“Ah, surface baits,” says muskie legend and longtime In-Fisherman contributor **** Pearson. “How I love them. Unfortunately, my love affair with them began late in my career.”
For muskie men like Pearson, who understand better than most how truly rare big muskies are and how fleeting the chance to catch them, the realization that they may have missed multitudes of muskies over the decades is painful. Pearson’s chagrin at having arrived so late to muskies on topwaters is more than mere hindsight, more than what if. This is a sock to the nose. Physical and mental pain. Mention those missed chances and he squirms. Oh, the days that could have been.
That giant fish that followed a bucktail across a wind-swept reef? Would she have smashed a tail-popping topwater? Never know. What would have happened if I’d thrown a buzzbait across those weedbeds all those years ago? Walk-the-dog topwaters? Had them, just didn’t use them much. Why not? I’d feel so much better now, if I had. “Lord knows what monsters I could have caught,” he says, “had I been wiser and not pushed topwaters aside after losing a few nice fish early on.”
Pearson isn’t unique among muskie anglers. Even as recently as four or five years ago, topwaters were a niche bait in the landscape of muskie tactics and techniques, their use mostly limited to calm mornings and evenings, and even then only in midsummer. Fast-forward to today, and topwaters play a key role in Pearson’s bag of muskie tricks.
A Time For Topwaters
“The right time for topwaters,” Pearson says, “is anytime. Season opener to ice-up. Windy, glass-calm, or anything in between. That may sound like I’m oversimplifying, but I’m not. There are few situations nowadays where topwaters aren’t a reasonable option. In many cases, they’re the first option.”
Why the change in thinking? “Actually, in part it was a comment In-Fisherman Editor In Chief Doug Stange made some 20 years ago that stuck with me and finally convinced me to give them another try,” Pearson offers. “We were filming an early In-Fisherman Television segment and he asked why I rarely threw surface baits.
“I said something like, ’When I get them to hit the blankety-blank things, I lose them.’ That was my attitude. Doug said I might be making a mistake. Then he added something that resonated and made me reconsider their use years later. His exact statement has faded. Basically, though, it was something like, ‘Studies suggest that once a predator fish has achieved feeding success on the surface, the experience is so unique that they’re forever likely to be hooked on surface feeding when opportunities exist. Therefore, muskies should be vulnerable to even the feeblest topwater presentations.’ I’m pretty sure he put the word feeble in there, especially for me.
“He was right. There’s something about a surface presentation that triggers the predatory instinct in muskies, whether it’s from a 30- or a 55-incher. His point was that a 50-incher has been around longer and is more likely to have had that positive reinforcement from feeding successfully on the surface. Topwaters often tend to select for bigger fish.”
