"I'm a firm believer in matching the hatch," Hibdon says. "If it looks like something they're used to chasing, it comes time to eat and they approach the bait closely, I think natural colors, shapes, and sizes produce best most of the time. Yet I seldom use a jerkbait that doesn't have a pink or chartreuse belly with a naturally colored back. It's hard to find lures with a pink belly, but when they're following baits and rejecting them, I paint a pink stripe down the belly of that bait. For some reason, aggressive or fairly hot highlights will trigger smallmouths at times better than an all-natural pattern. I've got a whole compartment on the boat that's nothing more than rubber-lure paints, paint pens, permanent markers, fingernail polish, dips, dyes and powder paints. Playing with color wins tournaments. Just putting a spot on a lure can make the difference between a fair bite and a hot bite.
"Dad and I are just as picky as those smallmouths when it comes to color," Hibdon added. "I'm a big believer in making a bait look right. I've brought spottails and other minnows home and recreated the color precisely in a tube, and I feel it can make all the difference in the world. That's our niche. We're not power fishermen. We're not flashy. But we go to great lengths to make our bait look right and it's not always what you think. It can be natural or downright weird and you never know what combination is going to work, but starting out by copying the natural exactly is a good starting point -- a good foundation. I don't know how many times I've found tiny crappies and bluegills in my livewell. That's why you're seeing so many baits with purple tints today. Crappie and bluegills are highly overlooked as a food source for smallmouths."
Sometimes color seems to trigger smallmouths, as if the partial flash of one shade of one color from the bait at the last moment mimics something they see reflected from preyfish during the last phase of decision-making. But finding the right color can be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
SPEED
Smallmouths sometimes hit a crankbait moving only at one particular speed and won't touch it at any other velocity. Tomorrow they might want the same bait delivered at a much different pace. And the real trigger -- a pause, a rip, or a direction change -- can change constantly. Just because you tried a crankbait doesn't mean you really tried it.
The concept of lure speed is not confined to crankbaits and spinnerbaits. Hibdon took 8th place at last year's Everstart Championship on Lake Cumberland and learned something about drop speed in the process. "It was during October," he says. "Smallmouths were 30 to 40 feet down. They came up to feed on shad, but only at midday and only if it was calm. If you happened to get right on top of them, you'd get bit, but when they went down, they were feeding on crayfish and became the toughest fish I've ever seen."
