7/20 Smallie Repo

Made it out for a couple hours in the middle of the hot day today. The rain this morning added a good tint to the water.

Fishing started out pretty decent. I don’t usually catch anything on the first part of the stretch, but I landed two in my first 5 casts. Well more like 1. The other one hit as I threw my spinner back into the water while I released the fish I just caught.

I was starting to get a little frustrated with the way the fishing was going after that. I had 2 nice fish hit (14″+). But I did not hook up with either one of them. The biggest fish of the day was not landed either. It decided it didn’t want to be caught and then proceeded to break the line.

All hope was not lost though. I had another, what I thought was an average fish, on. All of a sudden PING there goes the drag and the fish is off downstream. I end up having to walk down with it. I finally get even with this monster and PING off it goes again downstream. I can easily say that this fish was in control for the first few minutes. After I get even with it again, it only makes a few more short bursts. I bend over to pick it up…man what a hog! I didn’t know it was possible to have goosebumps in the middle of July when it’s 90 degrees, but I did as I measured and released her to fight another day. It taped out to a dandy 17.5″. My biggest so far this year.

The rest of the day brought a few more small ones. I caught one more nice one (14″) and called it quits after that.

Good Fishin
F.S.

Hey F.S.

Thanks for the report! Sounds like fun!

Good Fishing,
Mike

Thanks for the report. May I ask on kind of structure were your fish caught on? A hole, flat, rip rap, riffle, etc. What kind of water? Small river, stream, lake? Don’t need to give location, just ”general” specifics.

Thanks, Bill

He caught the fish in one of the smallmouth rivers here in SE MN. They were caught in different types of water and he caught them on spinners, plastics, and rapalas. The 2 largest fish were hooked in the same pool and on different lures. One was caught in the slowest deepest part of the pool while the other was nosed up into the riffle at the head of the pool. There wasn’t much of a pattern to the lure preference or the type of water they were holding in.

The rivers around here are small enough that you don’t really need to figure out what type of water the fish are holding in that day. It doesn’t take that much extra time and effort to fish them all. Lures on the other hand can make a huge difference, but at this time of the year you can ‘normally’ catch them on several types of lures, colors, sizes, and presentations. Of course even now you can still have days where they will only seem to take one type of lure, and it needs to be a specific size and color.

Thanks Mark.
Thanks, Bill

Ever thought of going into politics?

Good Fishing,
Mike

If there had been any type of pattern to speak of, I would have said so. I don’t mind giving that type of information. The bottom line is that at this time of year, smallies are pretty active and can be caught on most of the lures that are popular for smallmouth. When they are active, they will chase or wait for bait fish in all types of water. There just wasn’t really anything news worthy to report other than the fact that some decent fishing occured.

As for where he was fishing…….I’ve already given my opinion on that as have many others recently.