Blip. It cuts the surface film with the merest disturbance and goes hunting through reeds for bronze bass. Deflecting off the tall, green stalks, it purrs along, emitting a constant, subtle buzz that reaches the lateral line of smallmouths foraging over rocks beyond the reed edge—not enough vibration to be threatening, but plenty to feel like a meal. Bass turn, staring in that direction and wait for it to emerge.

The augering tail of a plastic grub acts, visually, much the same as a spinner blade. On a horizontal retrieve, the spinning, flipping tail creates a “soft hologram”—an illusion with the profile of a minnow. Moving too fast to be perceived as the simple hook-shaped piece of plastic it is, an augertail grub creates a blur that mimics the swimming style of minnows. Like a spinnerblade, grubtails produce flash, but in drastically reduced amounts. Thump, too, is dialed way down, for those days when a spinnerbait provides too much attraction.

Using a plastic grub in place of more aggressive baits is like turning down the volume on a radio. Less is more (1) where bass get a steady, daily diet of spinnerbaits and crankbaits; (2) after cold fronts; and (3) whenever bass are pressured, spooky, or reluctant to bite. But, unlike plastic baits without action tails or rattles—a common response in situations that require finesse—grubs get the attention of bass looking the other way.

The proliferation of grubs on the market today allows us to play endlessly with size, color, weight, action, and speed. Match the right characteristics with the mood of the fish and the surrounding cover, and it’s possible to catch smallmouths on grubs almost anywhere, anytime. What follows is a seasonal perspective on grub tactics designed to match the moods of bass in various types of cover, beginning in spring.

Open Water

Early in the season during prespawn, smallmouths often suspend and swim halfway down across shallow flats. The clearer the water, the more these bass look up, searching for minnows. Smallmouths pinned to the bottom tend to be inactive or are looking for crawfish. Jig-grub packages fashioned to imitate the right prey take them in either case. Later, during postspawn and all summer, active smallmouths suspend wherever minnows are a major forage source—and that’s practically everywhere. Again, a jig-grub combo can decode the puzzle.

One of the best ways to find suspending bass is with horizontal grub tactics. One of the oldest combinations in the book, the ballhead combined with a 3- to 5-inch grub works just fine, here. Even better is the Gopher Tackle Mushroom Head or Walker Fishing Systems Mini Mag Head. On these jigs, the back of the head is flat, so a plastic body can be snugged up against it for a seamless profile. More importantly, both employ VMC Barbarian hooks, which seldom fail to penetrate and hold because the hook point always is in the right position.

Run the hook through the middle of the grub and bring it out right on the seam, with the plastic tail pointing up. The tail augers at slow speeds better when rigged with the tail up. A straight, balanced package that tracks true and offers a natural streamlined profile to smallmouths is critical.

Just cast it out and reel it in. Experiment with jig sizes, grub sizes, and speed, but don’t drop it, hop it, or stop it. The key is a steady, horizontal retrieve. Determine depths bass are using by starting high and fast on the first cast and ending up low and slow until a pattern develops. Cast out, drop the rod tip, count the jig down to the target depth, and start reeling slowly. Or quickly. I recently won a tournament reeling chartreuse Berkley Power Grubs over the top of rockpiles and reefs as fast as my hands and the reel handle would allow.

In spring, a 1/16- to 1/32-ounce head combined with a 2- to 5-inch grub retrieved slowly across flats adjacent to spawning areas produces giant bronzebacks for me. Later in summer, suspended smallmouths (rarely positioned more than 30 feet below the surface) will at times rise 10 to 15 feet for a 5-inch grub on a 1/4- to 3/8-ounce head retrieved at moderate speeds over 30- to 70-foot depths. Use a 7- to 71⁄2-foot, medium to medium-light spinning rod (I like Red Barn wooden-handle rods with G. Loomis blanks), a spinning reel with a large spool (such as the Team Daiwa 1600), and 6- to 8-pound line for long casts that cover as much water as possible.

