Topwater Baits: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore: Not just for breakfast anymore – once a slogan for Florida orange juice, keep those words in mind when you tie on a Rapala topwater bait. Both are good all day long. “The misconception is that topwater baits only work during low-light periods, and that’s simply not true,” says Florida pro Bernie Schultz, a seven-time Bassmaster Classic qualifier. “In fact, there’s been situations where you can catch ‘em better under bright-sky, high-sun conditions.”
Fellow Rapala pros Davy Hite and Rusty Brown agree.
“I learned many, many years ago that a topwater is not just an early-morning or late-afternoon bait,” says Hite, a Bassmaster Classic champion and Bassmaster Angler of the Year. “And you don’t necessarily have to have clouds.”
On Arizona’s Lake Mead, “you can throw topwater baits all day,” says Brown, a California pro who threw a Rapala Skitter Walk last month to win the 31st Anniversary WON Bass Nitro Boats/Mercury U.S. Open on Mead. “Some cloud cover helped me, but I could pick up the Skitter Walk and throw it out there at 12:30 and get bites.”
Schultz threw a Skitter Walk en route to a sixth-place finish this summer in a Bassmaster tournament on New York’s St. Lawrence’s River. On the second day, he weighed 23.5 pounds of smallmouth bass, the day’s heaviest limit.
“The bite really didn’t get going until 10:15 or 10:30 in the morning and it was good until I left – and that was the middle of the day on a high, blue-sky day,” he recalls.
Still, overcast days can extend a topwater bite long past morning in many parts of the country. Additionally, dark clouds that gather before a thunderstorm on a previously sunny day can really turn on a topwater bite.
In addition to northern smallmouth waters, Schultz says, topwater baits produce quality bass in the middle of the day in Florida, southern Texas, some southeastern reservoirs and all over the southwest.
Schultz’s go-to topwater baits are Rapala Skitter Walks, X-Rap Props, X-Rap Pops and Skitter Pops.
“I’m going use them all when dialing in the bite,” he says. “It’s a matter of just applying the situation and experimenting a little bit. You have to carry them all though, to know. You can’t just buy one and have the whole topwater spectrum covered. There are different types of baits for different situations or conditions. And it’s important to have at least one of each to apply to those changing conditions.”
X-Rap Prop
Schultz’s favorite topwater, “especially in the South,” is the X-Rap Prop, which he helped Rapala Product Development, Mark Fisher design. “Every aspect of that bait is thoroughly thought through – the profile, buoyancy, the cosmetics,” Schultz says.
Featuring a long, minnow profile and counter-rotating front and rear propellers, the X-Rap Prop “makes a really cool clicking, chattering sound when you pull it through the water,” Schultz says. “And the fish just can’t stand that.”
Growing up in Florida, Schultz and all the bass fishermen he knew – from his grandpa to his buddies – “relied” on prop baits. He’s not sure why they’re not used more in other parts of the country, because they work everywhere.
“People don’t throw them enough,” he says. “It’s a shame, because it’s really a productive bait. In many cases, it will out-produce other topwater baits, particularly on better fish.”
He fishes it with “two pulls and a pause,” similar to a typical jerkbait cadence, but slower. “On prop baits, the pause is extremely crucial,” he says. “I never steady-retrieve a prop bait.” View X-Rap Prop
Skitter Walk
As its name implies, the Skitter Walk imparts a walk-the-dog action that’s effective across the country.
“It can work in a lot of different types of situations and all kinds of habitat,” Schultz says. “I’ve made it work on grass lakes, where I’m fishing holes in submerged grass, and I’ve worked it around the contours of emergent vegetation and had good success.”
In clear water, the Skitter Walk’s action elicits strikes. In stained and muddy water, it calls fish in with sound emitted from a large, single internal bearing.
“It emits a real deep, guttural knocking sound and it resonates,” Schultz explains. “Fish hear that and it pulls them to the surface like a magnet to the surface. I’ve drawn them from great distances, both laterally or vertically from the bottom.”
Schultz’s main pattern in his sixth-place finish on the gin-clear St. Lawrence River was fan-casting a Skitter Walk over the tops of shoals and humps near the mouth of Lake Ontario. “It was just ideal habitat,” he recalls. “You could see the fish swimming around on a calm day.”
