The Best Spring Texas Rig Tips and Tricks - How To from Kyle Welcher

All right, what's going on, everybody? Kyle Welcher here, with BassResource. I'm gonna take y'all kinda through how I gear up and how I fish my favorite bait, especially my favorite tournament bait, coming up on the springtime. You know, springtime is a really transitional time of the year so I wanna fish with a lot of baits that are really, really versatile, and I feel like anything I come in front of, I can really get a bite out of.

But right now we're primarily going to talk about the springtime, pre-spawn, and the spawn, how exactly I fish this bait. It's a Missile Baits D Bomb. This is my standard setup right here that stays on the deck 99% of the time. It's a 7.6-foot rod, super high-speed gear ratio reel, and then I have a 22-pound Sunline Shooter on there, a big 5/0 hook and a 1/2-ounce weight.

This is a standard one for me, where I feel like any piece of cover I come by, unless it's extremely heavy matted grass, I can flip this bait in there, and get a bite. It doesn't matter if I'm flipping laydowns, dock posts, isolated grass, whatever it is. But in this one, I'm gonna tell you all about how I gear up, you know, for pre-spawn.

The way that I always see it is, the fish move out, kind of, onto the channel swings, and then in the pre-spawn, they kind of move up trying to find places where they're gonna spawn and they really, really get on isolated cover. So if I'm ever gonna downsize my weight, I'm gonna downsize, especially in the lakes that I have not been with that, or drawdown lakes or anywhere we go there's drawdown lakes where the stumps and everything are super shallow, and the fish are up there in really shallow water.

I'm gonna downsize to a 1/4 or a 3/8-ounce weight, I'm gonna flip this bait around with the same hook, and I'm gonna try to maximize the amount of bites I can get out of what little bit of cover we have left in the water. So it doesn't matter if the dock is, you know, 2 feet deep or 10 feet deep, it's a bait I feel like I can get bites off of. I just want to upsize weights if it's 10 feet deep because I can go a little bit faster.

So whenever they first move up to spawn, we usually have a lot of stained water because in the wintertime we get a lot of...a lot of rain typically. So for me, it's usually a black and blue, or a Bruiser, or a Bruiser...a Bruiser Flash type of color from D Bomb that...from Missile that I'm gonna flip. You know, it just seems like, especially in the pre-spawn, that's the color that even in clear water, it really, really gets deep.

And other than that, the standard's gonna be a green pumpkin. That's about the only two I flip. If I'm fishing a highland reservoir, I'll pretty much keep a green pumpkin, they just seem to eat them a little bit better, or if we've got really clear water.

So that's kind of the way that I gear up going into the pre-spawn in my neck of the woods. But we always have tournaments that head to Florida, and I'll catch those exact same fish that are on the isolated stumps on the back posts of docks. They're just kind of waiting to find where they want to spawn at. In Florida, they tuck up underneath grass mats, or they tuck in the tullies, or they tuck in the reeds or wherever they get, and I'll use this same exact setup with braided line and an 1.5 ounce weight, you know, to get those same exact pre-spawn fish that are pulling up waiting to spawn.

So it's also another extremely good bait. Whenever the fish do decide to lock on the beds, I'll downsize weights again, use a 1/4, let this bait fall extremely slow in front of their face, and I'll try to make sure I can get those bigger females to eat something like this D Bomb has a little bit bigger of a profile than most people want to bait fish with. It really seems to make those big females bite.

So that's kind of the way that I gear it up in the spring. I just kind of deviate exactly how heavy my weight is for how fast I wanna fish that bait. If there's only a lot of isolated cover, like if we've only got a few grass mats in Florida or a few stumps here and there in Alabama, I'm gonna try to downsize my weights as much as possible, and then fish a little bit slower. But if we have a lot of vegetation in the water, I'm gonna upsize my weights. If we've got a lot of deep docks, I'm gonna upsize my weights just so I can get a little bit further. So that's how I deviate with the D Bomb early in the year.

Beautiful D Bomb bass. This is what it's all about right here.

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