Top Smallmouth Bass Baits of 2017

By Andrew Ragas

At the end of every season, I reveal the secret baits that caught the most fish for me. Now that my 2017 bass fishing season has concluded, we glance back at the dominating baits and presentations that screamed success for big fish this year. Revisiting the old, consistent standbys from each of the previous years, and revealing some new.

I have to be on the top of my game daily, and my only requirement in fishing lures is they better catch fish for my guests and I! At any given time, I keep up to 10 rods rigged and ready with an assortment of fish catchers at my Ranger’s front deck….. along with another 10 or so below in its rod locker. Overkill, yes. But here’s my logic: A diversified lure selection like this will help not only make you a more versatile bass angler, but allow you to catch more fish and be prepared for the called upon presentation at any given time. 

Prime patterns and favorite lures can be revisited each year, especially as the environment and behaviors of smallmouth bass dictate their locations and influence their feeding habits. Each year a few annual constants remain, but new discoveries and techniques succeed in the underwater world below me.

As any observant and scientific-minded angler can conclude, the success you have with your favorite lures and technique-specific methods depends on weather and water conditions, fish locations, and habitats. On the lakes and rivers you fished throughout 2017, what were some of your favorite and most productive methods to catch big fish throughout the year?

Here are this season’s winners, in no specific order.

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Dynamic Lures Travado

This is my favorite big fish suspending jerkbait. Approximately 4 inches long, casts like a rocket, runs deep (up to 6 ft with mono), and has a wide side to side action and hang.

The Dyamic Lures Travado is a short lip jerkbait that suits best for shallow to mid depth presentations. In my neck of the woods, it tends to fish best when water temperatures are between 45 to 60 degrees, so spring and fall. With an average diving depth of 3 to 5 feet, it casts like a bullet at 3/8 oz with medium heavy action casting gear with 10 and 12 lb. copolymer and fluorocarbon lines. I’ve been using the Travado in spring and fall in colder water temperatures as a search bait to find where the feeding wolfpacks of smallmouths are located and aggressive power fishing techniques must be employed. I fish suspending jerkbaits often, and always have at least a few different types tied onto my rods year-round. In spring, during the first three weeks of May, I use them 100% of the time. The only Travado color I ever use is Ghost Fish. It is the perfect representation of ciscoes, which is the main forage species in many of my favorite waters. In 2017, Dynamic Lures products caught some of my largest smallmouths of the season.

Nothing is worse than having trophy fish come unpinned from weak and dull treble hooks. For best results, replace factory hooks with Trokar Tk300 round bend treble hooks.

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Rapala X-Rap 08 – River Perch

It’s timeless, simple, and slimmed down compared to other suspending jerks and slashbaits I throw. Often the best baits are those that remain unchanged, and continue to produce year after year. 2017 was the rebirth of the downsized X-Rap 08, in a color I had never used before; river perch. This season, I went thru nearly 400 fish on one single bait before eventually losing it to line fray. And it worked on all waters, dark and clear. A natural forage on every lake, with colors visible to fish on every lake. Smallmouths love yellow perch anyhow, no surprise here.

Due to its slender profile and strong construction, the X-Rap 08 is built for accurate, long distance casting. What separates this suspending jerk from others is I can fish this one comfortably with my favorite 7ft med. heavy spinning rod with high-speed Quantum Smoke 30 Speed Freak reel. The X-Rap incorporates a long-cast design, enabling weights to shift during the cast. Its weight-forward design is a benefit because it allows anglers to cover vast amounts of water quickly, making it an effective search bait. The key characteristic of the X-Rap is that it can be fished in any type of manner and according to the moods and feeding patterns of the fish. This correlates with the retrieve of the X-Rap and the way it is fished as it involves a lot of mixing and matching according to the behavior of the fish.

My success with the X-Rap is always dictated by the activity and aggression levels of the fish. For instance, on days when smallmouths are active and striking everything in sight, I prefer retrieving the X-Rap with an erratic hard wrist twitching and rod ripping motion. In this situation the rod tip is pointed down towards the water and I employ a rapid erratic rip-pull-rip motion through the water. After a series of 3 to 5 rips, I allow the lure to pause for a second before resuming the motions again. Another tactic that works well is the sweep retrieve. This is similar to the hard twitching retrieve but instead of rapid erratic jerks I use longer, more powerful jerks with slightly longer pauses.

