what a year for smallies

last week I was able to jump out on the river for a bit with my girlfriend to fish for some smallies. We concentrated on areas were they were stage to spawn and stage post spawn. The fish we caught came from black and red tubes. These fish are adjacent to strong current and when they get out in it they fight soooo hard. We each caught two at this spot including one double on a 19.5 and a 20 incher. (the girlfriends was bigger) I was so happy for her. I love watching other people in my boat having a good time.

Here is a picture of mine. We didn’t catch any fish there over the weekend and yesterday we were out and cuaght 6. All post spawn and all big. I didn’t have the camera but we did take one 19.5 back to the landing for a pic becuase it was my friends biggest smallie ever. I would have to believe that over the last week a lot of the fish spawned out.

both fish

Nice footballs. Would you care to divulge the depth that these post spawners have been in and how are you rigging and working the tubes.

Awesome!!! Looks like you had a great day on the water. The area you are fishing appears to have a good healthy population of smallies….

Wow…Beauty fish!! Way to go GF on catching the bigger one…
Don’t worry nature boy, that happens all the time with my wife…

Wow! Sunny weather, pretty girl, and HUGE fish….what more could a guy ask for? Congrats to both of you, those are dang nice fish!

nice smallies, great looking fish

i havent caught very many this year, although i know a lot of guys have. i just have concentrated on them too hard, they move around too much for me to stay on for tournaments.

It isn’t just the Miss, that is having a banner year on
smallies. Last night, in my “after-work” club, we hauled
24 smallies out of a 40 foot long by 5 foot wide, by 2 feet
deep eddy, with my 5 biggest weighing between 23 and 24 lbs.
We were fishing the next “pool” up the Chippewa River, from
Lake Wissota, and NSP was pulling a lot of water, which
shut down most of the river to lazy fat smallmouth. My
partner was marveling all night that if we could have
looked down in the water, that is all we would have seen
was fat smallie backs. The sad news was I finished second
place to a guy that was bed fishing on a “trophy” smallie
lake north of Chippewa Falls. He was sight fishing, and
probably would have beat me by a couple of pounds. We are a
paper tournament format, scoring by lengths, so weight wise
it may have been closer, than the paper score showed. But
the bottom line is there are numerous BIG smallies being
fooled in several different eco-systems, around western
Wisconsin, too.

I have got to get a digital camera for the boat!

Big Bass Bane