A lure designed by championship bass angler David Fritts is quietly making noise in the large and always-growing niche of fishing pressured bass.
Built by Berkley, the Frittside is a crankbait that combines several key traits to provoke the attention of bass without spooking them, specifically in cold, hot and pressured conditions.
The Frittside, available in several sizes of course, is a square-billed crankbait with flat sides and no internal rattle. Its size and construction make the most of a crankbait’s opportunity to be fished at a variety of depths and speeds, while the flat sides make the most of the opportunity to cause a disturbance without making a sound. The cavitation caused by its sides grabs attention in a different way. Often, a loud rattle can be counterproductive in cleaner waters, and in places where bass are fished a lot.
The Frittside is a slow riser, a lure with slightly-positive buoyancy, so it works best in shallow water presentations. It’s a diver courtesy of its bill, but it’s not a deep diver so it works well in riprap. As a shallow-runner, it’s a crankbait that can be worked well from the bank as well as a boat.
Its tight, balsa-like action has been a big hit with bass in cold water, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work just as well as waters warm up.
The Frittside lures are generally on the small side for crankbaits, so they’re best fished with a lighter rod and line setup. Still, it’s very castable for its size, in part because of the positioning of its weight chambers. It has two, one in front and the other behind the front of two treble hooks. This is a crankbait of quality construction, one that should work well right now in the mixed pre-, mid- and post-spawn conditions of local waters.
It’s fitting this lure is a David Fritts design. Fritts, 67, has been a tournament pro for 34 years. He has 60 to 10 finishes, is a past Bassmaster Classic champion, B.A.S.S. Angler of the Year and Forrest Wood Cup champion, and he’s done it all while fishing crankbaits almost exclusively. He’s a self-taught bass angler who got his start with crankbaits and, largely, stuck with it. The Berkley Frittside line reflects the experience and skill of an angler and designer who has learned to fish a few different general lures in many different specific ways. This pattern seems destined to be a tackle box staple from now on.
Strike him, her out
Catching gamefish like bass or crappie is as much about provoking a strike without spooking the fish as it is about finding a fish in the mood for a meal. Just the right amount of provocation can be a hard note to strike. When crappie are in a quiet mood, a bait presenting too much action will turn off the bite, if not spook the fish altogether. These are the times that call for the tiniest jigs on the lightest line one can stand to fish.
The time of year has arrived when largemouth bass generally begin favoring baits with significant amounts of red in them. Beyond its visual appeal across the spectrum of water colors, this preference likely occurs because it coordinates with predominant crawfish colors present at the same time. Whatever the reason, Coleman said the time for the red shift for bass is now.
Although fishing the spring spawn is a practice associated first with crappie in many minds, largemouth bass concentrate a key part of their reproductive year in that season as well. This offers anglers what is likely their best chance of the year to catch personal records by hauling in egg-laden, heavy female bass during the pre-spawn. It also creates a once-a-year opportunity to provoke strikes from territorial male bass during the spawn itself. Immediately after the spawn, when bass move off of beds and bluegill take their place, the bass spawn offers a mop-up time to fish bluegill-patterned swim baits and other plugs just off these beds, catching big bass that have not fed regularly for many days.
Largemouth bass frequently spawn twice per year, concentrating those efforts during the spring and fall. The fall spawn is much less predictable, not universal to all populations of largemouth bass and not nearly so well defined though so, for practical purposes, fishing the bass spawn is an event that takes place once per year, in the spring.
Bass feed heavily both before and after the spawn. During the spawn itself they may not eat for roughly two weeks, but they can be caught during this time by provoking their defensive nature, fishing crawfish- and bluegill-patterned baits.
Largemouth bass and crappie both begin spawning when water temperatures edge above 60 degrees, but bass tend to continue spawning in water somewhat warmer than crappie will willingly tolerate. When water temperatures hit 70 to 75 degrees, crappie return to deeper, cooler water, but largemouth continue spawning until water temperatures approach 80 degrees. This wide zone of temperature tolerance explains, in large part, the universal nature of the range and variety of waters in which largemouth bass thrive.
When cool fronts hit, bass will pause their spawning activities until favorable temperatures return. Female bass can hold onto their eggs without difficulty for up to six weeks, waiting for warmer days to return.
As with any natural phenomenon, there are sweet spots and ideal conditions to seek, and the sweet spot for bass seems to be water temperatures between 63 and 68 degrees. In their standard practice, when water temperatures rise into this zone, male bass move into shallow coves and flats, where they sweep away debris from a circular spot, typically an area of the lake or pond with a hard bottom, often near a stump or larger rock. The zeal and vigor they display in creating these nests, and in keeping other male bass away from them, acts as their courtship ritual. A zealous male bass may attract and spawn with any number of females. Male bass with bloody tail fins, acquired fanning debris off of lake bottoms, are a certain sign the spawn is at hand.
Female bass move in and deposit their eggs, which they produce at a rate of 2,000 to 7,000 per pound of their body weight. These the males fertilize, then jealously guard.
Fertilized eggs will hatch in two to 10 days, then the newly hatched bass, called “fry,” all hang around the nest area for roughly a week to two weeks. During this time, the male bass guard both the nest and the eggs, then fry, until the latter disperse on their own.
Fisheries biologists estimate an average recruitment rate for largemouth bass fry, that is to say, the percentage of bass that live at least one year after hatching, at nearly 70 percent. Successful reproduction at rates like these paint a clear picture of how quickly a pond or lake can become overcrowded, making regular harvesting of eating-sized bass a must.
Because water depths and the amount of sun and shade different parts of any lake receive, not every bass in any given body of water enters the same phase of the spawn at once. This mean, in the course of fishing any sizable lake, anglers may fish back and forth through all three phases of the spawn randomly through the course of a single day, and the strategies for each vary.
Bass enter the pre-spawn phase in water that’s crept above the 50-degree mark. These fish gorge themselves on a high-protein diet in preparation for the annual springtime event. These fish can be caught on lipless and finesse crank baits, jerk baits, casting and vibrating jigs and on umbrella rigs, Alabama rigs, imitating schools of shad.
When bass are on the beds, they can be provoked into striking with flipping and bladed jigs imitating crawfish patterns, Carolina-rigged crawfish presentations and swimbaits in bluegill patterns.
After the spawn, though they’re often physically depleted, bass can be particular about what gathers their remaining interest. In this phase, wacky-rigged worms and other plastics work well, as do flukes and the ever-popular Whopper Plopper by River2Sea.
Coincidentally, although bluegill gather onto their spawning beds in the two weeks surrounding every full moon, the first semi-warm water full moon of the spring is generally their biggest spawning event of the year. When you can coordinate this event with bass that are immediately post-spawn, you can tie into a feeding frenzy bonanza by fishing bluegill-pattern baits just off of bluegill beds.
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