HOW TO
4 WAYS TO FISH A FROG
By Curtis Niedermier
How to maximize your chances with this favorite topwater bait family
PHOTO BY BRODY MCWILLIAMS
“F
rog-fishing season” for MLF
pro Jacob Wheeler lasts from
before the spawn in the spring
until the water temperature dips into
the low 50s in the fall. To tackle such a
wide range of scenarios, Wheeler keeps
a slew of frog makes and models in his
boat and has mastered a handful of
techniques for fishing them.
1. Walking in Place
Wheeler starts throwing a frog early
in the spring before the water reaches
60 degrees, but really ramps it up
when bass start spawning. Catching
bedding bass requires a presentation
that can pester them into biting.
“That’s when I’m tending to slow
walk a frog a lot more in cover,” he says.
“I’m trying to keep that bait over their
head. I’m trying to not move it too far
toward me but bringing it side to side. If
I only have a small strike zone to catch
them, I try to really slow that bait down.”
The best strategy to accomplish the
slow walk or walk in place is to give the
frog a little extra slack and focus on really
popping the slack with each twitch.
2. Popping and Bobbing
When he’s in search mode and/or
the water is warm, Wheeler will
sometimes ditch trying to walk the
72
frog and instead pop it or bob it
quickly across the surface. It should
look like the frog’s face is slapping
the water.
In this case, speed is a trigger.
“I’ve seen it where those fish really
get on a popping action of moving that
bait very, very fast,” he says. “Everybody
now is so caught up with walking it that
I feel like it’s almost a deal where you’re
popping it and getting them to react
because they see a frog a decent
amount of time now.”
DON’T SETTLE ON SOFTNESS
While Wheeler claims to have more than 500 frogs in his
personal collection, the one feature he’s unwilling to settle on
is the softness of a frog. To him, the softer the better.
“You can do a lot of different things to a frog, like tweaking
the hooks out, and you can make it decent, but if it’s not soft,
the hookup ratio is not going to be as good as it could be.
That’s No. 1,” he says.
Wheeler likes the Terminator Walking Frog and Duckett
Fishing BD Frog because they tend to always be soft. But he
fishes other models, too, and will actually sort through to find
the specimens with the softest body. He’s not sure why some
are softer than others (sometimes there’s variation between
colors or in the manufacturing process, he thinks), but,
regardless of why, he always puts the softest ones in his
tournament box.
3. Walking the Dog
The standard walk-the-dog action is
still a go-to, but Wheeler rarely walks a
frog in a consistent, monotonous way.
“If I’m in open water, I tend to pop it
more until I get into those areas where
I can tell it’s a really high-percentage
area,” he says. “If I’m fishing lily pads, I
might want to walk it in the little holes.
I might slow the presentation down
once I get in a high-percentage area.
It’s all dependent on different kinds of
presentations for different targets.”
4. Mat Popping
Wheeler’s first choice when fishing a
mat is to work the frog with three pops
followed by a pause. He calls it a catand-mouse
game, where he’s trying to
make an impression in the mat that the
fish can see and then pausing to try and
tempt a bass to come up and strike.
“That’s probably my favorite
cadence, but, then again, I’ve also seen
it where the fish get very pressured
and a constant, fast movement is the
only way to trigger a bite,” he adds.
“It’s almost like throwing a DT 20
[crankbait] through a school of bass
offshore, and you have to burn it.”
Wheeler’s best advice for any frogging
scenario is to keep mixing it up to
see what works, because having a variety
of retrieves and a wide collection of frogs
can help extend the frogging season.
FLWFISHING.COM | MAJORLEAGUEFISHING.COM | JUNE-JULY 2020