Because I'll be dropping many names throughout the post, let me start with the cast of characters, the people I fish with.
Ben Cantrell is an engineering doctoral student in Madison WI. We fish when he is around Champaign, and in the photo below he's holding a catfish he caught at a pond in the Cherry Hills neighborhood of Champaign where his uncle used to live. It turns out that is the same pond by which Phil Fiscella lives. Ben is a smart guy who is interested in fish and tries to keep a lifetime list. We only made it out once this year, and in some drainage ditch fishing we caught several smallies, and he added a longear sunfish to his lifetime list. The next time he is down I hope to take him to a good spotted bass hole, so he can add that to his list.
Scott Ahlgren is a math professor with a background in fly fishing. We made it out once in 2010. It began as a very slow day, until right near the end when we found a school of fat smallies. In the blurry picture below you can see an extremely fat 15" or 16" smallie that he caught. Hopefully we can fish more next year.
Chet Fall is an excellent fisherman who can go all day. He'll do a 15 mile run before a 2 mile wade. The most remarkable thing is that he can fish in 90 degree weather in his neoprene waders without breaking a sweat or taking a drink. Meanwhile, I'm in breathable waders fighting off dehydration and heat stroke. Chet is very patient and will thoroughly work a hole with a jig, and pull out a nice smallie 15 minutes after I've decided it contained no more fish. Chet and I fish regularly, and in the picture below he has a big smallie he caught near the mouth of a feeder creek, a key staging area for fish traveling upstream to spawn.
Hua-Hua Chang is a longtime friend and collaborator/ business partner of mine. We co-own 9 acres of ground along a river. Because Hua is such a famous scholar, he's usually busy working and traveling the world, so we don't get out to fish much. Usually when we meet at the river it is to cut some wood, mow, or do some small construction project. I need to get Hua out more in 2011.
Tim Smith is largely responsible for getting me started river fishing again, which happened in the fall of 2007. Tim brings a vast knowledge of biology to his fishing, so it is always interesting to get his views on things. We try to fish whenever he is around, but much of his work is in Belize, so he blends a little snook fishing with his smallmouth fishing. Usually he is planting mangroves, doing some environmental field work, or inspecting shrimp farms. Here he is with a great looking spotted bass that he dabbled out of the wood in front of him.
Phil Fiscella is a very regular fishing partner. He might be the most creative river bass fisherman in Illinois. If you take 20 of the top river bass fishermen in Illinois and send them out to the river for a tournament, my money would be on Phil, even if he only has a bag of tubejigs and some jigheads. Well, let me say especially if he only has a bag of tubejigs and some jigheads. We try to fish 12 months a year, and he is always full of ideas concerning fishing or just about anything else. He is pictured below with a 19" smallie that he caught on a crankbait in about a foot of water.
Ken Douglas is my father and a very accomplished fisherman. At one point about 20 years ago he came within a couple of ounces of the state smallmouth record, with a big pig he caught in Powerton Lake. We fish an excellent strip mine pond in Fulton County, where he has caught a half-dozen bass over 9 pounds, a couple times a year. In June we had an amazing fishing trip in the northeast corner of South Dakota. In this picture he is holding a monster bronzeback from Roy Lake, SD.
Austin Douglas is my son, and had a breakthrough year with fishing. Austin got a lifetime of experience landing big smallies on the South Dakota trip, because we would hook fish and let him land them. However, he decided he wants to be 100% responsible for his catches, so we worked hard in ponds last summer to teach him how to use a plastic worm. It was a big success. Here we are with one of the big smallies that Austin landed.
Now let's do a month-by month review of things, and see if I can remember things.
January: The year began with a few ice fishing trips, and most stream smallmouth trips were in a small stream within a couple miles of a warm water discharge. This meant fishing in 40 degree water rather than 35 degree water. Action was steady, but not fast, aside from one day when Phil and I got into a pool full of fat smallmouths and landed 13, with several around 18". The best winter technique was to fish a slender thin-walled tube, with an exposed hook protected by a light wire weedguard. We would cast upstream and try to fish as slowly as possible, letting the tube sit on the bottom for several seconds, or maybe slowly sift along in the slow current. Bites were light and required a great deal of patience before a hookset. Another technique that worked was float and fly. However, this appeared to be more productive for small bass, and it is killer for rock bass.
