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Dialing in frogging with Ish Monroe

California pro Ish Monroe said he never visits a tournament venue without checking to see if there’s a frog bite. Photos by Seigo Saito

Bassmaster Elite Series pro Ish Monroe is one of the best-known frog sticks fishing today. His lineage runs deep: He’s an angler child of the California Delta, and he was front and center when the frog revolution swept forth from that tangled maze of slop and sloughs. “Alfred Williams in Mississippi, of course, was the first to start fishing a frog,” Monroe said. “Then rat fishing on Guntersville got real popular. And then Bobby Barrack started throwing it on the California Delta and winning tournaments with it, catching giant fish on the cheese mats that suddenly popped up all over the delta. Punching wasn’t really viable back then because the weights were so big that nobody knew about punching except for the folks down in Florida. So we all started throwing frogs.”

Monroe parlayed his early amphibian acumen into a sponsorship with Snag Proof Lures, and his is now one of the longest-running, most recognizable bait sponsorships in the business. What follows is a detailed explanation from Monroe about how he dials in a frog bite.