Bassmaster Elite veteran Justin Lucas has bottled his calm-water, low-light topwater pattern into a single message for anyone walking into an unfamiliar lake during summer's early bite windows: lean on sound, not subtlety.
In a recent Wired2Fish breakdown filmed on a small Michigan lake Lucas had never seen before, the pro spent his morning fan-casting the Berkley Screamin' Choppo across shallow reed lines and shaded dock corners — and explained on camera why he believes the bait's signature squeak earns extra bites on the right kind of day.
"Doesn't get much better listening to this thing scream on a calm, cloudy, foggy morning," Lucas said. "The advantage of fishing the topwater like a Screamin' Choppo for me is just it's all about covering water. Fast-paced covering the bank, hitting a lot more spots than I could if I was throwing some type of soft plastic or jig."
His default move on a new venue is volume over precision. "When I don't know a lake very well like the one we were on, I had never been on before, I want to get there and put the trolling motor on high and just start fishing and seeing as much as I can," Lucas said. "Just seeing if I can generate some type of bites to start clueing me into something."
Lucas argued the Screamin' Choppo's appeal is fundamentally an acoustic one. The bait swaps the original Choppo's aggressive plopping tail for a softer tail moulded around a concentric rivet that grinds against a metal core under retrieve. "This bait has a concentric rivet and a metal tail structure built in that when they grind together give it that screaming sound profile," he said. "We know that they love that squeaky sound of buzzbaits and everything, and the conditions just set up perfectly for it."
The shallow reed lines around the lake's perimeter set up the first half of the bite, with submergent grass in front of the reeds creating natural lanes. "Anytime you're fishing a reed line, there's so many little nooks and crannies and points," Lucas said. "You can just zigzag through it and make a lot of little accurate casts. A lot of these bites came pretty close to the boat."
As the sun climbed and the topwater bite slid out of the open water, Lucas swung onto shallow docks. He was firm that depth in itself rarely kills a dock bite. "You almost can't fish a dock that's too shallow up north in the summer," he said. "I'm talking if there is 10 or 12 inches of water and even if you can see the bottom, but you can't see a fish up there, like it's still worth a cast, because they will tuck so far back under these docks."
His colour selection followed sky and clarity. In clear water with sun on it Lucas leant on ghost bluegill, especially when bass were eating bluegill in close. In low light he switched to bone and black for a stronger silhouette against the surface.
Gear was deliberately stripped down. "I'm going to keep this super simple as far as rod, reel, line goes when I'm throwing a Choppo bait," Lucas said. "It's going to be a 7'3 medium heavy rod. 40-pound braid. And the other key is a fast reel — I was throwing an 8.3:1, and that's just going to help me when I'm covering water."
When the topwater bite slowed mid-morning, Lucas's adaptation was tactical rather than seismic. Rather than running to a fresh stretch of bank, he simply held a flipping plastic in reserve to drop into the same shaded targets after the Choppo finished pulling fish off the cover. "It's pretty hard to beat a Choppo bite, and anytime I'm going to get that I'm going to take advantage of it."