Some of his spots were as shallow as three feet, but he spent most of his time targeting shoals that topped out at six to 10 feet. “There was 50 feet of water right next to ten foot of water … so the fish had a chance to move up and feed or suspend off the drop in a matter of just 10 yards.”
In winning the U.S. Open in a stained-water basin of Lake Mead, Brown threw a Skitter Walk around isolated wood near secondary cuts and small sand points. A bone-color Skitter Walk matched the hatch perfectly, he says.
“It’s not really long, but it’s not really small and it has a fat body,” Brown explains. “I was trying to mimic the size of the bluegill that were swimming out of the grass and around the sticks and I was also mimicking the shad.”
Some of his Skitter Walk strikes came within four or five feet of the bank, right around the isolated sticks. Others came off deeper structure, including submerged brush or bushes. View Skitter Walk
X-Rap Pop
Topwater fishing is among Hite’s favorite way to catch bass and an X-Rap Pop is tops. When bass and baitfish are schooling, suspending and “getting ready to migrate into their winter destinations,” Hite will throw an “X-Pop” all day long, especially in the fall.
“This thing is awesome if you get on some schooling fish – it busts ‘em up, and you can have a lot of fun,” says Hite, a South Carolina pro, in a March 2012 Bassmaster magazine article. “When you go fish, you’ve got to have fun, and there’s nothing more fun than seeing a bass smash a topwater plug.”
The X-Pop is a good choice for both tournament anglers and weekend fishermen that value size over numbers.
“For the quality of the fish that you need to win tournaments, you need to try to trigger those bigger fish,” Hite says. “And those bigger fish will absolutely bite a topwater throughout the day in the fall.”
October is Hite’s favorite month to throw a topwater – especially in his home state.
“In South Carolina, from Santee Cooper to Hartwell, I feel confident you can go anytime in October and catch fish on a topwater,” he says in a column he wrote last fall for South Carolina Sportsman magazine “There are some years when it seems like the topwater bite lasts until mid-November. Usually, year-in and year-out, the first half of October is going to be the best action.”
It’s important to make long casts when fishing topwater baits to target schooling fish, especially in clear water. Hite fishes topwater baits on 12- to 15-pound test monofilament line, not fluorocabon. Because fluoro is heavier than mono, it pulls down the nose of a topwater bait, inhibiting its action. Incorrect action will make the wrong sound.
“The key to that bait is the sound that it makes,” Hite explains. “That blooping sound – that popping noise – sounds like schooling threadfin shad and blueback herring.”
In the Southeast’s manmade reservoirs, that sound will often call up bass from as deep as 10 to 20 feet.
“Bass are predators, and when they hear splashing or some kind of disturbance on the surface, a lot of times, they react to it because they think it’s an easy opportunity to eat their prey,” Hite explains. “And that’s what really triggers those bigger fish.”
Although the X-Pop is designed to make the correct popping sound, getting bites and hooking up consistently often depends on the cadence and length of pauses the angler imparts with his retrieve.
It’s important to keep and open mind and vary your retrieve and cadence until you get a strike, Hite says. And then duplicate what worked until it is no longer effective. Then begin experimenting again.
“Some days, I don’t ever let the X-Pop stop, I’ll just constantly twitch it and bring it to me,” he says. “There’s other days where you twitch that bait and pause it for 10 seconds, and that’s when you get your strike.”
Hite will throw and X-Rap Pop when he sees fish breaking on the surface and when he sees fish suspended on his sonar unit’s display. Likely spots on southeastern reservoirs are points and creek channel bends.
Water clarity and abundance of cover determines how heavy a monofilament line Hite will use with an X-Pop. Lighter line casts a little better and farther for open water. Around heavy cover, you’ll want heavier line “to muscle those fish out of the cover.”
In the fall, Hite uses a 7-foot, medium-heavy baitcasting rod to help launch his X-Pop to reach distant schools in open water. When he’s throwing to cover in other times of the year, he uses a 6-foot, medium-heavy rod. “When you’re throwing to targets, its much easier to be accurate with a shorter rod,” he says. Throughout the year, he retrieves his topwater baits with a 6.2:1 gear ratio baitcasting reel. View X-Rap Pop