After a lackluster morning topwater session, these anglers switched to suspending and slow-sinking plugs to entice trout and snook in three feet of water.
Some days you just gotta weigh the benefits. Do you want to plug the morning away, anticipating that one grand topwater strike? Or do you want to catch fish? Maybe one after another.
Like many anglers, I often succumb to the topwater craze—repeating to myself and anyone else who’ll listen that “I’d rather get one topwater take than 10 underwater.”
What?
Accidentally uncovering an old tackle box made me rethink this strategy completely. Upon opening the dust-covered lure cradle, my eyes feasted on an extensive collection of lures—plugs I once touted as the best artificial fish catchers in the business. What took me by surprise was that out of the whole bunch, only two were topwaters. The rest were lipless sinkers and suspenders. Viewing them flooded my parietal lobes with pleasant memories.
There, hidden in the corner, was a favorite 52M MirrOlure, colored red-and-gold that drew redfish repeatedly off the oyster bars of upper St. Augustine. Beside it, a 704 TT and Bagley Mullet reminded me of the many trout blitzes I successfully worked with these lures, two to four feet below the surface. A beat-up Bomber Mullet whisked me into the backwaters of Tomoka River, where snook after snook attacked it.
Hard or Soft?
While it’s hard to break away from old standards, in this case hard-sided sinking and suspending plugs, there is another option. Soft-sided suspending lures are adding new converts by the day. Soft suspenders such as the Corky, Fat Boy, Corky Devil and Storm Wildeye Croaker dupe a lot of fish.
These neutral-buoyancy lures will not sink deep, unless you add weight to them. The soft sides have a more natural bait feel, and fish tend to hold on to them a bit longer, according to some fishermen. One thing you can do with them that’s impossible on any hard-plastic plug, is to bend them. Tilting the head or tail up or down changes the lure’s action. Be careful though; too much tweak will make the lure spin—a motion that seldom adds fish to the box. —F.B.
Before we proceed, let’s clarify a definition. Just what is a sinking/suspending twitchbait? The answer to that is not so easy, particularly if you peruse the latest tackle catalogs. For now, though, let’s keep it simple and address the suspending twitchbaits that I mentioned above and highlight those that have no lips.
Know what I like best about this lure class? They possess no built-in action. It’s up to the angler to impart a seductive wiggle, to make these hard pieces of wood and plastic entice strikes. Cast one, reel it straight back and, odds are, these lures will never get a scratch.
Take that same lure, however, pitch it into a likely strike zone and dance it through the water column with short, sharp twitches of the rodtip and you’ll likely get slammed. That is, if you wiggle it seductively enough to catch a predator’s attention.
Retrieve style is the most important element for working lipless subsurface artificials. One I’ve relied on through the years is the double-twitch. It’s simple to master and quite deadly. To practice, cast your lure (you’ll need water deep enough for it to sink or suspend), let it settle in the water column and reel the slack out of the line. With the rodtip close to water and line tight, bump the rodtip about an inch or two in rapid succession. This causes the underwater plug to dart right and left, sort of like a wounded baitfish. A word of caution for double twitching: don’t sweep the rodtip, just bump it.
Sweeping imparts an entirely different action to the lure and removes it from the strike zone quicker. Yet, sweeping is not a bad thing—under the right circumstances. I often combine the two approaches—if doing so best fits the terrain I’m plugging. For instance, you cast into shallows next to a cut or channel, and must move the lure pronto to avoid hanging it on bottom. Sweep the lure toward deeper water, but once the lure reaches the dropoff switch to a slow double-twitch retrieve.
Plugs are among the many suspending models available.
This action mimics an off-kilter minnow and, as was proven to me many seasons back, drives channel-edge-hanging trout completely bonkers. Redfish fall for it, too, often tracking “swept” lures across the shallows only to hit them in deeper water. Snook are also drawn to this retrieve, but 9 times in 10, linesiders attack the lure the second it begins to sink along the dropoff.
