Is there anything more dazzling, spectacular or spellbinding in the bass fishing world than a big mossback monster blowing up on a topwater frog? It’s kind of like fishing’s Jack in the Box — can you hear that tune in your head? Da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da (“Pop Goes the Weasel,” if you need to Google it).
OK, play that tune as you picture you frog walking, sliding or twitching over a grass mat, amid peppergrass leaves or between emergent grass stalks. You know it’s coming; wait for it, wait for it, wait for it ….
Well, maybe it’s not gonna … BOOM! Thunder crashin’, lightning flashin’, earth shakes and the whole 9 yards. Rarely a warning; always an adrenalin rush — you can see this 1,000 times and it never gets old.
On Toledo Bend, FLW pro Jim Tutt often starts his warm-season mornings by checking bank grass stands for bass that stroll up to the shallows for an early feed.
“These bass will drop off into deeper water once the sun gets up, but first thing in the morning, this can be on fire,” Tutt said. “It’s hit or miss, but when you find the right stretch of grass, you can really catch them.”
Bassmaster Elite Series pro Shaw Grigsby puts his Strike King KVD Sexy Frog to work whenever he finds a nice stretch of matted hydrilla with lots of contour features and interior holes.
Any break in the cover, he said, indicates some type of hard-bottom feature — rock, stump, break — that interrupts the growth of vegetation. Bass will certainly tuck themselves deep into the hydrilla when they need some “me” time, but those looking to feed will utilize any edge, nook or opening to watch for prey.
“You always want to make sure you hit both sides of those holes,” Grigsby said. “You never know where that fish might be sitting.”
Louisiana’s Greg Hackney agrees, noting that warm-season weed mats can become quite dense.
“You might get one to come up through the grass,” he said. “It’s not that they don’t hear it or feel it moving overhead: It’s just that it takes a lot of (effort) to push through a grass mat that may be a couple feet thick.”