The X-Rap family of baits comes with a pair of razor-sharp VMC trebles, but I recommend swapping them in favor of Trokar Tk300 round bend treble hooks.

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Rapala Cranking Rap 05

This specific bait is getting a little old……. but big smallmouths love loud, noisy squarebills. Best of all, this bait itself carries a price tag of only $5.99.

I am a power fishing fanatic. Just like it did in from my end of season awards in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 Rapala’s Cranking Rap accounted for some of my largest bass of the season, again measuring up to 21 inches. It excelled in early spring during the prespawn stage, early summer during the post spawn stage, mid-summer along major feeding shelves, and in early fall as crayfish presence was still prevalent on lakes and rivers. Under most circumstances I use a crankbait to search out cover and structure, looking for a reaction bite yet at the same time covering water in search for actively feeding fish. I don’t fish them slowly as one normally would with a fiberglass rod and a lower gear ratio reel. Rather, I power my way to ferocious strikes with speed and power, often after dark.

The loud Cranking Rap is an absolute favorite for night fish, which I do almost nightly during the months of July and August. I start each night on habitat-rich shorelines and main lake flats that are known crayfish and smallmouth feeding grounds. I meticulously cover these areas by power cranking, fan-casting. As my most successful nighttime smallmouth lures to date, I have found these crankbaits to possess the loudest rattles and widest, most compact vibration. Both properties are critical to triggering strikes at night.

The Crankin Rap comes with two rather dull VMC trebles. In order to keep fish pinned with the most minimal of hooksets with medium action casting gear, I strongly encourage immediately swapping them in favor of Trokar Tk300 round bend treble hooks.

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Strike King Coffee Tube, with Freedom Tackle Zodiac Jig

The Strike King Coffee Tube is my favorite tube of all time. I fish my tube jigs utilizing one of two methods: Rigged with a swinging jig head, and a tube jig insert. As far as rigging the tube with swinging jig, the ability to swap out original factory hooks in favor of using a favorite brand and style is where the Freedom Lures Zodiac Jig wins me over. This is a concept many smallmouth bass anglers look for. While the chemically sharpened hooks available in original packaging with the jig are rightfully sharp, I modify the jig to my specifications, making it sharper and stronger to better withstand rocks and snags, by swapping out factory hooks in favor of my preferred Trokar 2/0 EWG’s. I then take further steps, matching hook type and size according to the soft plastics smallmouths want. When hooked, smallmouths are not able to use this tube jig as leverage when trying to shake free, thus more fish are landed.

In 2017, the simple tube jig was the most reliable, effective, and biggest fish producer in my boat for leisure fishing, and guide trips. I hosted several guide trips in which fish wouldn’t care to grab anything else but a slowly-dragged tube along the bottom. I dealt with a lot of coldfronts and adverse conditions throughout the year, so that’s my theory why the tube reigned for customers and I.

When smallmouths aren’t chasing moving baits, or won’t clobber another type of jig, the trusty tube often saves the day. Despite being one of the most popular smallmouth lures of all time, smallmouths remain to be unconditioned to its seductiveness and effectiveness.

No other specific bait or rigging combination accounted for more numbers of smallmouth bass in 2017 than the coffee tube paired with the Freedom Tackle Zodiac, or simply rigged with a Trokar Tube Jig insert. The only colors I use: Magic Goby / Crazy Craw / KVD Kick.

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Strike King Rage Swimmer with Trokar Boxing Glove Jig

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Freedom Tackle Corp. Hydra 1/2 oz. with Kalins Sizmic Shad

It took me a while to come up with this swimbait concoction. I want to personally thank Freedom Tackle manager, Tom Chopin, and Freedom family member & bass fishing personality, JP DeRose, for their influence in me attempting and replicating their Great Lakes swimming head tactics on my local inland lakes of northern Wisconsin.

