As anglers, we each have a handful of bass fishing baits to which we turn when the fishing gets really tough. Maybe a half-dozen lures that we know we can count on to draw a strike. Whether it’s a tough summer bite and you grab for a drop shot or a post-frontal prespawn deal and you commit to the punching rod knowing that’s the only bait you have any confidence in getting bit.
We’ve all been there. We all have those special “confidence baits”.
For professional angler Scott Canterbury, one of those confidence baits throughout the year and especially in the winter is the Bagley Balsa Sunny B. The Sunny B comes in two sizes; a shallow diver that runs 3 to 4 feet and a medium diver that runs 6 to 7 feet. These baits have very similar action and are interchangeable for Canterbury based solely on depth. The main thing is that he can count on these when he needs a bite.
Canterbury found himself in a similar situation this past season while fishing the Bassmaster Elite Series event on Lake Chickamauga.
“I actually made the cut on that bait,” Canterbury said. “I caught all my fish the first day on a frog but the second day I only had one fish around midday and I ran down and caught everything I weighed in on the shallow-diving Sunny B around schooling fish that I couldn’t get to bite anything else.”
A version of this bait is one Canterbury keeps handy year round, but let’s look now at how he uses them in particular from the winter months into the prespawn.