Featured Stories

Walking the banks of ponds or wading creeks and throwing topwater lures is a fun and easy way to find great summer fishing action.

Bank fishing, creek fishing and topwater bass fishing rank among my favorite ways to fish, and during summer I often get to combine those things. It is a wonderfully simple approach, walking the bank of pond or wading up a creek and using topwater fishing lures, and good opportunities continue throughout summer and well into autumn.

Because I’m not launching a boat or running anywhere and the approach is very basic, this type of fishing lends itself to outings of any length. I can go for a few hours in the morning or close to dark and have plenty of time to find good fishing action.

Paint Shop Spotlight: Rebel Pop R in Rebel Shad - Bait School Bite Spec

When: Summer/Fall

Where: Anywhere bass may roam

The exclusive Pop R in Rebel Shad was built to imitate all types of baitfish and become the only popping topwater color you need tied on this summer!

Spring awakens exciting topwater bass fishing opportunities, and a Pop-R is ideal for igniting the action in many situations.

Spring means different things to different people. Some think about baseball, azaleas blooming or the Masters. In the minds of many bass fishermen, springtime is Rebel Pop-R time.

Bassmaster Elite Series pro Stetson Blaylock is one such angler. He has fished a Rebel Pop-R during the pre-spawn and spawning periods for many years, and a few springs back a Pop-R delivered him 1^st and 2^nd place finishes in consecutive Elite Series events.

It’s not that a Rebel Pop-R doesn’t produce excellent action all summer and through the fall. It does. Spring has extra virtues that make it especially good, though, along with being the time when the Pop-R bite first heats up each year.

Learn about different Pop-R models and when to use each to maximize success.

You know the Rebel Pop-R. It’s the most iconic popper in the fishing world, a name commonly used to reference various poppers and the unofficial template for many other popping lures.

You may not realize that the Rebel Lures makes several different Pop-R models, all with much in common but each a little different. We’ll look at all the Pop-Rs and dig into how each is distinctive to help you pick the perfect Pop-R for any given situation.

Wading a creek or river for bass and other species is a fun and highly effective way to catch fish during summer and autumn. Follow these tips to find great fishing adventures.

With only a couple of hours available, a buddy and I went for maximized efficiency. We parked my car near an Ozarks creek just before daylight and then rode in his truck to another access point, a mile or so downstream. We had tackle packed in light backpacks and topwater lures tied on, and as soon as we had enough light to see where we were walking, we moved streamside at the lower end of a long pool and eyed our first casts.

My Teeny Pop-R disturbed the slick surface first, and the first gentle pop prompted a not-so-gentle attack. The fish missed twice and didn’t come back, but we were underway. Two hours later, just in time to get to where we needed to go, we left fish biting and walked to my car, a few hundred feet away. We’d caught several smallmouths, a couple of spots and largemouths and a handful of mixed panfish. An amazing start to any day!

If you have wadable streams withing reasonable reach that offer public access and support a population of smallmouths, spots, largemouths, shoal bass or other black bass species, there are few simpler or more enjoyable ways to find fishing action than by wading-fishing with a light spinning outfit and modest arsenal of small lures. These tips can make your wade-fishing outings extra productive.

Brutally strong fish and vicious topwater strikes make a fabulous combination. Here’s what you need to know to get in on exciting bluefish action this summer.

Pound for pound, bluefish are known as the hardest fighting inshore fish along the Northeast coast. Blues demand respect, punishing rods, destroying lures with knife-bladed teeth, ripping drags, and blowing up reels with powerful runs.

Ask other anglers: Topwater popping for any gamefish typically tops the list of exciting ways to fish. When you get topwater blow-ups from 10-, 15- and even 20-pound alligator bluefish, the adrenaline meter goes through the roof.

If you choose the right lure styles for the situation and go at the right times, summer topwater fishing can be outstanding. Here’s what you need to know.

Late summer can be a tumultuous time to fish due to ultra-hot temps and uncooperative fish, which seem to turn their nose up to every presentation possible. The one saving grace is the topwater action you can find early in the morning or late in the evening, when bass have their short feeding periods. These periods give way to some intense action, if the right lures are chosen for the given situation. Detailed below are my top picks, by action, for late summer topwater bassin’!

The new Rebel Pop-R P71 delivers the attributes of the iconic P70 Pop-R in response to demand from anglers across the country.

“It does everything the P70 did,” Arkansas bass pro Stetson Blaylock said about the new Rebel P71 Pop-R. “It’s heavy, so you can roll cast it under docks and other cover and lay it in there quietly.  It rests tail down, and you can make it move back and forth the while keeping it in the same place.”

Matching the characteristics of the long-discontinued and hard-to-find P70 is a big deal to Blaylock, because the P70 has been a big-money bait for him that has called up many critical bass in major tournaments, including first- and second-place finishes in consecutive Bassmaster Elite Series events on Winyah Bay and Lake Hartwell in spring 2019.

At Lake Hartwell, a P70 produced a key catch with a “slow motion strike” that was caught on film and has become legendary among tournament bass fishing fans.