When fishing mats that are somewhat sparse, you can get away with using bulky lures like a skirted jig with a plastic trailer. (Photo courtesy of St. Croix Rods)
August 11, 2025
By Ken Duke
In summertime, the living may be easy, but the bass fishing is anything but. The easy options are either long gone or weeks away. You won’t have much success burning lipless crankbaits across flats or winding spinnerbaits and squarebills through blowdowns or along riprap. You can try dragging a Carolina rig across points. You’re likely to pick up a few fish but probably nothing to brag about—nothing to get you fired up to come back tomorrow or next week.
All those things paid dividends in the spring, and they’ll likely pay off again in the fall. However, if you’re doing them in-between—during summer—you’re either wishing for fish or passing up on some of the most exciting and productive fishing of the year.
It’s time for bass fishing’s version of hand-to-hand combat—two different methods that rely on heavy gear and all but guarantee heart-stopping action in shallow water and opportunities to battle some of your lake’s biggest, meanest, gnarliest bass. These are fish that live in the worst neighborhoods, where there’s a good chance of having your tackle torn up and your line busted. I’m talking, of course, about flippin’ and froggin’, but more specifically, I’m talking about mat fishing.
HIT THE MATS When we talk about mats, we’re usually discussing submerged vegetation that grows to the surface, tops out and then spreads horizontally to create a canopy. If you can find mats like that, fantastic. The odds are high they contain everything a bass could want—food, cover, ambush points, oxygen. But matted vegetation is far from the only mat option. Great mat fishing can be had almost anywhere. You just need to be on the lookout for it.
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In fact, some of the best mat fishing takes place above and below mats that most bass anglers never see—or choose to ignore. If you have wind or current where you fish, you almost certainly have productive mat fishing, even if you have zero vegetation. Just check out the banks that have taken on the brunt of the wind or current for a few days. Mats can appear out of nowhere. Maybe they’re made of dislodged vegetation from far away. Maybe they’re created by sawdust from an up-current sawmill. I’ve even found excellent mat fishing under floating trash (and felt guilty that I fished it rather than disposed of it).
If such flotsam piles up and creates shade, an ecosystem can be formed in short order. Bait and bass will find their way under it and be susceptible to good presentations. This can be true whether the mat is over 2 feet of water or 50. And the two best presentations for mat fishing in summer are frogging and flipping.
When punching mats, strikes typically come as the bait falls. Be sure to also jiggle it just below the canopy before winding it back for another flip. (Photo courtesy of St. Croix rods) GET FROGGY Let’s start with frogging because that’s where you should start on the typical summer morning, before the sun gets high, the water gets warm and the bass hunker down under these mats. Frogging involves the use of hollow-bodied lures that typically have double hooks that ride tight against the body. This makes them extremely weedless and, therefore, great choices when targeting the heaviest matted cover on any body of water. And if the lure isn’t impervious to snags, the gear you should be using will nevertheless all but guarantee that you’ll get the bait back.
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Braided line of 50-, 65- or 80-pound test is your go-to here, with 65-pound test being a good default choice. Fifty-pound line will cast a little better and a little farther, 80 will come through vegetation a little more surely, but 65 is a solid compromise that will handle just about any issue that arises. For the best mat frogging, you need edges or holes. These are places where you can make the frog walk and create a little topwater disturbance, places where bass are likely to be looking for a meal to pass by.
The problem with hollow-body frogs is that they have a notoriously poor hook-up rate. The ratio of strikes to catches is probably as bad as any bass-fishing technique ever devised. How do you improve the hook-up rate? Well, it’s easier said than done, but it also gets easier with practice. Quite simply, you wait.
Even though bass are highly efficient feeders, they’re not always accurate. This is especially true in thick cover and most particularly when the item they’re trying to eat is tethered to a rod and reel, making it behave unnaturally when they try to ingest it. When a bass eats a real forage item, that prey moves naturally into the bass’ mouth. There’s little resistance because there’s no fishing line connected to the food. Because the line pulls back, even a little, it can cause the bass to miss your lure. By waiting one, two or even three seconds, you give the bass a better chance of getting the lure fully into its mouth, where you can connect with your hookset.
Denser mats require more weight or streamlined offerings in order to punch through to bass waiting below. (Photo courtesy of Z-Man Fishing) FLIP, PITCH, PUNCH Flippin’, as you might know, is a shallow-water, fixed-line method developed by the legendary Dee Thomas in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He developed it as an alternative to tule dipping, which used a long cane pole and no reel to dip and dabble a jig in holes in the weeds. A decade later, flippin’ had evolved. Anglers were using rods measuring 7 1/2 to 8 feet in length to make short, underhanded “pitches” to shallow cover.
