Top water plug fishing has become my favorite fishing technique of late.  There are a lot of shoreline spots that host papio and kaku ready to jump a bobbing, slurping lure.  Even if the water is only a foot or so deep, the lures float and don’t get hung up. With a 25lb fluoro leader, I haven’t been cut off by kaku yet.

Sounds like an ideal fishing method huh?  Well, the top water hookup ratio is notoriously low.  The fish either hit the lure body but miss the hooks or get suspicious and veer off at the last millisecond.

There are recommended times to fish top water, and some lures are designed to have better hookup ratios than others.

Fish seem to hit top water lures better when the sun angle is low. Dawn or dusk.  The fish may be more easily fooled in the low light, or they don’t like looking up into the bright sky to feed.  When the sun is overhead I often get weak attempts to pull the lure down.

This lure shape has always attracted fish but often the fish splash next to it a few times and become disinterested.  Maybe it’s because the body is so fat that the fish are blocked from the hooks?  Look at the scratches on its back, opposite side of where the hooks are.  To be fair, most of the attackers are kaku trying to slice off the back end of the lure. If they were decent sized papios they probably would’ve wolfed the whole lure down.

When I miss fish with the chubby lure above I switch to this narrower, bobbing lure.  It misses fish too, but eventually hooks one.

 

Maybe the fish’s jaws are wrapping around the slender body better and eventually finding a hook?  Both lures are sold out of Japan and this narrow faced lure is especially hard to find.  The model I’m fishing is really a freshwater bass lure that I’ve been putting saltwater hooks on.  Look at what it attracted in the past.

This kaku hit an hr before dark. I pinch down the barbs of the hooks so I can tag and release the fish with minimal harm.

 

 

And this kaku kept missing my hooks but was hooked by Clay’s lure.  Clay employs a much faster retrieve that gets the kaku to commit. I’ve been trying to learn that retrieve. The last time out I walked my lure back quickly and when I was about to lift the lure out of the water a white papio took a swipe and missed the hooks.

Mores misses than hookups but a very exciting way to fish.