5 Little-Known Ways To Conquer Cold Fronts
Story and Photos By Don Wirth

The cold front that blew through late last night pretty much trashed your hopes of winning your bass club's tournament. It started with heavy rains and a strong wind out of the west. Then as the front passed, the skies cleared, humidity dropped and the wind switched out of the north, causing air temperatures to plummet and the bass to disappear from your usual hotspots. The bite started off tough and only got tougher as the day progressed. Hardly anybody in the club, including you, weighed in a keeper bass. But then, that's to be expected during a cold front, isn't it?

Not necessarily. If you're one of the select anglers who casts for cash on the professional tournament circuit, you can't afford to let a cold front negatively impact your success. In the big leagues of bassin', there's no room for excuses. You've got to catch bass, weather or not. Your livelihood and reputation depend on it.

Illinois pro Chad Morgenthaler knows that catching bass and winning tournaments during cold fronts require adjustments to lures, presentations, fishing locations and mental outlook. Morgenthaler, a veteran of the F.L.W. tour, offers up five innovative ways to deal with frontal passages that you can use to conquer cold fronts on your home waters. Read what follows carefully, then put these strategies to work the next time a cold front threatens to ruin your weekend bass outing.

Remain Positive
"The weekend angler's typical reaction to a severe cold front is to shrug his shoulders and admit defeat," Morgenthaler says. "It stands to reason that if you adapt a negative attitude and view frontal conditions as unbeatable, you're not going to catch fish. The most important thing any angler can do when faced with frontal conditions is to remain positive. The reality is, cold fronts seldom totally shut down the bass bite, and can even trigger previously sluggish bass to feed. As is usually the case in bass fishing, knowledge is the key to success. Knowing why bass react to frontal passages the way they do, then making the proper adjustments to your angling approach, can help you score strikes even during seemingly impossible frontal conditions."

Separating fact from fiction is a crucial part of the savvy bass angler's cold-front approach.

"For example, we've all heard that a strong cold front will knock bass for a loop, but this is misleading," Morgenthaler says. "The bass isn't some weak-sister creature that's totally at the mercy of its environment. It's a highly successful predator, and as such, has learned to adapt to changing weather conditions."

When a cold front blows through, the accompanying drop in air and water temperature and increased ultraviolet light penetration impact the lower organisms in the food chain, such as insects, far more than they do game fish like bass.

"Bass instinctively know that feeding will be tough for a few days, so they go into a holding pattern until conditions improve and the food chain gets cranking again," Morgenthaler explains. "This is their way of conserving energy, and it makes perfect sense. Why swim all over creation looking for a meal when weather cues such as bluebird skies and a north wind tell you that finding food is going to be difficult in the short term? Knowing the facts about this common weather phenomenon helps you understand why bass behave as they do during a frontal passage, and in turn allows you to formulate workable game plans for catching them."

Understand Seasonal Differences
How bass react to a frontal passage varies from season to season.

"When we hear the term ‘cold front,' we usually think of spring, but cold fronts occur in every season, even midsummer," Morgenthaler says. "Knowing how bass respond to frontal passages in different seasons can help you fill your livewell all year long."

Prespawn (early spring) fronts can be the most vexing.

"Part of this is mental," Morgenthaler adds. "You're all psyched up about getting out on the lake after a long, cold winter, and then a front blows through and messes with your game plan. Now is when you need to make presentation adjustments on a daily basis. The weather can be very unstable in early spring, causing bass to be deep one day, shallow the next."

Morgenthaler's first rule of thumb during prespawn cold fronts is to back off from where he was catching bass before the front arrived.

"This is especially true in clear lakes that lack extensive shallow weed or wood cover," he says. "Bass move out to the ends of points and the edges of flats, close to deep water, and
suspend. You can catch these fish on jerkbaits and drop-shot rigs. In murkier lakes with lots of shallow cover, they'll move tighter to grass and stumps. The key now is to downsize your lure and line. Instead of a 1/2-ounce flipping jig on heavy braided line, I'll switch to a 1/4-ounce finesse jig on 10-pound fluorocarbon line."

Summer fronts may escape the notice of anglers, but they still influence bass location.

"Often the only noticeable change you can detect during a summer cold front is a drop in humidity," Morgenthaler says. "This increases UV light penetration, which has a huge impact on the food chain."

Morgenthaler has found that a summer front will often cause bass to move from grassy cover to wood or rocks.

