Irresistible retrieves for topwater fishing and more.

Bass fishing involves many retrieves—burning, ripping, hopping, crawling, shaking, stitching, twitching, jerking, swimming, dragging, and more. There’s no lack of options once a lure hits the water. Some are easy to master, like burning a big tandem spinnerbait. Others require uncanny patience, such as Bill Murphy’s stitching technique, so slow it’s almost a non-retrieve.

With the exception of stitching, where one hand recovers and temporarily stores the line, anglers use one of two tools to draw a lure past the quarry—rod and reel. No standard retrieve demands as much coordination of rod and reel manipulation as the topwater technique known as ‘walking-the-dog’, where cadence and timing are essential to achieve optimal action.

Walking-the-dog seems to have originated with Heddon’s cigar-shaped topwater, the Zara Spook. For some, this technique is generically known as Spook fishing. There’s something about the way a Spook dips, cuts, and lunges from the water like a desperate baitfish that’s entrenched it as a bait for the ages.

Recent designs have been influenced by intricate Japanese models with realistic silhouettes and finishes. Some manufacturers claim that the curved shape of Heddon’s new SwayBack Spook, Yo-Zuri’s Banana Boat, and the Lucky Craft Sammy makes walking-the-dog easier. In truth, both the new renditions and traditional baits share much in common: They drive big bass nuts.

The Importance of Slack

As a kid, I borrowed an old Zara Spook from my uncle’s tackle box and began casting it out and reeling it in steadily. Scooting forward in a straight line, the lure exhibited none of the magic, side-to-side sashaying that makes it deadly. After a few casts, it was relegated to the bottom rack.

It was five years later while watching an episode of “Fishing with Orlando Wilson” that the proverbial light bulb came on. The host was working a Spook along a lily-pad edge and catching lots of bass. But I was most interested in the way he worked the plug. By rhythmically twitching his rod tip downward and slightly to the side, he made that Spook dance across the surface. The key, he explained, was to flick the rod tip back toward the lure after each twitch, putting slack in the line and giving the lure freedom to glide to each side without resistance.

Experimenting with the lure again, I learned that walking-the-dog involves measured recovery of slack line with the reel. Too much or too little reeling stalls the lure’s attractive walk. Practice improved my coordination and timing. To take up slack as the lure approaches, experienced anglers make quarter- to half-turns of the reel handle between rhythmic taps of the rod.

They maintain visual contact with the lure to make sure it’s walking properly and to spot following fish. This sounds more complicated than it is. Once you know what to do, walking-the-dog is quite simple and rhythmically therapeutic. The day I mastered the technique, I caught a 20-inch smallie on my tenth cast.

Topwater Walking

Walking-the-dog with a topwater can be effective from spring (water temperatures broaching about 55°F) through early fall, with only the time around the spawn less than ideal. And if you limit your dog-walking to low-light periods of dawn, dusk, and cloudy days, you’re missing action.

Speed can be a trigger but dawdling retrieves can also work well. As a search tool, these lures can be cast far and snapped along at a frantic clip to draw strikes from aggressive, roaming smallmouth. They also work when twitched intermittently along vegetation and timber edges, often drawing cover-oriented largemouths from their fortified homes.