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Slow-sinking hard baits rank as some of the best trout fishing lures for the cool season. Learn how these baits can help you catch more fish.

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.

Hard baits, including minnow imitators and specialized crankbaits like Rebel Crawfish and Crickhoppers provide major advantages for stream trout and produce great results.

“This is all they’ve been hitting,” the guy behind the fly shop counter advised my son, Nathaniel, showing him a midge so tiny it was barely visible on the tip of his finger. “With it being all catch-and-release, those fish get very fussy.”

Nathaniel wasn’t planning to fly-fish, so the suggested pattern didn’t matter, but he listened politely and nodded, maybe wondering slightly if a small jig might work best when we got to the stream the next morning. Shortened version: The trout were highly aggressive, and Nathaniel caught most of his fish on Rebel Wee-Crawfish and his best fish on a 3 ½-inch jerkbait that he had equipped with a 1/O single hook. Other young anglers we saw that day were having minimal success.

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.