Upper Miss Smallie Report 8-8-06

<!–IMG_MARK–> Right now on the Upper Miss you can safely say that its “that time of year” where people should consider giving up their favorite lake haunts and shift gears towards some river smallmouth bass fishing. Based on the number of smallie reports that are showing up here at IDA, other anglers have the same idea. Whether it be the Croix, Mighty Mississippi, feeder rivers and creeks,etc….basically saying if its wet and slippery, there might be smallies cruising the area.

The bite right now is very predictable for summertime patterns to catch these smallies, most all traditional presentations have scored fish in one situation or another, but my best odds have been traced down to 3 presentations for my confident approach. A Rebel Pop-R, 4” YUM mega tubes rigged on a BFT Super Doo head, and a swim jig. Jimmy D and staff have been prototyping a new swim jig that we have been using for several weeks now with some great results. More info in the near future on the swim jig. The Pop-R is one of those lures that always works on the mighty miss regardless of the time of day or most days the conditions you are faced with. Smallies love topwaters and for some reason this bait brings the best ones to the plate most often. The YUM tubes have been one of those follow up baits that I have rigged on several rods for myself as well as my customers. If we see a “hot” fish, we can usually get that fish to bite a tube right now anyway. The swim jig for me has been a very good search tool. Swim jigs are fairly new to me. It was not until about a month or so ago that our own Mike Finke hopped in the boat with me and showed me this technique first hand. I have swam hair jigs before, but the old “jig and pig” look was fairly new to my arsenal. Since then it has become one of my favorite ways to search water.

Up here the smalllies lately begin to actively “chase” lures upon the heat of the day. By this time it’s usually my go to for the next several hours of the trip trying to pitch in and around the heavy cover to try to trigger a bigger fish to run the jig down. This approach has accounted for several fish over he 20” mark this week for me. We have some mods yet to make on this jig, but we are close to having a good jig ready to roll!

This past week I also spent a bit of time preparing for a upcoming 13th annual Lion;s Club Smallmouth bass tourney that took place this past Sunday on the upper Miss. Pre-fishing for me had shown that my shallow skinny water haunts that I had anticipated on fishing were not producing the size of fish that I thought it would take to win a tournament. So come tourney day we shifted gears and went to some of our favorite well known deeper water haunts. By 9:00am we had 3-18” fish in the box for good star Getting the right fish to go in a one day tournament is always a risky task, We spent the rest of the day looking for one or two bigger fish. We did manage to get a 19” fish later in the morning but were unable to get a bigger 5th fish in the box and had to settle with a 17” fish that hurt us in the running for top honors. We ended the day in 7th place about a 1-1/2# out of first place contentions. Its always fun fishing this event. A lot of old and new friends of mine fish this event and its always good to have some local rivalries take place! Congrats to this years winners of Stve Leggat and Chad Omann. They finished the day with #14.76, Good job guys.