"If you were catching them from hydrilla or milfoil and then can't get a bite in this stuff following the front's passage, try fishing the closest available stumps, laydown logs or rocks instead," he suggests. "If you were using a tube jig or frog in the grass, try bumping a square-billed crankbait or worm off the wood once the humidity has dropped."

Rather than being a negative influence, cold fronts can actually trigger a major bass bite in fall.

"Baitfish will school up heavily now, and a frontal passage makes them lethargic and easier for bass to chase down and catch," Morgenthaler says. "Target the ends of points with a small crankbait and keep a topwater popper or chugger tied on in case you spot surface feeding activity."

Target Deep Bass
Understanding that at any given time there are usually two populations of bass in a lake — one shallow and one deep — gives you another option for scoring strikes when cold fronts occur.

"Deeper bass can be much easier to catch than bass buried in shallow cover following a frontal passage," Morgenthaler claims. "Deep water insulates bass and their prey from the negative effects of increased light penetration and a sudden drop in surface temperature. In fact, deeper bass may be oblivious to the frontal passage. I've had fast action in the 18- to 25-foot zone during severe cold fronts when you couldn't buy a strike in shallow cover. This pattern pays off best in clear to slightly stained lakes."

The key to whacking a heavy bass limit from deep water is to locate isolated pieces of cover on prime structures such as points, humps and roadbeds.

"In effect, you're taking the opposite approach of the shallow-water angler by seeking out that one lone stump on top of a hump or that little pile of rocks on the end of a point, rather than big masses of cover," Morgenthaler says. "Bass will either hold tight to or suspend around these solitary objects, and they are highly catchable once you pinpoint them on your graph."

There aren't many lures that allow you to probe water 18 to 25 feet deep. Morgenthaler relies heavily on deep-diving crankbaits when he spots bass in the shallower end of that spectrum on his electronics, then switches to a drop-shot rig for the deepest fish.

"The drop-shot is especially deadly during spring fronts," he says. "I'll use a 4-inch finesse worm or a small soft jerkbait to catch bass I can't reach with a crankbait. I'll get right over the fish and lower the rig straight down to them. Often I'll see bass on my graph streaking up to grab the lure."

Vary The Rate Of Fall
Cold-front bass commonly relate to vertical cover — bluff banks, deep submerged trees and pole timber. When they do, Morgenthaler knows that a vertical or 45-degree presentation with a jig-type lure is in order and that varying the lure's rate of fall can spell the difference between an empty livewell and a fat tournament paycheck.

"Usually bass want a slower-falling lure in frontal conditions," he says. "This can be achieved in a number of ways, such as using a lighter jig — ¼ or 3/16 ounce as compared to ½ or ¾ ounce — using a bigger, bulkier plastic or pork trailer, or switching to heavier line, especially braid, which floats. Avoid fluorocarbon line, which sinks."

But the real surprise is that bass sometimes prefer a faster-sinking jig during a cold front.
"During one fall tournament in a clear lake, I couldn't get a bite by patiently dropping finesse jigs to bass suspending in standing timber," Morgenthaler recalls. "So I tied on a 1-ounce jig that dropped like a rock and caught five big bass in less than an hour. I surmised that in those clear-water frontal conditions, the bass had way too much time to scrutinize my slow-falling jig. But when that heavy jig shot past them, they grabbed it without hesitation."

Burn Lipless Crankbaits
Here's another tip that goes against everything most anglers have been taught about cold-front bass.

"Lipless crankbaits are the most overlooked and underutilized cold-front lures," Morgenthaler insists. "Because they're designed to be retrieved quickly and because their extreme noise and vibration make them anything but subtle, many anglers associate these lures only with active bass, especially schooling fish. The fact is they're super-deadly during cold fronts. I rely on them heavily in both spring and fall tournaments. My favorite lipless crank is the Xcalibur Xr50. It's got the perfect sound, profile and action to trigger sluggish bass."

In spring, the best lipless crankbait bite typically occurs the day the cold front arrives and the first day after it passes.

"Now is when you want to target shallow pockets off the main lake," Morgenthaler says. "When the front blows through, bass that had moved onto the banks to spawn will back off and suspend in these pockets until weather conditions stabilize. Combing the pocket with a red lipless crank can produce the biggest bass you'll catch all year. This is a killer lunker-bass pattern."