Best New Prop Body Bait – The Booyah Toadrunner
By Sam Wike
At the 2017 Elite Series event on Sam Rayburn Reservoir in Texas Jason Christie appeared to be throwing a Teckel frog. This is one of the many new prop body baits to hit the market last year. In a bassmaster.com article, after the event, Christie is quoted saying, “I fished grass beds over spawning areas that funneled back into the main lake.” The BASS article goes on to say that Christie’s two “main” choices were the “Booyah Poppin Pad Crasher Frog and the Booyah Pad Crasher.” However, neither of those two Booyah baits have a prop body on them and it is clear from the video footage that Christie was throwing some type of plopper prop bait.
The fishing tackle industry has been raining plopper prop body topwater baits since YouTube videos of the Teckel Sprinker frogs went viral in June of 2017. At I-Cast this year we watched Lunkerhunt take I-Cast’s Best Freshwater Soft Lure award in the Best of Show 2017 awards with a new series of plopper prop bodied baits. They launched that bait in three different body styles including; shads, frogs, and sunfish in 18 colors. We can, and should go even further back in time and give the Whopper Plopper the credit it deserves, here, as well as being one of the very first plopper baits to become popular. The original Whopper Plopper prototypes, which are now a bass fishing phenomenon and a standard selection in most angler’s arsenal of baits, had been around for 20 years before Larry Dahlberg and Simon Chan from River2Sea Lures brought the bait to market in 2008. Now in 2018, before the new Lunkerhunt Prop Series baits have even had a chance to hit the market, a new contender that looks to be the most thought out bait in the category has just been announced. It’s called the Toadrunner from Booyah Baits. A prototype of the Toadrunner frog is the actual bait Jason Christie was throwing during his 7th place finish at Sam Rayburn.
If you are a fan of Booyah’s product line, you are inevitably familiar with the Pad Crasher series of weedless soft body frogs. The new Booyah Toadrunner is built around a modified Pad Crasher body but with added side rails to help the bait run true and stay up in the water column. A lot of research was put into the leg design of this new bait, and the legs were sized perfectly to allow the bait to balance properly, as well as to appear lifelike in appearance and motion when the bait stops. Like most prop body baits the tail spins around 360 degrees to create commotion in the water as well as the iconic plopping sound. The Toadrunner has a molded wire in the tail which allows you to control the motion and sound profile by making slight tweaks to the wire.
The evolution from the Whopper Plopper that eventually has turned in to a weedless soft body frog with a “plopper” tail makes a lot of sense for anglers. The original Whopper Plopper bait series is difficult to throw in pads and cover due to the treble hooks and weight of the bait. The weedless body style and the ability for the bait to bounce makes new versions of this type of bait, such as the Toadrunner, a great new option to get that wake and plopping sound closer to more fish that couldn’t be reached before in the same way.
The new Toadrunner baits are going to be initially offered in 10 colors. It is 4.5 inches in length and weighs 7/8 ounce.
Want to know what else is new? Check out the highlights from the 2017 I-Cast new product showcase.