A Topwater Rod in 45 Feet of Water
There we were, IronMan Mendez and I, sitting over forty five feet of water on a beautiful Perris morning. Dave was glued to his Forward Facing Sonar while I stood there staring at the topwater rod in my hand.
A topwater rod.
In forty five feet of water.
It was at that exact moment I realized my rod and the fish had fundamentally different opinions about where this meeting was supposed to take place.
I looked over the side of the boat and saw bait, but it wasn’t really… bait. It looked like the kind of bait that other bait eats. Miniscule. Mendez quietly reached for a rather fancy mid-strolling setup in the rod locker while I stood there wondering how exactly I intended to convince a fish suspended in thirty feet of water to swim all the way to the surface to smash a MegaBass Dog-X.
The math just wasn’t mathing. I looked at the water, then back at Dave. The baitfish floating by the Triton were maybe three-quarters of an inch long. Dave confidently rigged up a five-inch Deps Sakamata Shad on a 1/4-ounce Keitech ball head. I’m standing there looking at bait that would need ten of its friends lined up nose-to-tail just to equal the length of this thing.
“That makes absolutely no sense,” I thought.
Apparently, it made perfect sense to the bass.
Being the cautious angler that I am, I couldn’t quite commit. “Smaller equals more bites”—that’s practically tattooed somewhere in my brain. Plus, the only spinning rod I brought today was supposed to have been used to drop shot, and launching a quarter-ounce jighead all morning on 6-pound test didn’t exactly sound like a recipe for success.
So I compromised. A 1/8-ounce Keitech tungsten head. A 3.5-inch Jackall Rhythm Wag. Close enough.
Five casts later…
Dave yells, “Got ’em!”
The rod loads up. The fish jumps—a good 2-plus. Before I can grab the net…
Gone.
“FUCK!”
As weird as it sounds, it was exactly what I needed to see. The fish were actually eating this ridiculous baby giraffe looking bait in the middle of the water column.
A few casts later…
“FISH ON!”
My downsizing approach worked!.
The poor bastard that engulfed the Jackall was about eight inches long. I almost yelled, “Get the net!”
A few casts later Dave hooks another one… and loses it.
“Dude,” I laughed, “you using rubber hooks?”
The thing I noticed, though, was that his fish were noticeably bigger than mine. I kept getting little pecks from tiny fish. He kept finding better quality bites, even if they kept throwing the hook. After watching him lose what felt like his third good fish, he gave me one of those subtle partner hints:
“Put that thing away!” he said.
I laughed. He reminded me of an old friend of ours. RIP, Cavers.
Fine. I’ll throw the stupid Sakamata Shad.
In 2024, that thing needed a $60 plane ticket to get here. The funny part is I already had one of ’em already on a jighead, stored in that one divider in the 3700 where baits go to die after being used exactly one time after you muttering, “I knew this piece of shit wouldn’t work.” I’d bought it back in the day after hearing everyone in Japan rave about it, but I couldn’t catch a cold on the thing. It had been sitting in the Plano ever since, quietly waiting for me to admit maybe it wasn’t the bait’s fault.
Sure enough… I got one fish. Then another. Both of them measuring approximately 11.99 inches each. A step up from the 8 inchers that I was hooking before. Success. “Mid strolling.” Or, “Jigging a plastic fish on a ball head in the middle of the water column.” Whatever you want to call it.
Not exactly trophies, nor keepers, but enough to convince me there might actually be something to this whole big-ass-shad mid-strolling nonsense. Not enough for me to go out and change my name to Dylan or JD and start wearing flat-brim hats calling everyone ‘bro,’ but enough to continue throwing it.
After a lull in the action, I reached into my backpack to put back the dink killer Rhythm Wag away… and froze.
The banana.
I’d completely forgotten I’d stopped at the gas station at 4 am, and it was either a banana or gas station sushi. And you know what they say about gas station sushi. You don’t buy it. You rent it.
I looked over at Dave, hoping he hadn’t seen my reaction, but he was staring down intently at the Garmin, looking for new victims. Without saying a word, I peeled it, ate the entire thing in about 3 bites and 4 seconds, and shoved the peel into a random pocket of my Osprey backpack like I was hiding evidence from a crime scene.
Crisis averted.
Five minutes later, Dave hooks a really good fish. Snap. Breaks him off clean.
I looked blankly out across Perris Lake, scratching my neck nervously trying to look away.
“Shit, maybe the banana curse does exist,” I muttered quietly.
So what did I learn at Perris?
Apparently, 1. bass have no problem eating a five-inch bait while forage the size of a Tic-Tac invade the water column. 2. They call Dave “IronMan” for a reason. That dude can flat out fish. And, most importantly, 3. the banana curse remains scientifically unproven, though my Osprey backpack might never smell the same. Meanwhile, my topwater rod spent the entire morning wondering why it had even been invited to the party.
But funny enough, none of this would’ve happened if I’d left those Sakamatas buried in the bottom of a tackle box like they’d been since 2024. Spending the week organizing my gear put them back in my bag, but it took Dave to actually make them relevant. Without him confidently tying one on and absolutely shattering every preconceived notion I had about “matching the hatch,” that bait would have spent another two years collecting dust. Perris didn’t just teach me a new technique—Dave reminded me that sometimes the tackle you need has been sitting in your boxes all along, you just need someone who fishes differently than you to prove it works.
And really, when you strip away the forward-facing sonar, the high-end Japanese plastics, and the tuned spinning reels, it’s a technique we’ve all done before. Back in the day, we used to throw a small minnow bait on a jighead and jig it all the way back to the bank. Or to the jetty. Or back to the dock. It caught anything that swam. Sure, we couldn’t do it vertically or as efficiently without a boat and electronics, but the mechanics are identical. It’s the exact same thing the local trouser trout fishermen have been doing from the edges of city ponds for decades. The only difference is that bass fishermen think they deserve a bigger round of applause and a marketing name to sell more gear.
Looking back, the best part of the day wasn’t finishing third and almost squeezing into 2nd by a few ounces. It wasn’t actively getting confident in another technique, and it wasn’t even the fish. It was being reminded that thirty-five years of bass fishing doesn’t mean you’ve got the sport figured out.
Much like every lake and every season changes, every generation of anglers brings something new to the game. Sometimes, those new ideas are bullshit, and sometimes they’re game-changers. The trick is figuring out which is which before the weigh-in.
As for me? The Sakamata Shads are staying in the bag.
The bananas aren’t.
