As he launches his boat on an early December morning on Lake Havasu, Dean Rojas’ intentions are as clear as the desert sky. His boat has seven rods on deck: six different crankbaits and a vibrating jig. He’s ready to move quickly, cover water and take advantage of a windy day on the clear Arizona lake.
That’s how he approaches every trip this time of year, when efficiency and searching for active fish are the keys to success on Rojas’ home waters.
Rojas has lived in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, since 1997 and the reason he chose to live here was that it offers plenty of diversity.
“Lake Havasu was the perfect training ground for me as I began my career as a professional angler,” Rojas admits.
The lake is full of largemouth and smallmouth and has both clean and dirty water, plenty of current, rocks, wood, manmade structure, grass, and more. Just about everything you could want as a bass pro looking to keep his skills sharp.
On this day, Rojas throws a little bit of everything, proving his point about the diversity of fishing on his home waters. He lands bass on several baits and in both the main lake and in the Colorado River, which winds its way into and then flows through the lake.
Among Rojas’ selection of crankbaits on this December morning is everything from squarebills to deep-divers that will reach 20-feet of water.
“Right now, they can be at any different depth zone, especially here on Havasu,” Rojas shares. “You can have success in 2 feet of water in the backwaters up the river, and then out on humps that top out at 10 or 20 of water in the main lake. The key is to cover as many depths as you can during the late fall and early winter. You need to be ready for anything here, and really, that’s also true on your home body of water this time of year.”
His selection of crankbaits includes a variety of SPRO baits, from the John Crews Little John 50 to the Mike McClelland RKCrawler and the deep-diving Little John DD 70.
The majority of his cranking this time of year is done with crawfish imitators when fishing Lake Havasu.
“They start to get off of the shad pattern when the water cools down,” Rojas says. “I tend to do better with a crawdad pattern late in the year and throw shad colors almost exclusively in the summer.”
Fishing the shallow and mid-range crankbait produces bites for Rojas from largemouth, smallmouth, and a few stray striped bass during this trip.
One of the best things about vibrating jigs like the ChatterBait is that they work just about everywhere bass swim and can be simply cast and retrieved to be effective. The way Rojas fishes his bait on this trip is a bit unique, and it works.
“This isn’t like Florida where you just cast it and reel it back,” Rojas explains.
Instead, he fishes it with a lift-and-drop cadence that allows the bait to vibrate and flutter upwards before he lets it settle back down to the bottom.
Rojas is a fan of shad-patterned baits for this technique as it perfectly imitates a dying shad in the cooling waters. He’s able to pull in several healthy largemouth bass around shallow grass, rock, and wood doing this, and says that it’s a good way to catch a big cold-water largemouth on Lake Havasu.
As a touring professional angler, Rojas has fished (and won!) in all corners of the country, but the desert holds a special place in his heart. There’s no place like home for Dean Rojas.