Submitted photo The author leans heavily into sticklike jerkbaits such as the Rapala X-Rap for spring fishing, utilizing a pause after a series of jerks to set predator fish off.

I’m a sucker for my favorite lures. If you want to talk about impulse buying, bags of Dots pretzels and packs of Reese’s peanut butter cups in the checkout lane have nothing on a shiny new stickbait sitting on a tackle aisle shelf in spring. Just picturing the flashy rips through the water followed by the pause of the perfectly tuned baitfish imitator gets my adrenaline flowing, as well as the cash draining out of my bank account. Sure, while I have a few in stashes between tackleboxes and boats that are still in their boxes along with those with a few seasons worth of wear tucked into their plastic storage trays, I always figure that one more can’t hurt. As I like to say in the outdoors, if you have two, you have one; if you have one, you have none — and if you have 17, well, you’ve got one in every color. 


It was many seasons ago when I watched an avid bass angler rip and pause the Rapala Long Cast Minnow for smallmouth bass on my home flow of the Sheyenne River in early spring. I thought, “man, it’s way to early for that kind of action” as I flipped my jig and twister out along the shore for prespawn bronzebacks. But I was wrong. With a rip-rip-pause, suddenly the angler in the boat upstream from me was hooked up with an epic smallmouth. The trend continued until I moved on frustratedly, but with an idea in the back of my head to pick a couple of those lures up for the remainder of my spring season.


Needless to say the lure quickly moved to the top of my box, and its successor, the Rapala X-Rap, became a go-to in spring and early summer for not only smallmouth bass, but largemouth as well, along with shallow walleyes in certain spaces. In time I learned to adjust the cadence of the bait in line with fish activity levels. I’d rip and let the pause go longer when things were cold or fish were fussy; or slash my rod tip harder when things were warm and stable and bass were on the feed, but give them that pause that conveyed a certain weakness in their target that would just ring the dinner bell. 


From there the idea stuck with me. In those moments of pausing in any retrieve — a drop of a jig along the bottom, a stop in the steady retrieve of a crankbait or spinnerbait, and of course the pause in a stickbait’s furtive motions — I found fish on the attack, preying on that second or two of stalling that seemed to imitate something edible in a state that could easily be eaten. 


Like those purchases that come on a whim, or those decisions to eat the remaining cupcake in the dozen from my son’s birthday package when I know I shouldn’t, fish too have an affinity for a moment of weakness. It’s not in their resolve, however, but rather in that cue that suggests an easy meal. This spring, learn to exploit that reaction and natural instinct in the predators you pursue on the water, recreate that moment of weakness in your presentation and it’s likely you’ll find stronger success for bass, walleyes, pike and more … in our outdoors.