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!!!
