With smallmouths feeding preferences and lure engagement changing, we’ve learned to catch them with a new bag of tricks. As fish receive more pressure and see more lures, they can often respond with more engagement to something they've seen less of. Whenever I anticipate a shallow pre-spawn bite in May, each of my rigged rods will have horizontal search baits. Traditionally, 3 or 4 are rigged with different suspending jerkbaits, and another 3 or 4 are rigged with paddletails or other swimming plastics like a swimming grub. 1 or 2 others could be diving or lipless crankbaits for reaction bites. That lure selection has changed, however. While I keep 1 or 2 jerkbait setups on deck – mostly for tradition’s sake, I’ve expanded more with soft jerk minnows, finesse paddletails, and swimming grubs having 3 to 5 setups rigged with those. Then in recent years, other lures I’ve added to my spring rotation are the hair jig, ned rig, skirted jig and finesse grub, and a 2.5-inch finesse tube. No matter the water temperature, we’ll always get started with an X-rap. It covers water, remains a top search bait, and there is no better bait to work and react with acc