We have had a six week shut down for our tournament series that covers the bulk of the Smallmouth spawning season and we are back at it now. This was our third qualifying event for the NBSFA’s Molson / Mercury Bass Tour and it come right after a visit from Hurricane Arthur. The river has droppe d a bit this week but it is still at least three feet higher than normal for July. I wouldn’t call it filthy dirty but it is definitely stained.
We planned on going up the Oromocto River for this one hoping the upper reaches would clean up first. We didn’t have any idea how much wood was in the water so we opted to take my partner’s jet boat. We can cover some ground with the inboard Mercury 250 jet and didn’t have to worry about bumping into a tree because she is heavy gauge aluminum. Little did we know that we would more than bump into a tree.
After forty minutes of running we moved up one of the side branches to the river and the water was fairly clean which was great. We hadn’t seen any other boats coming up this far so we decided to slow down and fish our way up.
My partner, Phil, is a top water nut and he breaks out an SP 9 Skitter Pop and goes at it. The water is about 6 to 8 feet deep with logs of overhanging trees and Phil does his best to get right in around the wood. Sure enough a couple of cast in and he is into a 3 plus Smallie. A great start to our morning and we figure we are going to hammer them. I started off with a Texas rigged Senko but I was not getting any hits even with drifting it right under the trees so I finally switched to a 3/8 ounce JackAll Super Eruption spinnerbait with a small trailer hook added. In the meantime Phil had boated another just over two pounds. Shortly after I picked one up on the spinnerbait so we had three in the well in twenty minutes as we picked our way up the river.
About a half hour in we come around a turn and find a tree down right across the river and figure we are done. We nosed up to it and looked it over and decided that if we broke off a couple of limbs we could pivot the boat around the worst of it and then we used the branches to pull the boat through. This took at least half an hour of pushing and pulling but we were fishing again.
One more fish in the boat and another tree down but we were able to just go under it right in the centre. Really glad at this point that I hadn’t brought the Triton because there is no way I would have put my boat in there. We fished up until we ran out of water and started back down. We had missed a couple of bites on the way up so we decided to take the time to fish back down and it payed off with another decent low three pound fish. We figure we have about 12 lbs at this point and we have only fished one of the upper branches of the river and things are looking good.
We get back to the first tree and try to slide the boat over it but the water appears to have dropped and we are stuck. After a lot of grunting and groaning we get enough of the boat over the main trunk that we can start the jet up and give it that one little push to make it over.
Up the other branch we go and it is quite a bit dirtier than the one we just came out of but it doesn’t look so bad that it shouldn’t fish but it didn’t. We spent hours working our way through it looking for one big bite but only caught three 12 inches. You don’t realize until the end of the day that you made a mistake but we did. We should have gotten out of there and went looking for cleaner water.
As always we are one of the last boats in to weigh-in and one of the guys tells us the weights are low. This is usually a 14 to 15 lb event and we didn’t figure our 12lbs was going to matter. We check with one of the guys who had weighed in and he say lunker is only just over three pounds so we check our big fish and it came in at just over three pounds so we tagged it.
We ended up with 12.65 lbs with a 3.15 lb lunker and took second place and big fish. The winning team weighed in 12.70 lbs and their big fish was 3.10. The irony of the tournament was that one of the guys had no partner and Phil’s wife volunteered to fish with him. Phil gave her a milk run of spots that we weren’t going to fish and they were the team that beat us on our own fish.
A second place finish has us solidly in the lead for the Team of the Year race with four events to go. Life is good. No fish pictures from this one because the water and air temps were too high to hold them for photos.
All of Phil’s fish came on the Skitter Pop and mine came on the JackAll spinnerbait and one on a tube. We were both fishing Power Pro on Stradics rigged on Crucial Spinning rods.
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