A beneficial wind and its corresponding warming water temperatures drive feeding patterns in early spring and wake smallmouths up from their dormant winter state. Anglers who fail to understand wind patterns, and lack a sense of spring smallmouth lake locations, learn to embrace the skunk. Meanwhile those who follow the wind and have learned to…

The ideal smallmouth bass crankbait is a smaller, compact, realistic, and noisy representation of bottom-scurrying prey. In this case, it’s their favorite, the crayfish. In early spring as smallmouths prepare for their spawn, power cranking with a shallow diving crankbait will score big numbers of feisty, prespawn fish that are cruising the shallows for feeding,…

Early spring beckons jerkbaits from tackle trays on lakes all over the country. But in the northcountry, it’s an underutilized tactic. Largemouths and smallmouths alike find suspending jerkbaits difficult to resist as they stage to spawn. In May and June when smallmouth bass are staging for the spawn, I consider a suspending jerkbait the ultimate…

Since lakes vary so widely with depth, clarity and cover options for bass during the pre spawn period, it’s difficult to anticipate or define exactly what bass may do under post-frontal conditions. On this day however, smallmouth bass were stacked and found staging outside of known spawning sites.

As a true power fisherman, my favorite way to catch bass is using a jerkbait. During spring when bass are in the pre-spawn phase, cruising the shallows and staging outside of spawning areas, this technique allows me to cover maximum amounts of water in any conditions, and allows me to elicit the reactionary strike that…

The Rapala X-Rap is an extreme action slash bait that was released in 2004. When Rapala introduced the X-Rap, they not only brought a great new lure to fishermen, but they introduced an entirely new fishing system that revolutionized the way anglers fish jerkbaits. The versatility of the X-Rap allows an angler to impart several…