Late spring Smallmouth Bass
My Canadian Fishing Tour partner, Terry Curtis, made the trip to New Brunswick from Ontario to have a crack at some early season smallmouth. This was a treat for him because the season in Ontario doesn’t open until the last Saturday in June.
As lady luck would have it the four days that he and his wife spent here were less than ideal with a mix of cloud, showers and wind but that’s why we have rain gear. The forecast is 20 to 30 kilometer an hour winds out of the North East which wasn’t a problem because we were fishing the East side of the lake. This gave us some protection from the worst of it. The cool weather had kept the water temperature down in the high fifties so we were hoping for some schools of pre-spawn smallies moving into the areas where they will spawn. I started fishing on the first main lake point outside the thoroughfare between North Lake and East Grand. We worked down the shoreline for a while throwing some Flutter Worms and Senkos in both bright and dark colours trying to see if one was better than the other but the action was pretty slow until I switched to a Chartreuse Pepper TriggerX tube on a one eighth ounce head. That they liked and we picked up several fish off of docks and out on a six foot gravel flat near the point it rolled off into deeper water.
We were just thinking of moving further down the lake and figured we would fish the next couple of docks then go. A lady walked down near the shore and asked how we were doing and if we were putting a the fish back. We told her we were having a nice day and that yes, we were 100% Catch and Release. She said that she appreciated that and had been concerned that we might catch Rudy and not put him back. Obviously we had to ask who Rudy was. Apparently Rudy is a fairly stout Smallie that takes up residence under her dock each spring and she thought he might be there. Her grandchildren have caught him many times over the past four or five years and named him in the process. She said he has grown to over three pounds since their first encounter. We had a nice little chat and passed by the dock so as not to disturb Rudy while he waited for another visit from the kids next weekend. Nice lady and a really good story about the kids and Rudy.
We moved up the lake a couple of miles and settled down on a main lake point outside one of the big spawning bays hoping to get into a school of staging fish. One of my favourite search baits for this time of year is a HJ12 Husky Jerk in Silver with Black back. I had rigged up two very different rods for this: one was a 6’3” Crucial med action and the other was a 6’8” Cumara medium heavy. Both were rigged with 2500 Stradics and eight pound Seige green mono. As odd as it might sound I liked the feel of both rods with the jerkbaits although I got a bit more casting distance with the Cumara. I still like mono for jerk baits because I feel that the bit of stretch gives me a cushion on the hookset and doesn’t tear the hooks free. That’s just me though, I know guys who feel that Power Pro is the only way to fish jerk baits for the immediate hookset. Unfortunately the jerk bait bite wasn’t happening for us and I went back to the tube.
Terry kept switching up and went through a variety of hard and soft baits trying to find something else that would get them going, perhaps even better than the tube but he finally broke down and put one on. We caught fish on docks, wood rocks and on the edges of some six foot gravel and rock flats. When we stopped for a few minutes for a sandwich, our producer Shawn, grabbed one of the rods and caught a few fish as well. It has to be tough being an angler and having to stay behind the camera while we fish.
There were a few fish on beds but most of what we caught were not spawned out and it felt like they were just moving in. I imagine that when the sun comes out and the weather improves a bit there will be a flood of fish into the shallows.
It has been a few years since Terry and I got to share a boat together and that was definitely the best part of the trip for me.
Rick Greene
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