Topwater Frogs

Topwater fishing is great! Jigs and spinners may be effective but only topwater lures allow you to see the strike- what's more exciting than that?

I love throwing frogs- they're weedless and bass love them. The biggest drawback is their steep price so when it came time to restock my tackle box I put a lot of thought into it. I didn't want to spend over $10/frog but I wanted quality- I wanted to get the most bang for my buck. I thought about it for a while and came up with three categories to judge them on: color, hook setting ability and durability.

Now that I had my criteria to evaluate the frogs I went to Bass Pro, grabbed a lawn chair from the camping section and sat down in the frog aisle ready to get down to the bottom of things...

The first thing I evaluated was color and while very important it is often misunderstood. The only color that matters is its belly color- it's the only color that fish see. Think about it- the bass is coming up from below and most of the frog is above water. While intricate paint jobs catch the attention of an angler they do nothing to catch the attention of a bass.

To make matters worse, many times a frog's belly does not match the body. Don't buy a frog online unless you've already used it before and when you're at the tackle shop be sure to take the frog out to make sure the belly matches the body.

So the first thing I did was grab several frogs in the same color but from different brands and open up the packaging. Right off the bat I eliminated most of them when I saw their belly color didn't match the body. I had already decided I wanted to cover all my bases- black, white, green and yellow. Surprisingly, only one brand had frogs with black, white, green and yellow bellies.

With color taken care of I moved onto hook setting ability. Some frogs are stiff and require serious pressure to expose the hidden weed-safe hooks resulting in lost hook ups. It only took a slight amount of pressure to expose the hooks which made me happy.

The final thing to evaluate was durability. One thing I noticed was the better the durability the harder the hook set was and vice versa. It's important to find common ground between these two dividing forces. While hook setting is important you don't want a frog that immediately starts taking on water or is destroyed after one hit.

After a thorough inspection I had a decision to make...

Sure, a $12 frog might dance better than a $4 frog but is the difference worth the price and $12 frogs still break, get snagged, break off and fill with water. I thought to myself...

Is it really worth the money???

At what point does the skill of the angler overrule the lure???

Do you need a $12 lure or are you skilled enough to work a $4 frog???

I decided to go with $6 frogs and I'm anxious to see how my bargain (still made by a well known company- just not grossly overpriced) frogs stack up to the expensive ones!!!

Take care and tight lines!!!