This is the time of year that the smallmouth up north move shallow and start eating.
If I were going and only had one lure choice, it would be the Strike King Coffee Tube with a jighead inserted into its hollow cavity.
It’s a good representative of a crawfish or a gobie, and it catches big ones. And if you’re using forward-facing sonar, it’s a very efficient bait to cast at fish you see on the screen.
I remember when I fished a tournament on the St. Lawrence River last year, I may have weighed in two fish on a drop-shot rig and the rest on either a 3 1/2- or 2 1/2-inch tube.
In many cases, there were fish I saw that I couldn’t catch on other baits, but they bit the tube best. I had to adjust my jighead sizes between 3/8 and 1/2 ounce because of the size of the wind-blown waves.
It’s such a simple lure; you tie one knot and start casting. It’s easy to cast into the wind, although many of the fish I saw were spooked easily, so I had to make really long casts.
Oftentimes, when I’d get the bait close to a smallmouth, it would bite it.
I’ve found when the fish are active, the 3 1/2-inch tube works best, but if they are finicky, the smaller version tends to work best.
You can swim a tube, drag it on the bottom or hop it. It has the same versatility of a Hack Attack Jig, which is why it has withstood the test of time.
When the lake is calm, smallmouth tend to suspend high over deep water, but when it’s blowing, they get closer to the bottom and like to be around rocks.
One thing I noticed: If fish were suspended 8 feet down over 20 feet, many of them wouldn’t bite the tube until it plummeted to the bottom, and that’s where they’d go get it.
Also, when the lake was calm and the fish edgy, I’d go to the heavier tube jig and make the fish chase it to create more of a reaction bite among those fish that seemed to be in a funk.
As far as colors, you can’t go wrong with green pumpkin or green pumpkin with purple fleck. In my opinion, those colors best match the gobies.
So, if you’re among the lucky ones headed north for big smallmouth, don’t be afraid to go old school on ‘em and throw a tube jig. Those smallmouth have been biting that lure for decades, and they bite it just as good today.