Prior to this season, I made it a goal to learn open water fishing tactics for smallmouth bass. It was something I hadn’t done much of. Strategies I’ve learned and acquired while musky fishing the deep clear lakes, were applied successfully to catching open water roamer giant bass. Few anglers ever fish this way, and it’s not a tactic for the impatient.

From July through September, my boat was on an epic cisco bite. I have witnessed that some of the largest bass in lakes with cisco forage will set up on structures nearby deep open water locations, preferring feeding on this pelagic baitfish species year round, and doing their best to avoid being caught by the masses of anglers. Slinging paddletails and swimbaits, and deep cranking in and around open water isn’t a confident strategy for most anglers, and the impatient. You might only get 1-3 bites for the day, but the probability of them being giants and “PB Potential” will be exceptionally high.

All summer long I had patterned cisco locations and smallmouth feeding habits. A lot of casting, and a lot of near misses and no strikes. Knowing where the big fish are is one battle. Triggering them to strike is another challenge.

I went from rigging my swimbaits with jigs and bullet heads, to the best of both worlds; the Freedom Tackle Corp. Hydra. I have fished Freedom lures religiously since 2013. The interchangeable lure characteristics and swinging arm properties of these jigs enables maximum movement of your baits and presentation, in addition to preventing big fish from eventually throwing hooks on you during a jump, and in the fight.

Throughout the process a number of swimbait concoctions and riggings were tinkered with. No bites with any them, until some adjustments were made. I’ve always fished the Freedom Hydras, but with awkward plastic combos, ribbontail worms, swimming grubs, and poorly matched swimbaits. In midsummer, I finally found my match with a 3.8″ Kalins Sizmic Shad.

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Chompers Skirted Twintail (Hula) Grub

The skirted twin tail grub, regarded as “hula grub,” has put more big smallmouth bass in my boat than anything else besides most of the aforementioned baits on this list. Best fished with a 3/16 oz. Owner bullet head weedless hook in rivers, or a football head such as my new favorite Northland Lip Stick Jig on lakes with depth and minimum snags, it is a deadly bait that represents bottom scurrying crayfish. New for 2017, Trokar released a series of jig heads, with the Trokar HD Shell Buster in 1/4 oz to 1/2 oz. sizes made a formidable combination with my favorite hula grub. I fish the combo in all depths, from shallow rock bars and flats in summer, to the deep rock and wintering locations in fall.

Nowadays, there are a lot of soft plastics brands that produce their own versions of the hula grub. Without question, my favorite is the Chompers skirted twin tail. They run on the expensive side of this lure category, $5.99-$7.99, but are durable, overloaded with scented garlic goodness, and reek so bad that smallmouth laugh at us by how bad they smell to us. Favorite colors; Orange Marmalade, Root Beer Green Flake, Cinnamon Purple Flake.

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Kalin’s Hand-Tied Marabou Jigs

The main sizes most commonly used for this technique include 1/32 oz. 1/16 oz. and 1/8 oz. sizes. Wind, depth, line size, and how fast you plan to work the bait should all be considered when choosing the bait size that will work best on any given day. With medium light to medium extra fast action spinning tackle, I fish the lightest presentation that I can can get away with, on light 10 lb braid, or straight 6lb. fluorocarbon. The slow fall of these baits enables an angler to fish the bait horizontally through the water column at a very slow pace. Cast out as far as you can reach, let the jig glide down to the desired depth, point the rod tip down, and start reeling. Let the hair pulsate and do all the work for you. Lift and drop your rod throughout the retrieve also to trigger strikes.

 

If you’ve located the fish, try these smallmouth bass baits and tactics for next year. These all highlighted my 2017 season of excellent catches. A diversified lure selection will not only make you a more versatile angler, but allow you to catch more fish. Prime patterns and favorite lures can be revisited each year, especially as the environment and behaviors of smallmouth bass dictate their locations and influence their feeding habits.

Chasing trophy smallmouth bass year round requires a good lure selection of fish catchers like this. Be diverse, and not one-dimensional.

What were your best of 2017? Feel free to comment in the space below!