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Bass Love Spiders!

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A hollow-body spider is skittering across the pads, and the bass in the shallows can’t leave it alone.

NDYakAngler is back on the water for “Bass Love Spiders!”, a topwater kayak-fishing session built entirely around one bait: the Lunkerhunt Phantom Spider. The creator, known for chasing freshwater gamefish from a kayak across northern lakes, paddles into shallow cover and vegetation to see whether a fake arachnid can pull largemouth bass out of hiding for explosive surface strikes.

• The Lunkerhunt Phantom Spider is a hollow-body, weedless topwater lure engineered to mimic a real spider skittering across the water.
• Its flexible legs are built to stride, glide, and twitch on the retrieve, while an internal self-righting ballast in the sternum keeps the bait upright.
• NDYakAngler works the lure over pads and shallow structure where largemouth bass ambush falling or swimming terrestrial prey, generating repeated topwater blowups from the kayak.

Spider Lures Effectively Target Bass

Topwater fishing lives and dies on the profile and motion of the bait, and that’s exactly what the Phantom Spider is designed around. Its legs aren’t decorative — they’re shaped to stride and glide across the surface film, then twitch in place when the retrieve pauses, imitating the erratic, almost panicked movement of a real spider that’s fallen onto the water. For largemouth holding under pads or laid-up in shoreline vegetation, that kind of surface commotion is an invitation they routinely can’t refuse.

The hollow-body, weedless design matters just as much as the motion. Fishing over matted vegetation and submerged structure means constant contact with stems, pads, and brush, and a lure that snags on every cast never gets a fair shot at drawing a strike. The weedless build lets NDYakAngler skip and walk the Phantom Spider through cover other topwater baits simply can’t be fished in.

The Sternum Ballast and Why It Matters

One detail NDYakAngler highlights on the water is the bait’s internal self-righting ballast, positioned in the spider’s sternum. That weight keeps the lure oriented upright after every cast and every twitch, so it never flips or lands on its side the way a lot of soft-body topwater baits do. For an angler working fast, repetitive casts along pad edges and grass lines, not having to babysit the lure’s orientation means more presentable casts and more time with the bait actually in the strike zone.

The spider doesn’t swim across the surface — it strides, glides, and twitches, and that’s exactly what triggers the blowup.

Shallow Water, Kayak Range

The setup is built for exactly the kind of water a kayak excels at reaching. NDYakAngler works pads, shoreline vegetation, and shallow structure that a bass boat can’t always slip into quietly, sight-casting to cover where largemouth are lurking for anything that hits the surface. That low-profile, low-noise approach is the same advantage that shows up in the creator’s other shallow-water outings, including the kind of backcountry paddling covered in KAYAK CAMPING the Frio River – Her First Trip!, where reaching water on foot or by boat simply isn’t an option.

Once a bass commits to the Phantom Spider, the fight plays out entirely from the seat of the kayak — no net operator, no live well crew, just rod, paddle, and boat control. That’s the same stripped-down, hands-on style of fishing featured in Bare-handed shark fishing, where landing the fish is as much a part of the story as the strike itself.

Reading the Strikes

The topwater hits shown in the video aren’t subtle taps — they’re full surface explosions, the kind that happen when a bass commits from several feet away rather than easing up to inspect the bait. That’s the entire pitch behind the Phantom Spider’s design: give the fish something erratic and vulnerable-looking on the surface, and let shallow-water largemouth do what they do best around fallen prey near their nests and cover.

NDYakAngler lands the fish boatside each time the spider gets crushed, closing out the session with the bait doing exactly what Lunkerhunt built it to do — walk, twitch, and disappear in a blowup the moment a bass decides it’s had enough of watching.