Any Smallie updates?

Since I will mainly be targeting muskies… I got to thinking that may make for looooong, fishless day. Gonna bring up a couple of spinning rigs for the smallies. Are they still hitting pretty good?

The entire south end rock piles has been pretty consistent lately. Set up a milk route with all the rock piles and bounce around each rock pile. About every decent sized rock pile has been holding a school of 10 or more smallies cruising around the edges and periodically come up on top to feed. Throw topwaters over the tops and edges and pith small 3 inch grub tails to the edges. I have been having real good luck with the Pop-R’s up there and making real long casts and get it away from the boat.
Do not overlook the reed patches at all as these can produce some nice fish. But if you stuck to the rock piles for starters, you should get bit. These babies really pull up here!

Good Luck!

Went out on saturday morning, my brother and i got out around 7:30 or so, launched from teh SW side public access just a little north of the casino.
Had a decent smallie nip the end of my chart/brown cra rattle trap but came unbuttoned. The rest of the day we spent hitting various rock reefs to only see 30+ smallies cruising on them. No kidding, all these fish were quite possibly over 4 pounds. We saw a couple that were just hanging by rock marker buoys that looked to push the 22″ mark, those were some big brown blurbs sitting in the water.

Anyway, fish seen on the rock reefs cruising were not interested in anything we threw: shallow crank, traps, jerk baits, grubs, tubes, senkos, pop r, buzz bait, spinner bait, light jig with spider grub (for slow fall). All these things produced no biters as my brotherand i left the lake without one fish, i have no idea the last time that has happened and was a little hard to stomach. Both of us were amazed at the size of fish seen though, we are thinking these fish will turn into biters pretty quick.

One other note, on teh reefs we check on the sw portion of the lake, it seemed like most of the reef would be dead, then we would run into bunches of them as the fish seemed to locate themselves in specific areas of them, more so on the south side area of the reef. not sure if that can be deemed a pattern, but it is what we saw. Good luck, keep the reports coming if you will!

I know the feeling when you see those brutes down there. They get you pretty excited!!
From my experience for the most part, when I am that close to them I can rarely get them to bite consistantly. Occasionally, I can get them to go with small plastics crawled on the bottom near the fish. My best approach is to back off the edge slightly and keep bombing the entire area with your lures. Eventually these fish turn on for you. These small packs of fish move around the rock piles so much. The more you fish these rock piles, the more you will notice that there is a “spot on a spot” on each rock pile that the smallies find appealing. This helps cut down time when you set up a milk route and bounce around from spot to spot.
This is also the time of year where having a partner get ready with another rod rigged up with a light plastic tidbit and drop it behind a fish that is fighting near the boat. THese fish instinctively take advantage of this morsel and think its dropped prey!

My son and I headed out on Friday AM and tried some of our “hot spots” with no success. The wind was blowing in and the water was kind of cloudy. We were going to try another bay but found the water too rough for my 16′ boat. Hit a smaller lake and nailed the largemouth, turned out to be a good morning after all!!