Ok..So I’m a little confused as to why I’m doing this but here it goes!
You’ll notice that my avatar is me holding a walleye and my name clearly states that I this is what I like to do. However, I had a little boy this spring and my drive time to some of my favorite walleye lakes has been limited. It’s not as easy to get out for a day of walleye fishing as it used to be. With that, I’ve been doing some smallie fishing lately to compensate for my rough walleye fishing summer. It’s a way for me to get away for only a few hours at a time to some fishing.
Yesterday evening I hit one of my buddie’s spots on a small river that seems to be very very low right now (like many). I brought two of my good friends and had them pumped them up beyond belief on the way out there. AND sure enough, the very first cast TJ pulls in a 19.5. I gave him a quick measure and we snapped a pic thinking the day would bring a pile of fish.
We worked it down the river and hit a few hotspots along the way. An hour into our three hour tour we only had 6 fish. Most being on the small side. Once we hit the honeyhole things really slowed down. The fish weren’t there in numbers but we did encounter the following:
A yearling Whitetail busted out of the tall grass and ran about half way into the river, stoped, looked at us, and busted back into the grass. It was almost like she just ate 50 lbs of sugar the way she was acting!
A monster size snapper turtle chasing after my 14″ smallie as I was bringing him closer to shore! This thing was huge and I’ve never seen anything act that aggressive towards a meal! It was quite comical watching this critter try to keep up with the agile Smallmouth!
A solid 20″ Smallie cruising the shorline back n forth but wouldn’t bite on anything we threw at her! very odd?? I’m not sure?
We worked this for about 45 minutes and pulled out. After that we walked a ways and hit our last short run of the river. This was fairly productive and I was able to pull a 16.5 before leaving for the day.
We had our best success using basic worm set-ups. One of the guys tried some craws, jigging, and a few topwaters with not much luck. One thing I did notice was that there were a pile of 3-4 inch smallies all over the place. Many more than I can ever remember while fishing this river. I don’t know much about their spawning activities but would assume that one of the recent years put out a quality environment for these little guys.
All in all it was a great time walking the water with some good buddies, and a few fish to show for it. We averaged 1 fish every 10 minutes (not including the many misses! 
) which didn’t seem to be outstanding but it kept us busy enough!
