Visit a tackle shop near top bass waters in the country, and you get some insight into what works best in that area. Check the lures that take up the most shelf space. Or if the store has been ransacked by a recent wave of tournament anglers, ask what lures occupied the large empty space on that rack.

Touring bass pros face this dilemma while competing on the tournament trail. Wherever they fish, they discover one lure that seems to consistently produce locally. “I’ve gone to the Great Lakes where you need to have goby-colored tubes,” says Kentucky pro Mark Menendez. “On Sardis Lake, a red worm has always been a staple, but on the White River chain—Table Rock, Bull Shoals, Beaver—if you don’t have a Wiggle Wart, you’re foolish.”

Time of year, type of cover, available forage, and water clarity determine which lures succeed on a given bass fishery. Menendez believes the color of these “niche” baits is also critical. “Maybe it’s not the lure but a particular color that works best,” he says, ”and that’s determined by water clarity more than anything else.”

Before the advent of the personal computer, the best ways to discover go-to lures were listening to dock talk, and by trial-and-error. “The information age promotes the hot-lure phenomenon a lot faster,” claims Menendez. “If I’m going to Lake Guntersville, I can do 30 minutes of research on the computer and learn what I need to do. Prior to the Internet, it took a long time to research those historical patterns, and a lot of hours on the water.”

To help you stock the right lures for your next trip to some of the top bass waters, we outline go-to lures to match them.

Kentucky/Barkley Lakes

“The one constant on Kentucky Lake is blue—a good, solid, Wildcat blue,” Menendez says. “I remember the first bass over 7 pounds I caught was on a blue worm.” He also recalls going on a tear in his bass club tournaments while fishing a black jig and blue pork frog in the early 1980s. He makes sure every lure—whether it’s a soft plastic, a deep-diving crankbait, suspending jerkbait, or spinnerbait—has a touch of blue somewhere on its body.

His favorite lure for all seasons at Kentucky and Barkley lakes is a black or blue jig with a sapphire blue plastic trailer. In the early spring, Menendez pitches a 3/8-ounce jig to shallow cover, then switches to a 1/2-ounce version for stroking the lure (ripping the jig off the bottom and letting it fall back on a slack line) along ledges. During autumn, he opts for a 1/4-ounce jig that he swims around boat docks and brushpiles.

Ozark Highlands Reservoirs

When crawfish become active in the early spring, prespawn bass hunt for these delicacies along the rocky bottoms of the deep, clearwater reservoirs of Missouri and Arkansas. The lure that best resembles scurrying crawfish is the wide-wobbling crankbait, such as Storm Lures’ Wiggle Wart or the Cotton Cordell Wiggle O.

“If we get the right conditions, the Wiggle Wart is deadly,” says Roger Fitzpatrick, a two-time Bass Fishing League All-American qualifier from Eldon, Missouri. “It always seems to work better in slightly stained water, and if you have a bit of chop on the water during Prespawn.”