When fishing conditions get tough — be it from unsettled weather, intense fishing pressure, marginal water clarity, etc. — often the approach to scratch out a few bites is by downsizing the lures you present.

Consider a trip a few days ago when Matt Seethhaler and his wife Stacy joined me on the Allegheny River for a smallmouth bass outing. As has been the case for the past several weeks, we were dealing with high, discolored water, the product of an extraordinarily wet fall.

Typically under these conditions, the bass respond well to spinnerbaits and larger soft swimbaits. But an hour of targeting normally productive areas produced nothing. A change in tactics was in order.

We pulled up to a stretch of somewhat slower, deeper water, one where scattered shoreline boulders and rocky points created numerous pockets next to shore where fish could escape the force of the river’s current, yet be in an excellent position to ambush prey.

Matt and Stacy picked up rods rigged with small, finesse-sized tube jigs. Within the first few pockets, Matt hooked up with the day’s first smallmouth bass. Stacy soon followed. And while the action wasn’t fast, they both continued to take smallies during the course of the day, one that culminated at day’s end with Stacy taking the day’s best fish, an 18.5 incher, in a driving rainstorm.

The baits used that day were Z-Man Fishing’s TRD Tubez, a small, 2.5 inch tube bait. Standard-sized tubes typically used for bass are 3.5 to 4 inches in length (when you measure the entire length of the bait, including the tail). Not only is the TRD Tubez shorter, it’s also about 50 percent smaller in diameter.

While traditional tubes couple well with insert style leadhead jigs (where the head of the jig is inserted inside the hollow body of the tube), the short length of the TRD Tubez requires rigging with a standard leadhead jig — with the leadhead on the outside — just as you’d rig a standard twister-tail grub.

While jig styles of may shapes will work with the TRD Tubez, I’ve found mushroom-shaped heads to work best, style that comes with many names depending on the maker. The ones I use are from Killer Jigs, and they call them worm nose jigs. Z-Man’s are Shroomz, with Bass Pro Shops markets one called the Shroom Head.

I prefer 1/8 and 3/16 ounce heads for river fishing, as well as for many lake situations, where the slow descent is what often triggers bites.

Like many of Z-Man’s soft baits, the TRD Tubez is made of a material called Elaztech. It’s an extremely stretchy material, one that will hold up after many fish.

However, it takes a bit of getting accustomed to compared to traditional soft baits. Elaztech is very spongy, making it difficult to get the “bait holder” barbs found on the collar of a jighead to bite into.

Often, you really have to jam the head of the bait up against the back of the jighead to get the barb(s) to engage. I like to add a drop of super glue to secure the head against the flat back of the jighead to keep it locked in place.

Loc-Tite’s gel version works great for this. It also helps keep the bait from corkscrewing around the hook when you catch a fish, which commonly happens with an unsecured bait.

The TRD Tubez is just one example of dozens of such baits that can fall into the finesse category. I’ve also had excellent success with Z-Man’s Hula Stickz, a small worm that can be fished on a jighead, or Texas-rigged with a bullet-shaped split sinker.

Last Saturday, my guide client Ryan Salus took some nice Keystone Lake largemouths using the Hula Stickz on a drop shot rig in 30 feet of water.

Up on Conneaut Lake, my good friend Dave Lehman commonly catches quality-sized largemouths on 5/8 ounce flippin’ jigs along the weed edge. But when the bite got tough recently, he had a good day by downsizing to a three inch Galidas Grubz.

Jeff Knapp is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle