Ok first time posting, brand new here so please bear with me.  I fish mostly cats and carp myself so i'm new to bass fishing.  I was out at lake arlington and was fishing in about 5-10 feet of water, no cover, just open water.  There were fish jumping all over the place, and minnows/shad jumping out of the water...i decided to throw a couple of lures out there to see if i got anything and nothing.  I only had a rattletrap and a spoon...what would have been the ideal lure to throw out there when the shad are jumping and the fish are feeding off the top of the water?

try a buzzbait, popper, or one that ive had success on is the rapala J-11. try it

Welcome aboard!

Top water baits!

Buzz bait

Rage Tail Toads finally started working for me!

Cavitron Buzz bait -read this link

http://www.bassresource.com/bass_fishing_forums/YaBB.pl?num=1221068339

Super Fluke

WOW, i'm gonna have to google these lures, the only one i recognized was the rapala...does anyone know where I could read up on the retrieval methods for the different kinds of lures?

Super Fluke

That's my move as well.

WOW, i'm gonna have to google these lures, the only one i recognized was the rapala...does anyone know where I could read up on the retrieval methods for the different kinds of lures?

The best place to start are the articles right here on this site!  Here, this should keep you busy   ...

http://www.bassresource.com/fish/bass_fishing_articles.html

thanks for all the replies, looks like i have a lot of reading to do!!!  

I just went through that on a lake in texas and it took some trial and error. The bait that proved best was a silver chug a bug.

strike king zulu too, with weighted ewg 4/0.(fluke-soft jerkbait)

rapala x rap (hard jerk bait)

any popper in  shad color

strike king red eye shad- "sexy shad" color.

and dont forget the little george...............

honestly how many lures do you guys have?  I have maybe 15 and none of them have ever caught me fish...thinking about chunking them and starting all over...

Welcome to the best fishing site on the net.

When you asked how many lures we had. You'll find alot of us on this site are "tackle junkies". The answer is "NOT ENOUGH".

Falcon

I seem to have a lot of success with my jitterbugs and poppers. The great thing about the jitterbugs are that they are so easy to use. You just reel them enough so that they dance a little bit and fish love em.

chug bugs work wonders int his type of situation.

how many lures? ha.  last count i have 10 370size utility boxes and 5 shoe boxes of freshwater lures... and 6 utility boxes of saltwater lures. i could open a store.

and i kinda need to go again this weekend to pick up some stuff.

lol.

its not that the lures arent catching fish for you....its that youre not using them properly to catch fish.

any lure you buy has been made and marketed because someone somewhere has caught fish on it. u can too!