How Far We’ve Leapt

In the first club tournament I won on a hollow-bodied frog, I fished it on 20-pound test monofilament, a line that I’m guessing most Capital-S-Serious bass anglers don’t even own today. Braid was out at that time, but I guess I wasn’t using a lot of it. Perhaps I just didn’t take any to the derby about three hours away from home, but I can’t imagine a situation today where I wouldn’t have at least one reel with braid in the boat and a couple of spools of it somewhere in the boat or my tow vehicle.

It's a miracle that I landed any of the fish.

While the frog had always been a player for a core group of anglers like Hall of Famer Alfred Williams and western legend Bobby Barrack, until about 20 years ago for most of us it was just a situational oddity. It doesn’t seem like that long ago now that we’ve normalized dozens of frog SKUs not only on sites like Tackle Warehouse but also in your local shops and even some big box stores. Nevertheless, the concept of a brand named Frog Factory would’ve seemed ludicrous back in Y2K.

Then came Dean Rojas at Lake Wylie, which coincidentally was the first Bassmaster Classic that I covered as a member of the media. Despite the fact that Tak won it on a squarebill, and I rode with Aaron Martens who used all sorts of oddball tools, one of the biggest stories was Dean’s open-water frogging. Until then, as far as most of us knew, you ONLY frogged in the greenest, thickest cover you could find. But there was Rojas, who eventually finished 4^th, showing us otherwise. And he did it with one of the few premium frogs available, the Boze Sumo Frog.

Since then, all sorts of lures have come onto the market – from vibrating jigs to little fuzzy dice – but none has exploded or captured our attention as much as the frog. Obviously, Rojas, who went on to design an army of froggage, built the foundation of his career on it. So did some others, like Ish Monroe and Fred Roumbanis. Even if they could do other things, the frog was what kept us most interested. At the same time, it probably killed a few careers, too – anglers who loved it too much to put it down.

Still, we get more and more frogs every year. Our thirst for them continues to grow. I can’t imagine anyone having the same visceral response to pinging a minnow as they do to a blowup in the slop, even if the former is more consistently effective. When Laker Howell, a presumed pinger (although his Guntersville heritage would suggest otherwise) won at Leech Lake with a frog, he was just continuing that proud tradition and proving to the naysayers that not all hope is lost.