Our Rapala blog has all the latest Rapala fishing news, product info, pro tips & picks and more. Get the first look at Rapala news updates, new lures and featured videos.When he came from behind to win an FLW Tour tournament last weekend on Alabama’s Lewis Smith Lake, Rapala® Pro Dave Lefebre made waves —both figuratively and literally. The veteran Pennsylvania angler threw a Rapala BX™ Waking Minnow to put himself in contention to win.
“It’s amazing,” Lefebre says of the BX Waking Minnow. “On a slow and steady retrieve, the fish are totally convinced it’s real. When they zone in on that thing, it’s like they don’t have a care in the world. It’s like it puts them in a trance. The way that it goes back and forth, it’s almost like they’re going under hypnosis.”
A wake bait that swims just below the water’s surface with incredible, strike-inducing action, Rapala’s BX Waking Minnow features a balsa core encased in a durable copolymer shell for unrivaled toughness. The balsa cores provides the buoyancy you expect in a Rapala. The shell ensures durability.
Lefebre’s four-day total of 20 bass weighing 65 pounds, 5 ounces gave him a 1-pound, 14-ounce margin of victory over second place pro Clark Wendlandt, in the nationally-televised FLW event that featured 154 of the best professional bass-fishing anglers in the world competing for a top cash award of up to $125,000.
Lefebre, an 11-time Forrest Wood Cup qualifier, threw a Blue Back Herring pattern BX Waking Minnow mostly in the afternoon of the first two days of the tournament, targeting shallow largemouth in the backs of creeks, where shoreline brush and submerged boulders came together.
“The bluebacks were spawning around that in the morning, but you wouldn’t get any bites on it then,” Lefebre explains. “But when I’d come back later in the day and make a medium cast to the bushes near that rock, wolfpacks of giant bass would come up from those rocks. But you had to make accurate casts to get bit. You had to get really tight to those bushes and swim it between them.”
Weighing 3/4 of an ounce, the BX Waking Minnow casts a mile, making it much easier to make precision casts. “They’re just a dream to throw,” Lefebre says.
When fishing your lake with a BX Waking Minnow, launch it as far as possible and retrieve it slowly along fish-holding cover like brush, laydowns, weedlines, docks, and the edges of lily pad fields. No specialized reeling action or rod-tip movement – like when fishing a jerkbait — is required. Just slowly and steadily reel it back to the boat.
To make many competitors’ baits “do what they’re supposed to do,” takes a lot of practice and effort and a little bit of luck,” Lefebre explains. “But the BX Waking Minnow is designed to do what it does, so you don’t have to have all this technical craft and knowledge,” he says. “You can just throw it out there a mile, and you know it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. And you’ll get bites.”
The BX Waking Minnow features lifelike 3D eyes, finite scales and gill detail paired with an internal holographic foil for ultimate attraction. It comes equipped with three tough No. 5 VMC black nickel round-bend treble hooks that hold true and tight.
Measuring 5 1/4 inches long and weighing 3/4 ounce, the BX Waking Minnow reaps all the great benefits of the BX Series in the most common prey baitfish profile. It’s available in six color patterns: Blue Back Herring, Firetiger, Gold Shiner, Shadow, Smelt and Yellow Perch.