You can take a 5-inch green pumpkin Yamamoto Senko and do 85 percent of what you could do with any of these baits in any size or color, down to cutting it in half and sliding it up on a Ned rig.

Ford fishes the Senko Texas-style without a sinker. He buries the point of the hook into the worm’s soft body to make it weedless. On a two-day fishing trip in early May, Ford used about 100 Senkos.