Many veteran anglers consider fall the best time to catch largemouth, smallmouth and spotted bass with topwater lures. The bass are feeding heavily, with winter approaching, and much of their forage stays high in the water column. Five types of topwater lure – frogs, poppers, walkers, buzzbaits and tail spinners, each provide distinct advantages for autumn bass fishing.

We’ll look at each lure type and the approach that goes with it, considering advantages and how to use each to help you catch more bass this time of year.

Aquatic vegetation holds food and offers cover for bass during fall and commonly holds great concentrations of fish. A hollow-bodied soft-plastic frog lure like a BOOYAH Pad Crasher is ideal for creating commotion atop the vegetation and prompting explosive strikes.

An original Pad Crasher works wonderfully for working pad fields, mats of milfoil and hydrilla and thick, shallow stuff, like water willow. A Poppin’ Pad Crasher, which has cupped “popping” face, allows you to work weed edges and places where floating eelgrass or other vegetation makes it hard to present a traditional popper, but with a popping splash to trigger strikes.

Fall excels for fishing mats because underwater parts of the plants begin breaking up, leaving excellent shade and concealment on the surface and scattered below but with plenty of space for the bass to move underneath. It’s also a time when shallow vegetation of all types gets loaded with bluegill, crawfish and other bass forage species.



Bass feed heavily on shad and bluegill throughout fall, and a popping lure like a Rebel Pop-R or BOOYAH Boss Pop works wonders for fooling these fish. With different rod movements, a popper can be used to imitate a feeding bass to get fish to investigate or a fleeing baitfish to trigger strikes. Effective presentations often incorporate both sounds.

A slow, short rod sweep with the line tight creates a chugging sound, which suggests a bass feeding and will draw other bass to investigate. Quicker rod snaps produce more classic pops to prompt attacks. Repeated snaps, with the line semi-slack, make a popper walk and spit like a fleeing shad. Each sound has virtues. Use them together to prompt strikes and pay attention to what causes bass to respond.

A popper provides an excellent option anytime the bass are relating to bluegill or shad, and the water is sufficiently snag-free to work a lure with exposed treble hooks. It can be cast close to cover and worked with punctuated pauses to coax strikes or fished much faster to find fish and prompt reactions.

A topwater lure designed to “walk the dog,” such as a Heddon Zara Spook or other baits in the Heddon Spook family, allows you to work broad areas, like flats, long points, tops of river bars and roadbeds, to call in fish. This is important during fall, when bass often relate to large schools of shad and spread across vast structural features.

Walking lures glide rhythmically from side to side, often emitting sound with every move. Fish see and hear them and feel the vibrations from far away and can home in on a bait as it moves across the surface. Long casts that cover more territory and keep the bait in the water longer with each cast are beneficial. Most veteran bass anglers like to keep the cadence steady.

Spooks come in a broad range of sizes to fit different situations, and some rattle, while others knock or are intentionally made silent. Alabama bass pro and guide Jimmy Mason relies the most on the Super Spook Jr and the One Knocker Spook but will sometimes turn to a Super Spook to target bigger fish or mimic larger forage.

When bass feed shallow during fall, they commonly get widespread, holding near vegetation, docks, laydowns, stumps and many other types of cover. A buzzbait allows you to cover water quickly and to work through shallow cover to find actively feeding fish.

Keys for buzzbait fishing include keeping the bait moving as you work a shoreline or grassline and working the bait as close as possible to any available cover. In the case of sparse vegetation, that often means coming right through the grass. In the case of downed tree, it might mean buzzing between a couple of branches.

Mason’s go-to buzzbait for most situations is a War Eagle Buzzbait, which he believes makes the perfect buzzing sound and has a great profile. When forage is small or fishing pressure is high, he’ll downsize to a 1/8-ounce BOOYAH Pond Magic Buzz, which he fishes on spinning tackle with braided line. Buzzbaits produce a lot of big fish for Mason during the fall, and that includes the diminutive Pond Magic Buzz.


Tail-spinners like a Heddon Swim’n Image create a different splash and sound to appeal to bass and allow you to work quickly or slowly. The most traditional use is to fish one like a buzzbait, casting and reeling back steadily at a medium pace, but the same lure can be cast close to a piece of cover, allowed to rest and brought to life with a snap or sweep of the rod and then worked with steady repeated snaps or long pauses.


The gurgle of a Swim’n Image will call up bass some fall days when they simply do not want other topwater lures. It offers a blend of subtly and a commotion that the fish can’t refuse, and it provides a different look and sound when a lot of anglers are walking the dog or fishing poppers.

Because the Swim’n Image is engineered for long casts for its size, and because of its churning appeal when swam steadily, it ranks among the best topwater lures to cast to schooling bass during fall.