Tips That Catch MORE Bass

Hey, guys, Bryan Schmitt here with bassresource.com. I'm going to talk to you about springtime, the spring season for swim jigging. Probably no better season than spring for so many options out there, but swim jigging is really, really strong in the spring of the year. You know, and I'm going to bring spring, I'm going to go early pre-spawn, spawn, to early post-spawn. I'm going to just gather spring all into that.

So, you know, what are we targeting in the spring of the year? When I'm swim jigging in the spring of the year, I'm always looking for vegetation, submerged grass or visual, you know, emerging vegetation, lily pads, reeds, anything shallow habitat-wise. And there's reasons I choose certain jigs for certain scenarios, and I'm going to talk to you about that real quick. You know, first and foremost, in the spring of the year, I'm kind of basing it off a bluegill approach or a crayfish approach, okay? You know, if a fish is on bed, they do not like bluegills, and there's certain times where they're really eating crayfish really good. So I know I got my bases covered right there.

So let's just talk about a couple key colors here. You know, this is a green pumpkin, watermelonish swim jig with some red tinsel. I love some red at times. I think it's just something that draws a few extra bites. This is my swim jig again from Hayabusa. I have tinsel on every one of them, and I have a Missile Baits Chunky D in Green Pumpkin Flash on the back of this. Okay, that's one option. Another option is my river special. I call this river special. This is a green pumpkin with blue tinsel. I have a Missile Baits D Bomb in a vertical position on the back of this swim jig here. Just a little bit different than this. You know, this is a little more just straight green pumpkin. This has a little bit of watermelon. One has red tinsel. One has blue tinsel. Don't ask me why, but I've seen day-to-day where one color makes a big difference. But those two are some of my core, core deals in the spring of the year as well as this one here.

This is a black and blue with blue tinsel with the Chunky D trailer in Bruiser Flash. This is just a good color. Black and blue swim jigs will never go extinct. They will catch them, guys, and there's times where the black and blue is hard to beat. Another really cool color is the nasty color. We've talked about this at length. This is a really good option for imitating bluegill and brim. Very natural, natural color.

So we got our color selection pretty narrowed down for the spring swim jig fishing. Now, we got to dive into why we choose certain trailers for certain situations. You can control the depth that swim jig gets to a lot by your trailer, your trailer choice, and how you apply your trailer. So if you look here I have the D Bomb in a vertical position so it's a lot more streamlined with the hook. So if you see the hook there, everything's streamlined. This is going to allow less resistance on the water. This bait will ride a little bit deeper than if I turn it horizontal, you know, and it's fighting against the water. So I can control a little bit a foot or two here or there by how I apply my trailer. If I want to get down there into some submerged grass a little bit deeper, I'm going to put in the vertical position. If I want to keep it up there very shallow, shallower, I'll put in the horizontal position.

A D Bomb trailer is a bulky trailer as well. It's also going to keep it up, but there are certain scenarios, you know, where you're up there in some shallow lily pads and you want to keep it up, you can play with that. You don't always have to go up in line size. You can go up in your trailer size and angles. So let's say I want to get it a little bit deeper than a D Bomb. I want something really, really streamlined. That's when I'll go to the Shockwave in the spring of the year. The Shockwave is a very, very narrow swim bait, a small boot tail, not a lot of action. It has just enough to draw them in, but this trailer here, guys, allows it to get a lot deeper in the water. This is the smaller Shockwave model here. This is something that I could fish easily 5 to 8 foot and cover a lot of water.

And then the Chunky D is kind of the perfect medium, guys. This is not that big, but it still has a lot of action. So this is the medium, I would say, between the Shockwave and the D Bomb. And here's another thing. You know, the D Bomb and the Chunky D here, they have two legs that are going to kick. That's two legs putting off action. I always associate swim jigging with either a twin tail chunk trailer or a swim bait profile trailer. And I've seen that be a big deal depending on the food source that they are keying on. You know, are they more on bluegill and baitfish? You want the swim bait. Are they more on crayfish? It seems like the twin tail does a lot of damage for me. I believe this twin tail, you can fish it at a slower speed as well. So that's a key there.

But in the spring of the year, guys, we're thinking spawn. We want to get shallow, so you want to find shallow habitat that they can spawn around. And sometimes you want to look for the lead-in areas to the spawning areas, so especially if you have a beautiful shallow bay that has some habitat for them to spawn, but just outside there, there's a little bit of deeper grass. That's an excellent scenario for some staging fish, either pre-spawn or post-spawn during the spawn of the year. You kind of always want to think where they're going, where they're coming from. You know, depending on if you're on that pre-spawn, post-spawn bite, you want to get a little deeper. If you want to get up there where they're spawning, you want to get a little shallower, control your trailer sizes. And that is my deal for spring swim jigging. I hope you learned a little bit and then can apply this on your waters.