It’s that time of year for me where I prefer to give smallmouths a break and chase after the green ones. It was an awesome weekend for it too! I fished a smaller body of water north of Bemidji, MN. With all the rain and cooler weather my first instinct was to head straight for shallow weedy bays thinking they wouldn’t be that far off the spawn. Although there were fish in these bays, they weren’t quite the quality that we were looking for.
Largemouth on a Terminator Pro Series
We headed back out to the main lake casting to pockets in the pencil reeds and working jigs and texas rigs back through a nice weed line into a little deeper water. After trying this tactic for about a half an hour we had several nice bass in the boat and continued doing so for the next 2-3 hours.
We headed back to some smaller bays and even fished some wood on the main lake, but for whatever reason the largest population of quality bass we found were adjacent to reeds and deeper weeds. Most of the weeds consisted of cabbage, coontail, and grass. These areas had direct access to the deepest part of the lake.
Terminator June Bug
We kept it pretty simple with bait selection. My go to was a 3/8oz Terminator Pro Series, Black/Blue/Purple. I used a Trigger X Twin Tail Grub or a Flappin’ Craw for the trailer. Other presentations that worked well was a texas rig with a muck colored Trigger X Goo Bug. With the amount of weeds and reeds that we were fishing 50lb braid was a must for pulling them out of the heavy cover.
Goo Bug Bucketmouth
I was able to sneak out walleye and smallmouth fishing for a few hours on Monday, and the smallmouths were no where to be found on shallow rocks. Every fish we caught were on deeper rock humps. Most of them were even off the edges a little ways and were somewhat scattered. We caught a few on tubes and dropshoting with probe worms. We caught some really nice walleyes in the same areas live bait rigging leeches as well.