“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.”

Topwaters are so effective in triggering a predatory instinct, according to Pearson, because of where muskies do their thing. “I’ve been saying for years that anglers would catch more fish if they spent time trying to put together as many edges as possible. The surface is a critical edge. My friend In-Fisherman Field Editor Gord Pyzer calls it the ultimate edge. It’s a busy place where you find the greatest variations in so many factors key to muskie success: current, light penetration, oxygen, noise, weather. They’re all edges, in a way.

“Combine that key edge with edges in the more traditional sense—weededges, the edges of reefs or points, current edges created by wind or natural flow. Now you really have something. For predators, the surface often is that near-perfect environment that’s chaotic, and predators thrive on chaos.”

This key edge also is one where many of the disadvantages anglers contend with are reduced. The disturbance topwaters make on the surface film masks their exact nature. They’re a surface-swimming something, suggestive of many things yet specific to nothing. With no visible line in the water, and with the inherent distortion of surface-swimming objects when viewed from below, there’s little to indicate to even lure-wise and boat-shy fish that the presentation is a fraud. This perhaps explains the continued effectiveness of surface lures even on heavily pressured waters such as Minnesota’s Mille Lacs and Vermilion lakes.

Making the most of this chaotic environment where predators thrive, Pearson says, requires consideration of two critical factors: sound and speed.

The Sound of Success

Sound is the most important factor in topwaters for muskies, according to Pearson. “It’s probably the difference in determining which topwaters work and which don’t at any given time. At times a loud pop-pop-type bait with a front prop like a Slammer Thunderhead or Jim Dembiec’s Headbanger is the answer. Other times it’s subtle baits like a Topper Stopper. When I was involved in the Esox Research Company prior to its sale to Drifter Tackle, we worked nearly three years on a surface lure trying to get a certain sound. I understand Drifter has worked it out and the topwater with this sound is forthcoming soon.”

So, what sound, and when? “Well, no one ever knows for sure,” he says. “I’m positive water conditions are the determining factor, but the only way to find out is to experiment.”

In moderate weeds, in wind and waves, or in dark water, Pearson usually begins with a noisy bait that can call fish from a distance and helps them locate the bait. In calmer conditions or in colder water, he begins with a subtler-sounding squeaking bait like a Topper Stopper, or with what he calls splash baits like a walk-the-dog topwater. But sound preferences seem to change over time, perhaps as fish get conditioned to certain baits. We might remember that if the positive experience of feeding successfully on the surface is memorable to muskies, so is being caught on a certain bait, having a close call, or being bombarded with the same sound day after day.

Puzzling is the seeming preference fish have for a particular type of sound that can persist over the course of an entire season and across a variety of conditions. “Fishing topwaters on Lake of the Woods this past summer was fascinating,” Pearson says. “I’ve done well on topwaters there for some time, but this year, lures I was very confident in fizzled badly. A fish here and there, but nothing like I’d expect, even under what I thought were ideal conditions.

“Meanwhile, a new bait called the Rumbler, with a completely different sound, was outstanding. The Rumbler is a tail-spinning topwater but with a more subtle, higher-pitched sound than a lot of tail-spinners. It outfished all other topwaters for me this year. You might find that interesting in and of itself, but across the lake from me over in Sabaskong, Doug Johnson in the Northwest Angle was having similar success with the same lure.”

Why the Rumbler, instead of others with proven records for productivity on that body of water? Hard to say with certainty, but the difference, Pearson suspects, has something to do with sound. The preference for that sound carried on through the summer. “As I moved away from early-season weedbeds to more rock-related spots, it only got more effective,” he says.

Speed

Speed is a vital factor in any presentation approach, including with topwaters. Speed has an effect on the sound, but there’s more to it than that. Conditions often dictate lure speed, but often in ways one wouldn’t expect. And at times, according to Pearson, the relationship between speed and water conditions is counterintuitive.

Situations that create optimal feeding conditions—maximum chaos—for surface-looking predators like muskies call for aggressive, rapid presentations, in order to stand out in a roiled surface film and to trigger the keen predatory instinct of active muskies. “I’ve had days where multiple 50-inch fish were boated on walk-the-dog topwaters fished as fast as we could turn the reel handle in huge rollers and heavy wind,” Pearson says. “Under calm conditions, the same bait might require pauses of several seconds between twitches to get any attention at all.”

Tune your speed not only to the fish’s level of activity, but to the conditions as well. And as always—according to Pearson—experiment. Like preference for sound, preferences for speed can change day to day and season by season.

New topwaters continue to hit the market, the Rumbler perhaps the latest. These lures often play on variations of established themes, mixing and matching sound and action in just about any combination—from tail-spinning baits with subtle sound like the Rumbler, to clattering, rattle-filled walk-the-dog topwaters like the Musky Mania Doc, which blends subtle action with aggressive sound.

For Pearson, the experiment continues with this ever-growing array of lures. He’s making up for lost time.

*Rob Kimm, St. Paul, Minnesota, is Editor of Esox Angler, an exceptional muskie angler, and a frequent In-Fisherman contributor.