Tubes
A hollow plastic tube with tentacles. Still the best smallmouth bait ever made.
What it is
A hollow soft plastic body with a fringed skirt at the tail. With the jighead inserted inside the body, the tube spirals and glides on the fall in a way no other bait duplicates. It reads as a crayfish, a goby, or a dying baitfish depending on how you fish it.
When to throw one
Rock. Smallmouth on gravel and boulder, crappie around brush, tautog on structure, and any clear water situation where a subtle bait beats a loud one. Cold water is prime.
How to fish it
Drag it on bottom with long slow pulls and let it fall on slack line between them. That gliding fall is the entire reason the bait exists, so if you never give it slack you are throwing away the action you paid for.
Gear that matters
Internal jigheads for the spiral fall, exposed hook for open rock, and a tube jig with a weed guard when there is wood involved.
Hopping it fast like a normal jig. Slow it down until dragging feels boring.
Tubes by the numbers
- Families in the catalog
- 76
- Individual variants
- 657
- Brands represented
- 37
- Weight range
- 0.016 oz to 6.5 oz
- Length range
- 0.25 in to 7 in
- Most stocked color families
- White and Pearl, Silver and Blue, Watermelon
A family is a product line. A variant is one color and size of it, which is the level the app actually reasons about.
What the shelves carry
Shelf availability, not a recommendation. Which color is right depends on the day, and that is the part the app works out.
Tubes with the deepest color runs
The families carrying the most individual variants in the catalog. Breadth of stock, not a ranking of which one catches more fish.
What a web page cannot know
Everything above is true of tubes everywhere, in every month, for every angler. That is exactly the problem with it. Cobia answers the narrower question.
Those four lines need a location, a clock and your actual tackle box. No website has any of them.
Tubes questions people actually ask
A hollow soft plastic body with a fringed skirt at the tail. With the jighead inserted inside the body, the tube spirals and glides on the fall in a way no other bait duplicates. It reads as a crayfish, a goby, or a dying baitfish depending on how you fish it.
Rock. Smallmouth on gravel and boulder, crappie around brush, tautog on structure, and any clear water situation where a subtle bait beats a loud one. Cold water is prime.
Drag it on bottom with long slow pulls and let it fall on slack line between them. That gliding fall is the entire reason the bait exists, so if you never give it slack you are throwing away the action you paid for.
Hopping it fast like a normal jig. Slow it down until dragging feels boring.
Know which tube to tie on
Scan your receipts, build your box once, and Cobia ranks what you already own against the water in front of you.
Android coming soon
iPhone, iOS 17 or later. Setup takes about a minute.