Is anyone still getting eyes on spinners/crawlers? I have never fished ML this late in the season and I am headed up tomorrow.
I plan on pulling lead but don’t have a ton of experience doing it for walleye.
That bite has tailed off quite a bit. If I were still pulling spinners, I’d go with minnows now. (Red tails or shiners) I think you will do better pulling cranks on leadcore. Anything that is close to a perch pattern would be my first choice. If you find a school, drop a bobber rig on them tipped with a minnow.
Good Luck,
-J.
Al Linder just posted on FB they were out for 3 hours and got 10+ big fish pitching a white jig combo up into 10 fow.
Any suggestions on depth ranges?
Hahaha! That didn’t show up when I posted my reply.
Right now its all about swimbaits, jigging raps and BIG creek chubs! Pull those around rocky structure and you’ll catch fish.
How did it go?
Snow flurries mixed in with the drizzle on Saturday. Decided to troll formica flats instead of fishing! 
-J.
We ended up going on Sunday. We pulled lead for a little while with no success (I need to dedicate more time to it but my was wasn’t really into that). We switched over to rigging suckers and bumped into a bunch of good smallies. We ended with 1 decent eye and 12 smallies.
Here are the big ones.
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Snow flurries mixed in with the drizzle on Saturday. Decided to troll formica flats instead of fishing!
-J.
That is the same thought we had!
Those are some nice Toads you have there! 
-J.
22”, 21.5”, and 21”
It was a blast!
I understand how snow flurries can change plans when boats are involved.
Those are some nice smallies!!!
Beautiful Fish!
What type of structure and depth were you fishing?
Almost every time I hit 13′-14′ on the rocks I started marking lots of big smallies.
Best depth was 20’-25 and we were fishing in between two humps south of 3 mile reef. I assume that it’s rock covered in zeeb’s.
We had some other nice marks in the same depth range on the outside edge of 3 mile but we were pulling lead and never made it back up there with the suckers.
I was out on Saturday. Pulling big creek chubs in 13-15ft of water in the rocks. The smallmouth bite was off the chain! I lost count of the number of fish we had got bot I would also say 90% of them were over 19.5″ and the biggest was a tubby 22″ that went around that 7lb mark. Did also get a few walleyes mixed in.
At one point we were going with back to back to back doubles and even triples.
Hands down the best smallmouth fishing I have had out there and it’s only going to get bigger.
One thing I noticed is it came down to something that I never though would make a difference. One of the guys in our group was just putting on a clinic and we noticed the weight he was using. 3/8 oz Lindy Rattlin no snag slip sinker. The other guy put on on and started lighting it up as well. Then I finally gave in and it was on after that. I think it was the rattling and ticking on the rocks that got the attention of those fish and got them going. Normally I wouldn’t use a weight like that but hey when it works I am all in!
Here is a pic of my buddies PB 22″
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Hey Greg.
Thanks for posting on using creek chubs. Typically I really struggle catching SMB in Sept/Oct with plastics.
I had my grandson’s up with me over MEA Break and on the way up, after seeing your post, bought the last creek chubs from Vadoes.
Within a couple of hours my grandsons had 21″.
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Glad to hear you did well. Always nice to get the younger generation on a successful bite.
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