Missouri River Smallmouth Bass Fishing

With all of the chaos going on lately I finally just made time to do a little fishing over the weekend. Friday afternoon I picked up Wade Kuehl and we headed for the Upper Missouri River in Nebraska for some smallmouth action. When we arrived at Verdel we still had a couple hours of daylight left so without hesitation we hit the water.

Friday evening we just fish the rock around the landing. I started with my magic crankbait the Lucky Craft SKT Mini crankbait. Right off the bat I got a bite. At first I thought it was a huge smallie, but after a couple seconds I knew it wasn’t. I caught a 20+ in pike. It didn’t take long before we got into the smallies. I was just throwing the crankbait out and retrieving it with the current. Most bite came from right off of the bank. I alternated back and forth between the crank and a Pitbull Bait Stick Worm. The fish didn’t seem to be going after the stick worm very well. I caught quite a 6-8 smallies and gave Wade a LC crankbait to try out. We cranked for a while and each picked up a few fish, but we weren’t getting the quality that we wanted.

Wade switched to a tube and immediately caught a nice smallie. It was in the 17”-18” range. I on the other hand stuck with the crankbait a while longer before I got tire of the 12” bass. After Wade caught a smallie close to 3 lbs I decided it was time to switch. I went with a Venom Hot Rod. It wasn’t long before it started to produce for me. For the rest of the evening we fished a little slower with tube or Hot Rod and picked up some better quality bites. By the time we called it a night we caught at least a half dozen bass in the 15”-18” range.

Saturday morning we kind of got off to a late start. Some fog developed along the river overnight and would have made a run on the river rather treacherous without being able to see the sandbars. So we took our time and had breakfast at the Blue Moon Resort where we were staying. By the time we finished breakfast the fog began to clear. Around 9am we finally were on the water. We made a run upstream to fish some rock and wing dams. We started along a natural rock bank where Wade hooked into and lost a 3 pounder on a LC SKT crankbait. We proceeded to fish the wing dams. We basically fished each side of each one and caught a fish off of most of them. We kind of switched between cranks, tubes and stickworms. The crankbait was probably the easiest to fish as it wouldn’t get hung up in the rock like a tube would. The tubes seemed to catch bigger bass though. Most of the bites came within about a foot from the bank and the bite would happen as soon as the bait hit the water. After floating down the bank and wing dams once we went back up to try it again. This time we noticed the water had risen about a foot and dirtied up a bit. We picked up a few fish, but not as many as the first pass. After that we made the run back to Verdel. At Verdel we fished the landing all the way back to the ramp. Again we took a few on a crankbait the bigger fish were taken on plastic tubes.

Overall it was a great trip. It’s not very often I get to catch smallies in Nebraska. We caught enough fish to keep it fun with a few bigger ones mixed in, but nothing over 3 pounds which would have been nice. The weather was a great change as it has been cloudy and cool the last couple weeks so it was nice to see the sun for once.