target giant bass on the surface

topwater tips with Ray Hanselman

®

Summer 2020

By Pete Robbins

ER GIANTS

T

he longtime Lake Amistad guide and current

Bassmaster Elite Series pro spends more

time outdoors than all but a handful of people on earth and the only time he’s not chasing gigantic

largemouth is either when he’s hunting or when he’s

fishing a tournament on a waterway that doesn’t have

them.

He can crank, flip a jig and has plenty of experience

with big swimbaits, but surprisingly many of his true

monsters have come on the surface.

“I’ve probably caught more over 10 pounds on a

topwater than I have on a swimbait,” he said.

The fascination was born early. Growing up in Del

Rio, he had a childhood friend whose father was a

striper guide. They’d tag along with him, throwing

7-inch Cordell Red Fins, but “every time we’d go

we’d catch two or three 6- or 8- or 10-pound

bass.”

That lit a fire under him that led to several

30-pound tournament bags with that same

technique. Indeed, that wake bait in bone or

rainbow trout remains one of his key big bass

presentations decades later.

His other favorite topwater for giants is the Strike

King Mega Dawg, a 6-inch, 2 ounce walk-the-dog style

topwater. He’d fished similar baits like the Lunker

Punker prior to the Mega Dawg’s development, but

found them hard to work all day, so he begged

Strike King lure designer Phil Marks for this lure.

“It especially good in rough water,” he

said, noting that he favors the “Oyster” color

scheme. Because it casts like a bullet and

walks with comparatively less effort, he’s

more inclined to throw it from start to

finish when he knows that’s his best

chance for a monster – or five monsters.

Hanselman typically has both of

these key lures on the deck during prime

windows and switches back and forth

until he figures out which one the fish

want. The only qualifications for using them

is that the lake has to be relatively clear and

it has to have big ones. If there’s a bluegill spawn

going on, that’s prime time, and a “big topwater bait will bring out the kid in them.”

Wind is often better, but if it’s calm, he’ll just push out a little deeper. The Mega Dawg typically will trigger fish to come up out of 10- to 15-feet of water to blast it, but in ultra-clear water with little wind, they may rocket up out of 25. In that scenario, he looks for fish that are relating to submerged grass or those that are suspended in deep trees. In some instances, the fish aren’t relating to any cover at all.

“Sometimes I’ll be running 70 mph and I’ll see a big gizzard shad sick on the surface, walking on the top,” he stated. “I’ll always stop. It might be over 100-feet of water, but there’s usually a big bass hanging around, and they know that if they eat that they won’t have eat for a week.”

He said that on bluegill lakes the bite is typically better when the sun is high and beating down.

“That’s when the bluegills are active, out and about, and those big ones have their radar up and pinging,” he said. “I like 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.”

Credit FLW

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