Jimmy Houston's Secrets For Swimming Bottom Baits
Story and Photos By Mark Hicks

Jigs and Texas-rigged soft-plastic baits weighted with bullet sinkers are bottom-hopping lures. Or, they're used for penetrating thick bass cover like brush and grass. Only a few anglers would disagree, but one of them is none other than legendary bass fisherman Jimmy Houston.

Houston spends more time swimming bottom baits than anything else. And he swims them in deep water as well as in the shallows. He's been doing this successfully for more than 20 years.

One reason Houston got into the habit of swimming bottom baits is that he fishes fast and hard. He wants to show his bait to as many bass as he can in a day's fishing. Houston's favorite lure for this approach is a spinnerbait.

"I'm very aggressive with my fishing," Houston says. "I've always been that way. In doing that, I guess I got into the habit of fishing jigs and worms without letting them fall to the bottom."

Dixon's Philosophy
Houston also credits fellow Oklahoma bass fisherman John Dixon for his swimming methodology. Dixon died many years ago, but Houston claims he was one of the best spinnerbait fishermen he's ever seen. Dixon believed that 90 percent of all bass are caught 10 feet deep or less, and he based his spinnerbait fishing on this.

Dixon would cast a spinnerbait, let it sink 5 feet deep and retrieve it all the way back at a depth of 5 feet. He reasoned that any bass 5 to 10 feet deep would come up to take his spinnerbait, and that bass from the surface to 5 feet deep would drop down to get it.

"His philosophy was pretty country, but it worked," Houston says. "If it worked with a spinnerbait, I figured it would work with a jig or a weighted soft-plastic bait. That's what got me started."

Swimming a bait sounds simple, but Houston says it's actually much harder than a bottom-hopping retrieve. When you let a jig or plastic bait touch down, the bottom serves as a reference point. Every time you hop your bait up and let it drop back down, the bottom tells you exactly where your bait is. No matter how fast or slow you retrieve the bait, it always stays within a few feet of the bottom. You can't go wrong.

However, when you swim a bait, there is no definite reference point. You can count it down to the approximate depth you want to fish, figuring the bait drops about 1 foot per second, but this varies with the weight and the bulk of the lure you're fishing.

Things get even more difficult once the lure is at the right depth. Now you have to swim the bait at a speed that will maintain that depth throughout the retrieve. This varies from one bait to the next, depending on the weight and bulk of the bait and your line diameter. A heavy line tends to lift a bait more than a light line and requires a slower retrieve. Only experience can teach you how to maintain a given depth when swimming a bait. Experience is something Houston has in spades.

Suspended Bass
According to Houston, the reason swimming jigs and soft-plastic baits works so well is because bass always suspend. While they may be near the bottom, a piece of cover or even buried in or under cover, their belies are always above the bottom.

"If I asked somebody to describe a suspended bass, they would probably say, ‘Well, that's a bass that's 10 or 15 feet deep over 20 feet of water,' or something like that," Houston says. "But a bass is suspended all the time. He might be 5 feet deep in 6 feet of water, but he's never touching anything."

Houston points out that if you watch bass in a big aquarium, like the ones at Bass Pro Shops, you never see a bass touching the bottom or any of the structure. They're not like a catfish or a walleye that will lie right on the bottom.

"When I learned that years ago, it no longer made sense to me to have my bait on the bottom very much when I'm bass fishing," Houston says. "A swimming retrieve is more likely to put my bait in front of a bass's nose."

Swimming Baits
A 1/4- to 3/8-ounce Terminator Pro's Top Secret Jig is usually tied to Houston's line when he swims a jig. He opts for black and blue in most situations, and green pumpkin in clear, tough lakes. Whatever the jig's color, he tips it with a black neon Yum Chunk. The black neon color gets more bites for Houston everywhere he fishes.

Plastic lizards, worms and Yum's Tube and ribbed Vibra King Finesse Tube also spend a lot of time swimming on the end of Houston's line. He usually rigs these baits Texas style with a 3/16-ounce bullet sinker. Bass bite his swimming tubes and jigs because they think these baits are crayfish.

Since crayfish live on the bottom, you may be wondering when bass have a chance to nab these crustaceans while swimming in open water. Houston explains that bass root around the bottom and scare the crayfish into jumping up so they can catch them.

"If you're fishing a deep, rocky lake that's got a lot of crawfish in it, you'll notice that the bass will have rough places around their mouths," Houston says. "They get that from rooting those crawfish out."

Houston has dropped live crayfish into large aquariums that house bass. When the crayfish falls, it throws its pinchers out and remains dead still so it doesn't attract the attention of the bass. If it makes it to the bottom, it can hide in the cover and survive for a while. But few of them avoid being engulfed by a bass before they touch down.

"It's funny because we have all these crawfish-imitating baits that we shake, rattle and roll to give them more action," Houston says. "But a real crawfish doesn't move a muscle when he sinks. He tries to make himself invisible so he doesn't get eaten."

A 6-foot-6-inch medium-heavy Shimano Crucial baitcasting rod handles Houston's swimming chores. He matches the rod with a Shimano Chronarch reel and 12-, 14- or 16-pound Berkley Trilene XT line.

Swimming Places
Houston swims bottom baits anywhere a bass is likely to be, including over submerged grass, brushpiles, rocky bottoms and drop-offs, and next to grass edges, brush, flooded bushes, standing timber, laydown logs and boat docks. He finished in second and third place in consecutive early spring Bassmaster tournaments at Texas' Lake Sam Rayburn by swimming bottom baits past flooded willows. The willows protruded through the surface in 3 to 5 feet of water.

Houston would cast his bait past a willow and swim it next to the cover underwater. Then he would pause, shake the bait and continue swimming it back to the boat. The bass usually pounced on the bait immediately after Houston gave it a shake.

The first year, Houston resorted to swimming a 6-inch worm after missing several bass on a spinnerbait. He put a trailer hook on his spinnerbait and tried every trick he knew to catch short-striking fish, but he continued to miss half the bass that bit. However, the bass nearly took the rod out of his hand when they attacked the swimming worm.

Houston returned to Rayburn the next year and had little success on practice days swimming spinnerbaits and plastic worms past the willows. He was fishing with his wife, Chris, and she decided to try swimming a jig.

"I told her if they didn't want a worm, they wouldn't hit a jig," Houston says. "Well, she picked up that jig and caught three or four right off. I ended up fishing the tournament with a jig and doing well."

Swimming Action
Houston's basic presentation is to cast beyond or over the cover or structure he is fishing and let the jig sink to the level of the bass. Then he swims the bait with an occasional pause and shake. He believes a brief pause triggers strikes from bass the same way the stop-and-go ploy does with a crankbait.

"The colder the water, the slower you need to work the bait because the bass are sluggish," Houston says. "You can do that by using a lighter weight or increasing the line size. When the water warms up, you can use heavier baits and a faster retrieve."

Wouldn't a crankbait work just as well as swimming a bottom bait? Houston admits that this is true in some cases. However, the advantage with swimming a bottom bait is that you can change depths during the retrieve, whereas a crankbait swims at nearly the same depth once it gets down.

On many days, bass will be anywhere from the shallows to the depths. Houston can pitch a jig next to a tree standing in 20 feet of water, let it fall 5 feet and shake it, let it fall another 5 feet and shake it, and another 5 feet and shake it before swimming it ahead. In essence, he can fish the jig all the way down the tree.

"I change depths all the time," Houston says. "I may throw out there and swim a jig over two or three pieces of brush in 3 to 4 feet of water and then drop it down to 6 feet or 10 feet and swim it all the way back to the boat. You can't do that with a crankbait."