We decided to take some time and come out to a lake and fish for some basin panfish.
After a little searching, we landed on a pretty good school of Bluegills and Crappies. We starting fishing using small tungsten jigs tipped with wax worms.
We caught a few, but it was pretty slow so we dropped the camera down to see what was going on.
What we found was a lot of the fish were coming in and checking out our baits but we weren’t catching as many fish as we should have been with the amount we were marking. We decided to change tactics and switch over to aggressive baits. We tied on some spoons and then switched over to a few darting lures like the Northland Puppet Minnow.
Once we made the switch over to the more aggressive baits our catch rate started to increase dramatically.
As soon as we started snapping our puppet minnows and working them aggressively we started catching more fish. We watched on the camera how the fish reacted to our baits. Most of the time the fish would key in on the bottom treble hook. Generally, we tipped the bottom treble hook with a wax worm, but we also would catch fish with the bait on there. It was really the action of the bait that was trigger the strikes.
The more the bait darted from side to side the more aggressive the fish became.
When you’re fishing for panfish that are neutral most of the time you think that you should downsize and go ultra-slow and many times that does work; but just the opposite is also true. Sometimes when you go big and aggressive you will really be able to trigger strikers and get them to react to the lure like we did today.