Colors should imitate pelagic minnows. Smoke, smoke with pepper, white, clear with metal flake, rainbow trout, and shad patterns are the best options I’ve found. Uncover the right combination of color, size, speed, and weight, and suspended smallies can’t seem to resist the slow but steady progress of an augertail grub, even when they seem to refuse everything else.

Weeds And Wood

Certain jigheads on the market are designed to produce weedless presentations with shorter plastic bodies like grubs. The Legacy Lures Legacy-Lok jig and Bobby Garland’s TR Head are examples of designs that bury the hook point in the plastic while delivering a level horizontal presentation. These jigs also work well as drop baits when fishing pockets, and when dragging twintail grubs on bottom along a weededge.

In spring, smallmouths invade reed beds in sandy lakes and hold atop rock humps in shallow bays. Isolated wood cover can hold dozens of smallmouths during prespawn. In lakes lacking rock, reeds, cabbage, and wood are important to smallmouths all summer.

A spinnerbait might be the right call when bass are active. But they can be spinnerbaited to death on key spots. When that happens, or when cold fronts reduce the aggressiveness of smallmouths in reeds or surrounding cabbage beds, try replacing the spinnerbait with a 4- to 5-inch grub on a weedless head. Or rig it Texas style with a Gambler Florida-Rig sinker. Just cast into alleyways and pockets in the reeds and slowly reel it out past the edge.

This tactic replaces the spinnerbait with something similar but far more subtle. It slides horizontally through reeds and cabbage tops, like a spinnerbait. But instead of calling bass to the bait with a bright flash and heavy vibration, a grub hides and emits a soft pulse. It isn’t felt by a bass until it’s close, piquing curiosity. When the grub emerges, it’s so close that it tends to trigger reflex strikes, even at slow speeds.

On Rainy Lake last spring, smallies wanted the grub brought so slowly through the reeds that a 1/8-ounce Legacy-Lok jig was dragging along on rock and sand before the fish would strike it. They seemed to want the jig moving most of the time, though a small percentage took the jig on the drop or picked it up off bottom after a pause (deadsticking). At the same time, bass in surrounding cabbage beds preferred the bait riding along about halfway down, ticking leaves and stalks in the heaviest beds.

Around tangles of wood and where weeds grow thick around rockpiles by midsummer, Texas-rigged grubs tend to be more hassle free. In dense weeds and wood, grubs too often rip free from jigheads. To keep the grub from draping too far over branches and sticking, afix the cone sinker to the head, using either a toothpick, a screw-in model such as as the Florida Rig sinker manufactured by Gambler, or something like the Top Brass Peg-It. Use tough tear-resistant plastics such as Riverside or Mann’s 3- to 5-inch grubs on 1/0 to 3/0 round-bend worm or tube hooks like the Daiichi X-Point X-15. Texas-rigged grubs also work well as drop baits, falling vertically along the weed face or down into pockets.

For all wood and weed tactics with grubs, I like a 61⁄2- to 7-foot medium to medium-heavy spinning rod for setting hooks through plastic with a tough green 10- to 12-pound line like Maxima Ultragreen, P-Line, or Berkley Big Game Inshore. I start with green grubs, too, such as watermelon seed, green pumpkin, avocado, or similar shades around reeds and weeds; use brown grubs like root beer, pumpkin seed, and crawfish colors around wood.

Rocks

Smallmouths and rocks are inseparable. In the lakes and rivers I fish most for smallmouths, rocks are entirely unforgiving. Crawling anything along on these jagged moonscapes isn’t possible. Texas and Carolina rigs are gobbled up like popcorn. Football heads? Without 1,000 jigs in each size and color, forget it.

All the more reason why horizontal grubbin’ can be so spectacular around shallow rock. The same techniques and equipment described for working suspended bass produce well on shallow reefs, rockpiles, humps, along rocky shorelines, in shallow boulder fields, up on shallow flats, and along the first major break into deep water. Snags are reduced to a minimum, while coverage area expands dramatically. Most importantly, horizontal grubbin’ is an effective shallow technique that can be worked off the other side of the boat over deep water on the next cast, alternating between structure and open water.

