Catching bass in November
By BOYD DUCKETT

The more the mercury dips, the tighter the schools of baitfish will be. And when baitfish schools get tight, bass feed like crazy, gorging themselves for winter. For this reason, the last bite of the year can also produce some of the year's biggest fish. Also, cold-weather bass fishing can be a numbers game: where you find one, there's bound to be more.

On warm sunny days, anglers can often find fish relatively shallow, even in December. Fish will often gather on the first structure element - the edge of a weed line or a rock pile - off shore and they can be taken on all manner of motion lures such as crankbaits. Vibrating, rattling baits like a crankbait are productive when water temperatures are falling. Boat docks can also be a great place to target bass this time of year. Look for wood docks, on which algae grows below the water line. This algae is a food source for many species of prey fish. Bass, being ambush feeders, can easily lay in the shadows of the dock pilings and feed on minnows, shad and other prey as they attempt to feed off the algae.

For fishing docks, I like to flip a jig tipped with a Berkley PowerBait Chigger Craw. I have a personal attachment to this bait since it is the one I used to win the Bassmaster Classic. The big claws of the Chigger Craw produce an attention-grabbing flapping motion as it falls and is retrieved. If flipping a Chigger Craw on a jig doesn't work, I like to skip a wacky rigged PowerBait Fat Dover Crawler. Wacky rigging simply means hooking the bait through the middle. The bait will have an incredible motion as it falls and remains in the strike zone.