You can’t fish too shallow in late spring, even if there’s less than a foot of water. After the spawn, bass are hungry and looking for baby bluegills, crawfish and minnows up against the bank. The trick is to be quiet enough to get a bait in there without spooking bass away.

If you can’t pitch a bait without making barely a ripple, you might as well try something else. I like to rig an Attrax 6-inch finesse worm wacky-style on a 1/0 Mustad straight-shank hook and fish it on a 7-foot ABU Garcia Verdict spinning rod and Revo spinning reel with 8-pound-test Berkley 100% Fluorocarbon line. Light and water clarity really don’t matter; however, if the water is dingy, you do have to fish slower and give the bass a chance to zero in on it. I think that a wacky worm rigged like that represents a bream more than anything else. You just twitch it along – I do it in three motions that say, Come-Get-Me, and then I pause and repeat. A finesse worm rigged and fished this way is a great shallow-water bait and has been a good producer for me over the years.

— Duracell/Gillette pro Jacob Powroznik of Prince George, Va.