Today, most anglers use the term “flippin’” or “flipping” to mean both traditional flippin’ and pitching. “Punching” involves the same methods of presenting a lure, but the lure must be heavy enough to penetrate the matted cover to reach the open water below, where the bass live.
Once the summer sun gets high, the frog bite will typically slow down. When that happens, put away the frog (unless you see some surface feeding activity) and pick up the stoutest rod in most bassers’ arsenals—the punching rod—paired with a casting reel spooled with 65-pound braid.
The cover you’re fishing dictates lure choice. The thicker it is, the more streamlined your bait must be. If the cover is relatively sparse, you can get away with a skirted jig and soft-plastic trailer. If it’s dense, you’ll need something slimmer, like a small Texas-rigged creature bait or stickworm.
Cover density also dictates your lure’s weight. The heavier the cover, the heavier the weight will need to be to penetrate and get down to where the bass are holding.
Punching is not the time to skimp on jig weight or sinker size. If you’re putting your lure on target and it’s not breaking through at least 90 percent of the time, go heavier or more streamlined. Otherwise, you’re wasting time, and that’s even more precious than bass. A 1 1/2-ounce weight covers most scenarios but have an assortment of 3/4- to 2 1/2-ounce weights available for thicker or thinner vegetation. Similarly weighted flippin’ and punching jigs also work.
Once the lure breaks through the mat in relatively shallow water—6 feet or less—let it go all the way to the bottom on a nearly slack line. As it sinks, watch the line for any signs of a strike. You want the bait to fall as vertically as possible, but you also want to maintain enough contact that you’ll know if something has grabbed it. This initial fall is your best bet for getting a bite. Most of your punching strikes will come before the bait hits the bottom. If you’re not paying close attention, you’ll miss them.
If the water’s deep (10 feet or more), odds are good that any bass under the mat are suspended off the bottom. They might follow a lure all the way to the bottom. However, you’re more likely to get bit as the bait falls or as you lift the bait to the underside of the canopy and jiggle it just under the mat’s surface.
Don’t worry too much about color when mat fishing. It’s dark under there. Choose a dark color to get the best silhouette possible so the bass can better see your bait.
MAT MAINSTAYS Rods, reels, lines and baits for more success while fishing mats. Punching Power: Seaguar Smackdown braid (top left); Snag Proof Bobby’s Perfect Frog and Black Label Tackle Cliff Pace CP Craw lures (bottom left); Halo Fishing BB and Halo Fishing HFX rods (top right); Daiwa Tatula 200 LC and Daiwa Tatula Elite P/F baitcasting reels (bottom right). Mat fishing is not for the faint of heart or the ill-equipped. You need stout stuff to pull hefty bass out from under dense cover. The following recommendations should serve you well.
Line : 50- or 65-pound test Seaguar Smackdown braid . ($29.99/150-yard spool)Frogging Reel : Daiwa Tatula 200 LC ($199.99) with an 8.4:1 gear ratio for long casts with plenty of speed and muscle.Punching Reel : Daiwa Tatula Elite P/F (Pitch/Flip) casting reel ($249.99) with an 8.1:1 gear ratio and big power handles to get a lunker up and out of the mat quicklyFrogging Rod : 7-foot 2-inch heavy-action Halo Fishing BB Series Frogging casting rod ($179.99)Punching Rod : 7-foot 6-inch heavy-action Halo Fishing HFX Series casting rod ($149.00)Hollow-Body Frog : The Snag Proof Bobby’s Perfect Frog ($10.99) was designed by frog master Bobby Barrack and offers a great balance of softness (for surer hooksets) and durability. If the bass want a slower presentation, go with a popping frog like the SPRO Dean Rojas Bronzeye Poppin’ Frog 70 ($13.99). The concave mouth keeps it in place easier, and it’s everything you’d want in a hollow-bodied popping bait.Punching Bait : There are dozens of quality punch baits out there. A great one is the Black Label Tackle Cliff Pace CP Craw ($5.99/8-pack). It’s got the right profile to break through mats, and the right action to draw strikes. For the densest of mats, you’ll need the slimmest of profiles to penetrate the cover. A classic choice is the 3-inch Gambler Lures BB Cricket ($5.79/12-pack). Pair either of these baits with any good 1/0 to 6/0 heavy-cover flippin’ hook, an appropriate weight and a peg/bobber stop.This article was featured in the August issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe .
