Poppers, wake baits?

[Greasy B]

1 hour ago, Gavin said:

Can drift that candy for hundreds of yards with good mends.

Yep, when it works right, you animate and mend in the same movement, always keeping close contact.  

[Al Agnew]

2 hours ago, LarrySTL said:

I hear you all about these chuggers being too slow and actually I agree.  I could sometimes slow down enough to try the Lucky 13 but the bass had about 15 minutes to bite it or I would change away from it.   I did know a guy who loved the Hoodler beyond words.  Picture a huge Lucky 13 with a good sized prop on the back.  One day, yes from the back of my boat, he caught two LM over 5 lbs throwing it over about 50 feet of water  in the middle of one of those deep steep TR coves that was crammed full of cedars starting about 15 or 20 feet down. It got a little heated when I announced that I had not caught anything and that we were going to go do something different in a different type of water. 

I can actually do ok with a Chug Bug but I am fishing about the speed of a semi-slow to moderate WTD retrieve.

Back in the 1960s when I was a kid fishing Wappapello with my dad, one of our go-to baits was the Hoodler.  Especially the solid black one.  There were two other topwaters available back then that were as good or better, the Porter Pop Stop and Porter Duz-biz.  Both were similar to the hoodler, big chuggers with a prop on the back.  And in fact, we never fished Lucky 13s back then without adding a prop on the rear of them, which made them just like the Hoodler and the other two.  We never used the Zara Spook which was about the only walk the dog lure available, back then; all our topwaters where either the chuggers with prop, or prop baits like the Devils Horse and it's shorter, fatter, one prop cousin by the same company, the Buck n' Bawl.  I didn't start using walkers until about 15 or so years ago on the rivers, but once I did, they almost replaced my other stream topwaters.

And all those topwaters we fished back then?  We fished them all with a rapid retrieve.  We never slowed the retrieve down.  Maybe on the rare days when the topwaters weren't working (they worked pretty much all summer back then on lakes as shallow as Wappapello) we could have caught fish by slowing way down, but we never did it.