The Care And Use Of Sammies

[Ham]

I've got some Sammy 85's and 65's that I would like to sell on the cheap. I'll dig thru what I have and make a listing for them.

The Sammy is a great bait to be sure. Zara puppies do pretty well also and I don't mind the rattle in the SS Jr at all. Spro's Sammy knock off is a decent bait. I got one for the bullfrog color.

A little too good of a write up from Al. I will add as with any Topwater lure. Most of the time you need to wait until you feel the weight of the fish before you react to the strike.

[moguy1973]

Ok, these things are fun....Stopped by BPS after work tonight to pick up a 100 in Chart Shad, then went to the local park pond just up the street to try it out...Only had about 1/2 hour to fish and caught 3 LMB in that time, the largest being 1lbs/10oz, which is pretty good size for that pond. No super big explosive strikes, but when they hit it, it was gone and it was pretty easy to set the hook.

I did notice that they don't like getting moss or any kind of debris on them. That pond has a lot of surface weeds and moss and it made the Sammy lose all of it's action with the littlest bit of moss on the hooks.

Can't wait to try it out at my sister-in-law's private lake in Columbia this weekend where I'm sure they'll tear it up since no one really fishes it, and I know there are a lot of 4lbs+ LMB in there just waiting for me...

[Al Agnew]

Gavin is right about cost. We're talking about a surface lure here. If you are fishing from any kind of watercraft (or if you're wading and willing to swim for a $15 lure) it takes a really creative mistake to lose one. And for the soft plastics fans...ask yourself how many bags of your favorite soft plastics you go through in a summer. I'd bet you spend a lot more on your soft plastics each year than you would for a couple of Sammies that should last you several years. Of course, I CAN come up with creative ways of losing them, but I still have a few that I bought the first year they came out.

About the Sammy 65...in my opinion it's simply too small to ever be the kind of attractor of big fish that the larger sizes are, and it's also, like the 85, more difficult to get to work. One of my buddies and I were floating the Big Piney one day when the fish were really keying on surface lures. He was using the Megabass Dog X Junior or something like that, a lure about the size of the Sammy 65, and catching 10 inch smallies like crazy. I was using the Sammy 100 and 115 and catching about 3/4 the number of fish he was catching, but mine were averaging MUCH bigger. I finally razzed him about his little bitty bait so much (and he watched me catching much bigger fish long enough) that he finally broke down and put on a Sammy 100--and within ten minutes caught a 21 inch smallie.

For canoe and kayak use, as JoeD said, it's a lot more of a problem to work WTD lures than it is in a bass boat or even when you're wading. Most people find that they can most easily make the lure walk by holding the rod pointing downward with the tip close the water surface, easy to do when standing up, not so easy when sitting down low to the water, which is why you really need as short a rod as possible when in canoe or kayak to make it easy. Also, boat positioning becomes critical when working them from a sitting position. You'll probably find the a "backhand" rod position while twitching works best for you...in other words, if you are holding the rod in your right hand, your hands and the rod will be coming across your body with the tip of the rod to the left of your body. With a casting rod like I use, it's all wrist action, and your wrist bends downward, toward the palm of your hand, with each twitch. Bending the wrist upward, toward the back of your hand, it's much more difficult to get the sharp, short jerking motion you need to do. So if your rod tip is on the same side of your body as your rod hand, you're probably going to be using more of your elbow to help the twitch and it simply doesn't work well.

Now obviously, given this situation, if you're twitching with your right arm and fishing off the left side of the canoe, your body has to rotate a whole lot to the left to get your rod tip to the left side of your body. It really requires contortions, and you can't really work the lure off the left side of the canoe if it's even with the canoe or somewhat behind it. You're basically limited to fishing it off the right side of the canoe, directly in front of the canoe, or slightly to the left of the canoe.

So what I do in the solo canoe is simply keep the canoe turned toward my off side (turned so that it's facing to the left if you're right-handed), when I'm fishing a bank on that side. Only, I'm a left-handed caster, so I have to keep my canoe turned to the right if I'm fishing a right-side bank. I also tend to keep the canoe fairly close to that bank and cast well ahead, instead of casting perpendicular to the bank.

So I seldom mess up the cadence of working the lure. I can also walk it just fine by holding the rod tip high, which, while difficult, is doable with practice. Why would I want to? Well, say you're sitting in a spot with a strong chute of current between you and the target you want to fish, but slower water where the target is (very common near riffles where some of the best fish might be). If your rod tip is close to the water your line will be lying on the surface right in that jet of current, with the current pulling and tightening the line, making more than one or two twitches impossible before the current starts pulling the lure. But by keeping my rod tip high I can keep most of the line off the water and unaffected by the current, while still working the lure.

There are other little tricks that can take a LOT of practice but sometimes come in very handy. After you do it for a while your wrist gets muscle memory and you can do normal walking in your sleep. I've even experienced having my eyes seeming to bob back and forth as if following the zigzags of the lure when I'm sitting in the house at night after a long day of walking these lures. So to vary the cadence of the twitches you have to kind of unlearn your wrist's muscle memory. But if you can get your wrist to make every other twitch stronger--hard twitch, soft twitch, hard twitch, soft twitch--you can make the lure walk to one side or the other instead of straight back toward you. Say you made a cast cross current to a target, but miscalculated and the retrieve is going to end up being carried all the way into or even behind the target by the current. You can soft twitch hard twitch to keep the lure veering upstream and clearing the target! Or maybe walk it right under an overhanging log that you cast parallel to.

Of course, by varying the speed and strength of your twitches, you can make the lure do anything from very fast and very splashy to very long glides with each zig and zag to very little gliding and just wiggling back and forth coming in almost like a Jitterbug. You can make it almost stay in one place while walking, or suddenly make it go forward very quickly while still walking as if it's trying to get away from something. I've done all this so much that I often don't even consciously think about it, I just react to the particular conditions on that cast. But of course, I'm older than dirt and I've been doing it for a long time.

[ColdWaterFshr]

Good point about the cost compared to plastics. I didn't think about it that way, but it makes sense.

It takes some skill and a lot of practice to fish with a Sammy the way Al does out of a moving canoe, casting with pinpoint accuracy to targets and then working the lure the way he does. I was impressed. I thought I worked a buzzbait fast, but he works a Sammy even faster, and it requires a lot more than just cranking it in. He has the timing down on the WTD-action perfectly, but he probably doesn't even think about it anymore, its like driving a stick shift to him. I'm doing well to hit my targets semi-accurately while floating and just cranking it in.

[junkman]

Yes it doesn't take long to go through a bag of Gulp minnows at over 5 bucks a bag. And yes went to Bass Pro this evening which is only a 100 miles away and picked up a 100. Hope it works better then a spook and if it will work as good or better then a Chugger Jr. then I will have to add more to my tackle box.

[OzarksRiverman]

I was in Hartville today working on a stormwater management plan for the city. After the meeting I snuck down to the Upper Upper Gasconade to try out the Sammy 100 I picked up yesterday. It was a little rough getting the 'twitch' right, but after 10 minutes or so I got my first hook up, a 10" smallie. I caught three or four more, than as I was wading back down to my rig I tossed it out and got blew up about 16 1/2" smallie. I did have pictures of the lure and all of the fish, but when I caught that last one I was so excited I dropped my dadgum phone in the water and now it's toast... Oh well, it was worth it!

First fish caught on a topwater lure