While watching a fishing show about 15 years ago, Kenny Churchill saw a couple professional bass anglers fishing Rat-L-Traps through standing lily pad stems. They were catching a lot of fish, but the one thing he noticed was how much they were staying hung and how hard they were working to free their baits.
A few days after seeing that show, Churchill came across some floating Rat-L-Traps in a tackle shop.
“I saw those floaters and thought, hmmm,” Churchill recalled, “if they float, I could reel them slower through the pads and maybe not get hung up so much. Maybe fish them more like a spinnerbait.”
He started experimenting with a floating Trap on the Ross Barnett pad-stem flats, and the first thing he learned was that he could pull it through the stems and stop it whenever it came close to getting hung up.
“You can hit a pad stem with that floater and just stop reeling,” Churchill explained. “When you stop, it’s going to kind of float up slow, and that keeps it from getting hung. With the regular Traps — and they catch a bunch of fish — you’ve got to keep banging it and jerking it through there.”
Churchill learned another benefit of the floating Rat-L-Trap was that he didn’t lose as many fish on it as he did a regular Trap. He theorized that bass hooked on the floater couldn’t throw it as easily because he thought it might weigh less or be less dense than a regular Trap.
Floating Rat-L-Traps aren’t designed for the burning retrieves typically used with the regular ones. According to the 2012 Rat-L-Trap product catalog, the floating Rat-L-Trap is best fished with a slow-roll style retrieve or with a pause-and-twitch retrieve.
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