Top Bass Fishing Baits by Month

In this series of analysis reports on top baits, we attempt to tackle the question at the top of every bass angler’s mind: “What bait should I use?”. Depending on who you ask, the answer can be extremely complicated, nuanced, and biased. At Basscademy, we strive to take a data-driven approach to allow for an objective decision making process, and to present the information in a way to give anglers the edge they need to catch bigger and deeper bags.

Bait Selection

The first step in our bait analysis is to simply learn from the wisdom of the crowd. Without any prior knowledge about the location, quarry, and prevailing conditions, we can start by examining the most common and popular baits used by bass anglers in each particular month. Since bass exhibit fairly predictable seasonal patterns, this can be a useful starting point to narrowing down the list of bait choices.

At Basscademy, we’ve gone through extensive efforts to analyze and collect the different bait choices from hundreds of thousands of real fishing reports. The bait selection figures we present are based on the percentage of bass caught using each category of bait, out of all the fishing reports that contained bait information, for a given month.

Bait Effectiveness

Using the most popular or common bait is only a starting point; ideally, we want to find the most effective bait for each month . As a starting point, we can examine our dataset and calculate a “per angler”catch rate of each type of bait. In statistics, this technique is known as normalization. Since all of our data is from bass catches reported by anglers, we don’t have a way to determine a denominator upon which we can compute an effectiveness metric.

For example, a reasonable approach that is likely out of reach would be to take the number of catches for each bait and divide by the total number of hours fished. Nevertheless, we can use the “per angler” approach as a proxy to compute a normalized effectiveness rate for each bait. Depending on your bass fishing experience the results may or may not be surprising.