For more than an hour, Bob Danner had bombarded the outside edge of a clay-bottomed bar in the main stem of a large midwestern river, just a few feet upstream from the mouth of a tributary. So far, his jig-and-pig and plastic worm presentations had resulted in nothing more serious than a buildup of frustration.

Already, the humidity of early summer was beginning to invade the river valley. Beads of perspiration broke loose from Danner’s wrinkled brow and began running down his nose. Just one more misery, he mumbled, in what threatened to become another unproductive summer fishing trip.

Nevertheless, he had confidence that bass still lived amid the branches of a large sunken tree resting in more than 20 feet of water. He’d been able to hook several 5-pounders on previous tries—even as recently as a week before.

Since he’d released his previous catches on the spot, he had little reason to believe the bass weren’t still there.

In desperation, Danner dug deep into his tackle box to locate a brand new, deep-diving crankbait that sported a lengthy lip designed to allow anglers to fish as deep as 20 feet without a problem.

Danner had serious doubts that the lure would perform as well as the instructions claimed. However, with a little innovation, he figured he could make the lure touch the upper limbs of the tree, which stuck up to around 17 feet.

To make sure the lure reached the target area, he switched to a 7-foot flipping stick and a spare reel spooled with 12-pound-test line. With this tackle and a kneel-and-reel technique, he figured he could make the lure get down to paydirt.

For Danner, the method, the lure and something he learned by accident would mean the difference between a great day of fishing and going home empty-handed.

By kneeling on the casting deck of the boat and leaning over the side, he was able to probe the rod into the water deeply enough to crank the lure down to where it bounced off the tree limbs. On the second cast, his lure suddenly stopped. Fearful that he would lose his only deep-runner, Danner reacted by giving the rod tip a jerk. With the motion, the lure came free—and instantly a spotted bass struggled against the sting of steel stuck in its lip. A 2 1/2-pounder wasn’t the 5-pound largemouth he had hooked earlier, but it was a start.

Three more times he cast to the treetop and dug the lure deep, but he didn’t hit the limbs, and nothing happened. On the fourth cast, he once again hung the lure. When he jerked it free, the scenario played out again as another spotted bass fell for the offering.

Like a light suddenly coming on, a “touch-wood” pattern was forming. For reasons that only the fish could explain, the spots were pouncing on the lure only when it snagged for a second and then popped free.

Sometime later, and several hundred miles away, Rod Cremeans, a veteran bass angler from northern Ohio, worked a 1/4-ounce buzz bait across a weed bed deep in a backwater area of a large midwestern river. He started retrieving along a collision course with a snag sticking up from the middle of the vegetation some 40 feet away.

Expertly, he guided the metal and rubber skirt creation directly into the side of the stickup. Then, instead of stopping the retrieve, he continued to crank in the line, causing the lure to careen several inches off course. It hadn’t traveled more than a turn of the reel handle before a bulge showed at the surface directly under the lure!

Minutes later, after battling the struggling bigmouth through a tangle of brush limbs and lilies, Cremeans was able to lift the 4-pounder aboard. Once more the collision course tactic had paid handsome dividends.

Over the years, I’ve talked with some of America’s most respected bass anglers about their fishing techniques, and the “touch something” method comes up time and again. Almost every experienced bass fisherman has a favorite technique that calls for bouncing a lure into or off something to trigger a strike from a bass. Ken cook, a veteran angler from Oklahoma, has used both his fisheries biology education and his hands-on experience as a bass angler to find bass consistently from one end of the United States to the other. One of his favorite techniques is to bump and crash lures against solid objects to excite bass into striking.

One of his secrets is to “bump a stump” with a Zara Spook topwater plug. This method calls for retrieving the surface lure so that it runs into a stump or partially submerged log, then using a “half-walk twitch” to keep the lure bouncing its head against the cover. This maneuver, he said, makes the lure look like a small animal struggling to get onto the stump. The situation is a natural for inviting a charging strike from any active bass in the immediate area.

In spring, when bass are bedding, Cook uses a deliberate surface crash to excite shallow-water largemouths into smashing a 5/8-ounce jig-and-pig or a lizard rigged Texas-style with a 1/2- to 5/8-ounce bullet sinker. The trick, he explained, is to crash the offering against the surface as close to the fish as possible. The noisy surface entry, coupled with the fast sink of the bait, is an excellent method for catching (and then releasing) bass that shun more delicate presentations.

To make spinnerbaits and sinking crankbaits more productive, Cook crashes the lures into a stump, log or boulder, then lets them fall straight down on the bank or shadow side of the object. He reminds anglers using the method to keep control of the line and be on the alert for strikes occurring while the lure is falling.

Cook also uses the “touch-something” technique when fishing for midsummer bass holed up beneath an umbrella of vegetation. To reach the fish, Cook uses a heavyweight lure (large jig-and-pig combo or worm) to punch a hole in the weeds. The mere fact that the lure makes it to this difficult-to-reach fishing area, plus the attention it attracts by crashing through the cover, usually is enough to draw a strike from any nearby bass.

Watch for Part 2 in next week’s MWO Insider