When I think of late summer early fall, cropy baits, I think of a wide variety of baits because this time of year, depending on what type of body of water that you're on, rivers, lakes, ponds, cropy can be anywhere from 8 feet of water to 25 feet of water, maybe a little bit shallow or maybe a little bit deeper. So in this video, I narrowed down three basic setups that will catch cropy for you late summer early fall on either rivers, lakes, or ponds, depending on if they're shallow or deep. So to get started, it's probably the universal casting style lures, and that is your paddle tail swim baits and your curly tails. This right here is the Euro Tackle B vibe. It's a two and five eighths since little paddle tail or boot tail swim bait, depending on what you want to call it, super aggressive kick of a tail. Another lure is the classic curly tail. These baits are meant to be casted and you can fish these anywhere from basically less than a foot of water if you wanted to, to probably 15 plus foot. If you get deeper than 15 foot, you might want to think about just a vertical jig approach, but these baits, these are search baits, okay? Your curly tails, your paddle tail swim baits, anything with a reaction style strike, and even your smaller micro jerk baits. Like these baits are minicking baitfish, they're minicking dying baitfish, depending on how you fish them, and they're great baits if you're fishing shallow waters. Right now on the river, I'm on the river right now, and last week found a ton of croppy, up shallow, less than 10, 12 feet on some brush, some lay downs, and just casting at them, slow retrieve. Sometimes you give it a little bit of a flick, kind of like a jerk bait effect to it, and that triggered a lot of bites, put a lot of nice fish in the boat. So that is bait number one for this early fall transition time. You go to baits, paddle tail swim baits, curly tails, catches a lot of croppy this time of year. So with the paddle tail or the curly tail setup, you're going to go with a casting rod. This is my setup. It's a six and a half foot ACC rod. This is the casting slash dock shooting rod. Going with six pound mono, 1,000 size PC fun Viporex reel, and depending on how deep you're fishing, if you're fishing pretty shallow, right now I'm fishing eight foot for these croppy, and they're actually suspended, real close to these docks, but I'm able to pitch around the docks. They're not actually underneath them, they're just on the side. So your casting at them with just a little paddle tail swim bait, curly tails work great, but a small little casting rod works great for these baits. Let's get a little bit deeper, and you get fish in 15, 20, 25 foot. You're probably looking at a vertical jig approach. You can probably get over the top of these croppy odds are pretty good, if you're fishing a reservoir system or a lake, you're either fishing a deeper weed line or you're fishing a brush pile, lay down something like that, that deep, you can get right on the top of these croppy, and you're probably going to go to more of a minnow style approach, and that's where I go with something like this. Bunch of different colors, but this is the croppy monster. Small fry, this is a Chartreuse and Pearl pattern. As far as color patterns go, you can mix it up. Chartreuse, black and Chartreuse, your monster milk, your kind of clear slash blue colors, anything that's a natural minnow pattern, but mostly the profile is what's important. For this type of lure, if you can mimic the size of the bait fish that these croppy are feeding on this time of year, you're going to get a lot of bites. That vertical jig approach, a little bit longer rod, 8, 10, 12 foot rod, and you're just casting it out, flipping it out over your tops of brush piles, over tops of lay downs, put a lot of good fish in the boat using that technique. So when it comes to the vertical jig presentation with this minnow profile, I typically up north go with this eight footer. I usually pitch it out and then just kind of let it swing back towards the boat. For you guys down south, a little bit of mudier water, you can get right on top of those croppy. Go with the 10, 11, 12, 13 footer and then just reach out, drop that jig right in front of their nose, they hammer it. So the third and final go to rig for this early season or early fall season, and honestly, this is probably working around. That's the live minnow and bobber. Right now I just got this in line spring bobber and it's actually a three in one. You can clip it on here as a slip bobber and it actually slides up and down the line like this where you can clip it on in the fixed position and it just locks in. But slip bobbers, live minnow's, they work year round and it's a great rig, early fall. Put a minnow in front of a croppy's face, he's bound to bite it eventually. So that is the third rig. And again, I throw this on the 8 foot ACC 6 pound mono 1000 size Viper X PC fun reel. This set is actually 16 pounds jig that ACC makes and then these are the three in one bobbers by rod and bobs. Depending on the heaviness, depending on the weight of the jig, I might go to a fill bobber from running it through the actual grommet. So you can see these are plastic grommets in the middle. I typically don't like running these in line. I like a metal grommet if I'm going to run the line right through the middle of the bobber. But this, as you can see, the line slides right through. Okay, so you're sliding right through because it's hooked on this bottom little piece. There's two notches right there. The bottom notches for the slip and there's top notch up there is actually the fix that spring locks that line in there if you're fishing super shallow water. So those are my three go to rigs for early fall crop efficient. One of those is bound to catch crop before you. If you're fishing a lake, a river, reservoir pond, something, one of them is going to catch crop before you. So I'll link the entire setup down below in the video description. I need comments or questions. Post them in the comment section below or you can message me on Facebook or Instagram. I always appreciate you for hearing from you. I hope you're enjoying the 30 day video challenge more to come in September. Get out there, catch some fish this fall. We'll see you in the next one.