Fishing square billed crankbaits can be productive most of the year due to the fact that there will almost always be some fish in any given system that stay shallow. A new offering from River2Sea is the Ish Monroe designed Biggie Series.
There are currently four different versions of this bait available which are the Biggie-Smalls in Stealth Runner (a slow floater) and Bumpin’ Rattle (a fast floater) as well as the Biggie-Poppa in the same configurations. For our review today, we obtained the Biggie-Poppa, Stealth Runner, which is 2 5/8 inches in length, weighs 5/8 of an ounce, comes equipped with size 2 trebles fore and aft and is their silent version.
Generally speaking, baits like this are usually just classified as floating or much less often, as suspending. Is there really a difference between a slow floater as opposed to a fast floater? In the Biggie series, absolutely. The slow floater, when paused, will rise about half as fast as the fast floater.
Can this make a difference for the angler or to the fish? The only way to tell is to get it on the water and see what happens.
Construction Of The Bait
We chose the Biggie-Poppa due to the fact that as the season progresses, the bait fish tend to grow. The Poppa is now closer to our local forage in size than is the Smalls.
The thing that gets your attention immediately is the fact that this bait is a broad shouldered, wide bodied, wide wobbling lure. River2Sea did an excellent job with their weighting system on this lure and it shows on the first cast. The Poppa, for weighing only 5/8 ounce, gets high marks for distance as well as not catching your line on the cast.
Since we began our testing, we have used this bait in both windy and calm conditions and have yet to get one of those big #2’s wrapped around our line on the cast.
The purported running depth is 3 -5 feet for the Poppa which is easily attained even when using line up to 15 pound test. Why would you use a line this heavy? If you have emerging weeds, one of the ways to utilize this bait is to either tick the top of those weeds or get it caught and then rip it out. These as well as other retrieves that we’ve used have gotten us strikes but we’ll get back to that later.
As far as the construction of the bait, it is everything that we’ve become accustomed to from River2Sea. The components are solid, the paint schemes are well thought out and executed as are the actions that are engineered into the baits.
Fishing The Biggie Poppa
For those of you who haven’t had much success using square bills, one of the things to keep in mind is that this class of lures is generally used to get reaction bites. In other words, the fish that hit this bait aren’t necessarily feeding ferociously. It presents itself as a bit of a surprise and they hit it out of reflex. This is why when you’re fishing a square bill, you want to use a fast retrieve the vast majority of the time. You want this bait banging into things and of course, deflecting off of obstructions.
The way that we like to fish square bills is to throw them right on shore, reel quickly from there making sure to pause when you feel the bait hit something, and then continue with a speedy retrieve. Most of your strikes will occur on the pause immediately following contact with something in the water.
One of the traits that we as anglers are looking for in a square bill is how readily you can tell what kind of obstruction it is that you just t-boned. The Biggie-Poppa provides you with immediate, defined feedback.
When you hit a rock, you know that you made contact with something solid.
When you hit a weed, the feeling is completely different. If there is a discernible difference in obstruction, you will feel it with this bait. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have decent equipment to fish with either.
This is where the difference in the slow and fast floater comes into play. If the fish are a little sluggish, the slow floater allows them more time to commit to your bait by staying in the strike zone longer.
We have found during our testing that these Ish Monroe Series square-billed crankbaits by River2Sea are one of those tools that is both a pleasure to fish while at the same time providing the angler with a decent value all wrapped up in a well-executed package.
*Make sure to check out some extra pictures of the Biggie Poppa on our Facebook page. Click Here For Those*
See ya’ on the water …
| Ish Monroe Biggie Poppa | |
|---|---|
| Overall Rating |   |
| Very high quality, and works extremely well | |