Today’s review is on another new release from our friends at Koppers—specifically, the Koppers Live Target Walking Frog. We’ve come to expect, but are still no less impressed by, the amazing life-like finishes on the Koppers line.
As you can see from the picture, the Live Target Walking Frog is another incredibly realistic looking lure. It even has the front legs molded into the plastic right where they would be on a real frog as it is swimming.
Another feature that you notice once you get the lure out of the package is the banana like shape of the frog. At first glance, it has a slightly arched back and interesting shape to its face. While the looks are downright inspired, what matters with any lure is how it performs on the water, so let’s get to it!
Fishing The Walking Frog
We chose the larger of the two sizes, 4 5/8 inch 7/8 oz for our first experience with this bait. We have a lot of bull frogs in our local water so we chose the brown/black and tan/brown patterns. The colors are the same for both sizes but the larger, in my view, would more closely imitate our local forage.
One of the things that the angler has to keep in mind when getting any new lures is that to judge them, you must have a baseline to compare it to. In our case, our baseline is the One-Knocker Spook. Because the Koppers and the Spook are similar in size and are both walk-the-dog style baits, we thought these two would be the closest to each other of our choices. So on we go to the first cast.
We threw the Live Target Walking Frog on a 7 foot medium action rod with 15 pound P-Line, the same rig that we use for the Spook. The extra weight of the frog was immediately apparent as this bait will really sail without a lot of effort. It lands on the water pretty softly for a bait of this size and at rest sits with a slightly nose up posture that exposes the eyes above the surface. So far, so good. Now let’s see what the action is like.
Heavy On The Action
I gave it the first twitch and immediately found out that there are considerable differences between the Koppers and the Spook. While the Spook is very easy to walk the Koppers takes a bit more experience and effort. You have to give it a healthy snap of the rod tip to get it moving to the one side and allow it to swim as far as possible before giving it another, equally firm snap of the rod to keep it going.
No matter what you do however, you won’t get as wide a walk out of this bait as you do with the Spook. The Live Target Walking Frog has a narrower walk and swing than most other baits in this category. Whether this is good, bad or indifferent, I don’t know. What I do know is that it will take some practice to get used to using this lure as the action is much more subdued than the Spook. This also affects how you pick up line as you’re working the bait. You will pick it more slowly with the Koppers than with the Spook because the bait needs to be worked a little slower.
The Walking Frog will also see-saw on the surface during the retrieve. We saw that this was consistent with both of the baits we acquired so we have to assume that this is intentional. While it took a little getting used to, we were able to find the right rod tip snap and retrieve speed to use the Koppers effectively. Unfortunately, we didn’t get any bites on the frog but around here, the top-water bite really gets going sometime in late June. I for one, can’t wait! We will be using the Koppers Live Target Walking Frog a bunch and we’ll let you know how it does.
See ya’ on the water …