Straight-forward tactics, plus insider tricks that consistently turn fish in good conditions and bad.

If the water is clear when I’m swimming grubs horizontally around rocks, I start with 5-inch plain smoke or smoke with pepper grubs. If it’s windy and cloudy or late in the day, I switch to clear grubs with silver, blue, or green metal flake—something a little flashier that suggests a minnow. Use the same tackle as for open water.

Where smallmouths use gravel flats interspersed with rock, or move down to deeper flats with less broken rock as the season progresses, football heads work well in conjunction with grubs whenever bass are looking down. I especially like twintails because of their crawfish resemblance. Drag a football head, and as it strikes fist-size and larger rocks, it tips tail up. Try to work it in that spot as long as possible, raising and lowering the bait’s augering tail. For football heads, I use 12-pound line on a 61⁄2-foot medium-heavy casting rod.

Color Trix

Joe Puccio of Bait Rigs Tackle was lobbying hard. “You’ve got to try these in the tournament,” he told us, handing my partner a bag of his new Grub Master heads. We did, and they turned some nice smallmouths. Not enough to win, but that was probably our fault for not fishing them on day-one.

The Grub Master is a unique idea, a long, slender version of the Slo-Poke Jig that slips right inside a solid plastic grub. With the weight distributed over a longer portion of the hook shank, the Grub Master doesn’t fall nose-down. It falls horizontally, which is perfect for making slow horizontal retrieves over shallow flats early in the season. Stop the 1/8-ounce version with a 5-inch tail, and it actually spirals down like a tube, but in a horizontal position, which is quite different for a grub presentation.

Working in conjunction with Kalin’s, the Bait Rigs Grub Master Kit comes with 1/8- and 1/4-ounce heads and a variety of clear and translucent 5-inch grub bodies. “Put the pink head in a smoke grub, and you get all these shades of purple and deep blue emanating from the grub,” Puccio said. “By mixing and matching different colors of grubs and heads, it’s possible to create new colors and to fine-tune a pattern as never before.”

Color is supposed to be the last piece of the puzzle. Doesn’t mean it’s not important. Playing with color and getting it right can be the difference between a few bass and lots on some days. Adding a dash of certain colors to address things like variable water clarity and changing light conditions can make a big difference, too. Mister Twister offers a new way to do it with Color Burst, a spray-on coloring agent that stays on soft plastic. It comes in orange, chartreuse, blue, green, and pink, and is translucent, so light passes through to really add pop to the bait.

Put a blue back on a clear grub to imitate smelt in open water. Put orange highlights on sand-colored grubs to hint at crawfish coloration around rocks. Add a dash of chartreuse to the tail as the sun goes down. The possibilities are endless.