Heavy Cover Frog Fishing

Bass love dense vegetation. Whether fishing in the California Delta, an east Texas reservoir or a Florida lake, odds are if you find dense vegetation you'll find fish. But, while locating these beds may be easy, presenting lures to bass dug into their snarled depths can take a bit of adjustment.

A favored approach for probing dense weedbeds is to punch heavy jigs or heavily weighted Texas-rigged soft-plastics through the canopy, allowing the fish lurking beneath to get an eyeful of the lure. Punching beds can be effective. However, it is also tediously slow and, at times, downright boring.

Many anglers -- especially those wishing to cover vast amounts of water -- have chosen to force the fish to come to them rather than trying to place a bait right in front of fish hiding beneath vegetation. For these fishermen, nothing is quite as effective for finding out if fish are home as an artificial frog. When rigged weedlessly, frogs can be fished in even the densest vegetation. And, once a bass zeroes in on a frog drug across the surface of a grass mat, the strike can be both violent and exhilarating.

"I have absolutely had a blast with that lure," said former bass pro and current lure designer John Dean, referring to his Ribbit Frog. "I like seeing bass blow up on it, I like seeing people fish with it and I like seeing people win money with it. It's really worked out all the way around."

When fishing dense vegetation, Dean says he attacks it as if it were a microcosm of an entire lake.

"When I'm fishing a dense bed, I try to look for areas that are different. Obviously, I like to find avenues where the mat is clear … find a place with a hole or an alley where you can make a clean cast. If you rig them weedless, they'll come back pretty clean even when you go over the top of the mat. But, those little alleys and holes are where the bass will ambush them.

"I'll also look at the edges of the vegetation. I'll fish the secondary points of the mat. And, I'll fish areas where little sloughs or drains cut through the vegetation. You're really just trying to find features that are different, just like you would when you are fishing a shoreline."

Despite popular belief, Dean says there's more than one way to rig and fish a frog.

"Everybody thinks about fishing frogs weightless on the surface around thick grass like hydrilla or pepper grass. And, that does work well. But, that's not the only way to fish a frog. For starters, you don't have to have grass to be productive on a frog. Stumps, rocks -- any type of structure can be good for frog fishing.

"If you are fishing the frog on the surface, you don't always have to keep it right on the surface. When I'm fishing on top, I rig my frogs with unweighted or weighted; I let the fish dictate which.

"I'll typically start out with an unweighted hook. But, if I'm getting a bunch of blowups, I'll switch to a weighted hook. With the weighted hook, you can drop the bait down a little and get it right in front of his face. You'll usually hook up a little more that way. And, if you miss a big blowup on an unweighted frog, don't hesitate to throw a weighted one right back in there. That's one thing about frogs; bass will come back and hit them again and again."

Although he likes the visual strikes provided by surface fishing frogs, Dean says he feels like he can consistently produce heavier stringers with a lesser utilized method.

"If you've never fished a frog on a Carolina-rig, you're missing out," Dean stated. "I don't really do anything different than I would when fishing any other type of soft-plastic on a Carolina-rig. I don't try to swim it or move it extra fast to make the feet kick. I just slowly drag it along, almost dead-sticking it.