Every guide worth his salt has one. You know, that sneaky trick up his sleeve that always keeps his clients' rods bent. Cold fronts, breathless firecracker days, July blizzards (it could happen)-the conditions are almost beside the point. These slick tricks simply catch fish, atmospheric conditions losing their bark and bite. Ask any guide: when times get tough in mid to late summer, it's real nice to know you've got that ace bait awaiting deployment.

In my own guiding days, the golden ticket was a Gopher Bait Spin tipped with a minnow. Throw these simple contraptions behind the boat, start driving around the weededge, and pretty soon, we'd have all kinds of fish hooked up- everything from bass and pike to walleyes and crappies. Another client fish fry, delivered. The photos would tell the story-big grins on everyone's face. Curiously, today, lures like the Bait Spin remain overlooked and underutilized. So simple in design, but oh so appealing to fish, which pretty much describes the three patterns that follow: basic, fundamentally great baits that simply catch lots and lots of fish.