Rapala Original Floating F09 - Rainbow Trout

3½ inches, 3/16 oz, balsa. The bigger Original casts better than the F07 and gives a predator something worth crossing a flat for, while keeping the same slow roll and the same three-to-five-foot run. It floats at rest, so a pause lifts it over rock and weed instead of dragging it into them.

Rainbow trout is a predator's color, not a trout fisherman's. Utah stocks catchable rainbows into reservoirs all season, and the biggest fish in those reservoirs — brown trout, lake trout, tiger muskie, and the rainbows that outgrew the pellet stage — know it. Fish it where the truck has been: the same ramps and shorelines the plants go in on, in the weeks right after. That silver-blue back with the pink stripe is the last thing a lot of nine-inch rainbows ever see. Two No. 8 trebles, hand-tuned and tank-tested.