Poe discusses how he ‘walks the dog’ on Lake Calcasieu
Watching Capt. Nick Poe effortlessly ‘walk the dog’ with topwater lures on Big Lake is a lot like watching a bricklayer put up a wall — it looks really easy until you try to do it.
“Nobody taught me how. I watched my parents,” said Poe, with Big Lake Guide Service. “Watch your bait and see how it reacts to every twitch. Once you figure out the twitch, then you can add the reel to it.
“You’ll twitch and then reel, twitch and then reel. That’s pretty much all it is — you’re picking up the slack you just created with the twitch.”
His MirrOlure chrome and chartreuse She Pup tied with a non-slip loop knot zig-zagged perfectly across the water, and despite the steady twitching and reeling, Poe took his time getting the lure back to the boat.
“I don’t like to move my bait forward very much. It takes a long time for me to work my cast in,” he said. “The bait is sitting there in one spot going back-and-forth.
“I’m just picking up a quarter-turn at a time. That’s it.”
He varies he retrieves to give the specks what they want each day.
“Sometimes they want it to shoot, like a Super Spook when they’re in a real aggressive mode. Twitch it and it will shoot 15 inches at a time and they’ll eat it like that,” he said. “Today, they wanted short little twitches, maybe 2 inches at a time working the bait in the same spot.
“You’re picking up ground, but you’re not picking up much ground. It’s not a fast retrieve at all.”
When a fish blows up on the bait but isn’t hooked, Poe said you have a couple of options to consider.
“You need to figure out if you should stop altogether, because a lot of times you can just stop everything and he’ll hit it again while it’s sitting there,” he said. “Or if they don’t want it to stop, you’ve got to keep moving. They might want two more twitches and a stop.
“Sometimes you just want to make it do crazy, erratic motions. That’s what I do. When I get a blowup, I try to do something different that I haven’t done that entire cast.”
Oftentimes, the subtlest change in presentation can result in a reaction strike, like adjusting your cap during a retrieve or picking up your sunglasses that fell off.
“Something happens working the bait, maybe you reach down and drop your rod tip just a little and it hits it – bam!” Poe said. “He was following it the whole time, and you changed the angle just a little and he bit.”
Fooling specks with topwater lures is a challenge every day, and even though he estimates he’s on the water fishing almost 200 days a year, Poe confessed to watching fishing shows on television to keep himself sharp.
“Not many people can watch bass fishing on TV, but I could watch it all day long because I feel like I learn a lot from those guys,” he said with a laugh. “They start talking in-depth about angle changes, and bait and working ledges.
“I guess all that stuff matters in tricking a critter with a brain the size of a pea.”
