During the hotter months when the lake weeds are at their thickest, one fun way to catch largemouth bass is by throwing a frog imitating bait into thick cover. Frogs are ideal when fishing heavy cover because they are made to float over the top and go through the thick stuff with relative ease. They are also a blast to fish so they offer a great change of pace from rubber worms and jigs. There’s a lot of different frogs on the market these days ranging from the Scum Frog too the new Spro series. They come in a wide range of colors and sizes, but personally I like to use traditional patterns of green or black. Personally, I’ve never seen a florescent orange or bright purple frog in the lake but I’m sure somewhere an angler swears by his lucky hot pink frog. I don’t even know if I want to catch a bass that would eat a hot pink frog, but to each his own!
There’s a variety of fishing tactics for frog fishing and fishermen can experiment with various retrieves too. For example in August we like to occasionally throw a buzz bait around heavy weeds and burn the lure over the heads of the bass to get a reaction strike. Sometimes this tactic will catch truly huge fish. You can fish a frog the same way. When swimming frogs quickly I like to use the 4-inch Zoom Horny Toad. The legs on this frog really kick up a wake that drives big bass crazy. When fishing slower I like the 2 ½ inch Spro Frog Jr in leopard color (green/black). One thing that will help anglers up the odds of hooking into a big largemouth on a fake frog is to use a heavier braided line and a rather stout rod. I use a 7 foot medium action bait caster loaded with 60 pound power pro for my frog fishing, however you can fish frogs on a spinning outfit. Sometimes it’s easier to “skip” the frog under docks or trees with a spinning rod too. The braided line doesn’t have any stretch so when the bass takes the frog under, the angler should hesitate for a second or two and then set the hook very hard. Setting the hook too early will result in your frog flying over the boat without a bass attached to the hook. Lastly, the braid cuts through the weeds better so it makes it easier to haul your trophy out of matted grass. One word of warning though, northern pike love to hit these frogs and they have a tendency to bite you off. The braided line will help a little bit, but at $9 or $10 a frog it can get expensive!
In last weeks article I wrote about how we’ve been diving the lakes quite a bit this summer and checking out what the fish are up to. Well, I have a story from this week that I found interesting. Basically, we were free diving the shallows picking crayfish. I had two identical white buckets with holes poked in the lid to store the crayfish as we caught them. In one bucket we had about 30 crayfish and the other bucket was empty. I tied the buckets to the end of the dock and sank them to the bottom. Within minutes up to 9 smallmouth bass were swimming around the bucket that had the crayfish and not one bass was near the empty bucket. The bass couldn’t see inside the pails, so they either could smell the crayfish or hear them clicking. Regardless, the fact of the matter is that those bass knew there was bait inside – amazing. After watching the bass for a while, I dove down and picked a small crayfish from under a nearby rock. I swam over toward the bucket, held the crayfish out in my fingers and a smallmouth about 14 inches long come over and ate the crayfish right out of my hand. It was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had. Next week we’re going to try filming it with my underwater camera. If everything works out, I’ll post the video and put the link in this article. Good luck fishing this week!