By early postspawn (62°F to 68°F), most smallmouths around the country are relating to rocks somewhere. When the water is the slightest bit stained or cloudy, I find that chartreuse or fire-tiger grubs worked quickly over the tops of rocky points, reefs, or humps can trigger hordes of smallmouths. Cast all the way across the tip of these structural elements, and retrieve at a high rate of speed—sometimes as fast as the reel will allow with a 1/4-ounce or larger jig.

But experiment with jig size and speed. Sometimes a 1/16-ounce head or even smaller works best at a crawl. Though a steady, uneventful retrieve typically produces best, I sometimes find that pushing the rod tip toward the grub for a split second just as it reaches the darker, deeper water on the edge of the drop converts a few extra followers on each spot.

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.

Cold Fronts

Plastics of all kinds are versatile baits, because we add everything else. Weighting can be achieved with jigs, cone sinkers, split shot, Carolina weights, and various other methods. Hooks can be left exposed for better hookups, or buried in the plastic for a weedless approach. But how is grub size considered?

A 5-inch grub is perfect most days for most horizontal grub techniques. But those itty, bitty grubs in the 2- to 3-inch range that most people use for crappies and white bass can save a trip on tough days for smallmouths after a severe cold front. Scale back to 4-pound line on a 7-foot ultralight rod from G. Loomis, St. Croix, or Quantum, and those fishless post-frontal days translate into precious memories.

After fronts, smallmouths tend to hug structure. They weasel their way back into cracks and crevices in slab rock where nothing short of dynamite can bring them out, but they also nestle into nooks and crannies where they can be reached. Typically, they hold on little inside corners in 8 to 18 feet of water, where rock meets sand or where gravel meets mud near the sharpest drop into deeper water.

In 8 to 10 feet of water, try 1/32-ounce jigs for the slowest possible presentation with a 2-inch Berkley or Yamamoto grub. Deeper or when it’s windy, jump to 1/16-ounce versions with a 3-inch grub. Owner Panfish Heads are perfect for this, because the relatively large needle-sharp hooks create easy penetration with 4-pound line.

Watch these tiny jigs sink beside the boat, and it’s easy to see why patience is critical with this technique. It should drop like a little fluff of neck feather, which means reeling painfully slow to keep the jig down once it reaches the proper depth. (This can also be a dynamite prespawn largemouth technique over developing weedbeds.) Count the jig down to the bottom transitions on inside corners on rocky points and humps, and keep it there.

Horizontal is the key word. The smaller the jig, the harder it becomes to keep it riding on a horizontal plane. If retrieve speed is too fast, the jig will rise. Pause the retrieve from time to time until hanging up becomes a problem, in order to determine how slow the presentation should be. Smallmouths in cold-front conditions are pegged to bottom and aren’t willing to move much, so the jig has to glide-pause its way right into their mouths.

Black is a good color to start with, here. Pumpkin, watermelon seed, smoke or clear grubs without metal flake, or anything natural and unpresupposing works best for pressured or inactive bass. Subtle techniques require subtle colors. The sense that something’s there without being able to find it quickly is what seems to trigger a hunting response in bass. No sense moving really slow with this hypnotic tactic only to turn off the fish with wild colors.

Fishing grubs on a horizontal plane offers several key advantages. Snags are reduced to a bare-bones minimum, so more time can be spent developing patterns and catching bass. The hook always rides up, for excellent hookup ratios. The system covers both suspended and cover-oriented fish, and while grubs can swim through the heaviest stuff, with the right jigs and rigs, they excel in open water, too.

Action-tail grubs are so versatile and deadly for smallmouths, that it’s a shame so many anglers render them one-dimensional. Carry a rainbow assortment of colors and sizes to meet all conditions. Grubs. Not just for bottom hopping anymore.