February was more of the same, but I had some modest success in the bigger and colder river, miles down from where our warm stream enters. Float and fly had some success, primarily with spotted bass. The key is to find eddies and fish them thoroughly, in the front and back, and along the seam. I cheated a little and tipped my hair jigs with wax worms. I figured if I was using a bobber, I had already lost my pride, so why not catch a few more fish.
March is a tough month to remember, and I think I didn't get out much. I recall catching a few smallies and spots on crankbaits, and also some on #4 Mepps spinners. The water tends to be high in March, and much of my fishing is on the bank. My experience in these March conditions is that it can be highly productive to target where ditches enter the river, and I have at least three such spots that are always productive in the early spring. Just past where the ditch enters, there tends to be a mudline, and if you can rip a crankbait along the seam in the clearer water, quite often a big smallie or spot will be there to slam it.
April marks the beginning of a fun time, which is tracking the smallies' migrations to spawning locations. It can be productive to start searching in small feeder creeks. I think the best day I had in April was a trip with Chet in our primary river that ended just below the mouth of a feeder creek. There is a nice deep stretch with some riprap that can be loaded with fish gathering and preparing to move up in the creek. We got into a bunch of fat smallies in this spot, maybe a dozen or so. We were pitching tubejigs upstream and letting them tumble on down through some rocks and into the mouths of bronzebacks. Chet is pictured above with one of them. By April, I like to replace the slender tubes with somewhat meatier Strike King Coffee Tubes. Also, I replace the wire weedguard hooks with Owner finesse hooks, rigged texposed. This month, fish were also chasing my #4 Mepps spinners and I even moved to a #5. Many river fishing articles advocate #2 and #3 spinners, but I see no reason to go so light. I think a heavier spinner vibrating through the water draws more attention, especially if the water is somewhat murky. Also, I'm bothered by how many fish I've possibly killed when they have completely engulfed the trebles on the smaller spinner. In the future, when I want to go light, I'll use a beetle spin instead of #2 or #3 spinners.
May saw some high water on the streams I fished, and I fished the little warm water stream I mentioned from January quite a bit, though I was usually many miles downstream from where the winter fishing took place. I fished pools and holes of all sorts rather than spawn beds, but clearly fish were populating this stream more and more, with spawning on their minds. In one case I used a tubejig to pull 4 nice smallies out of a hole that couldn't have been more than 30 square feet. A few fish were also becoming aggressive on a buzzbait, though it was generally a poor year for topwater.
In a non-smallmouth related story, I have to mention a trip to a Fulton County strip mine pond with Dad. He introduced me to a Spro plastic frog. I tossed it into some sparse but spreading lily pads, and saw a monster bass come up and engulf it. An initial tug got it moving away from the pads. For some ridiculous reason, I was experimenting with some weak and cheap 8-lb Eagle Claw monofilament line. Mercifully, this bass cooperated and swam away from the pads into open water towards the boat. Eventually, I landed an 8 lb largemouth, by far my largest ever, but not even close to the largest in this 40 acre pond.
June was quite a month. I was pretty much washed out from stream fishing, as this was a wet month just prior to a prolonged dry period. However, we had an amazing trip to Roy Lake, South Dakota. On June 1 Dad and I began our search for Roy Lake smallies. We fished along rocky shorelines and along wood where these rising lakes are claiming timber and pasture land. It was tough to start with and we ended up in a weedy bay that was stuffed with nice northerns. We caught several on spinnerbaits and Dad had one that must have been 8-10 pounds. The next day we continued our search for bronzebacks. As we held the boat in about 9 feet of water and casted towards shore, we finally met with success as a huge smallmouth clobbered my Bagley buzzbait.
I caught 3 other smallmouths on a buzzbait that day, and after losing the magic Bagley, that was the end of the buzzbait bite for the trip. It was crazy, they were killing this particular buzzbat, but wouldn't touch another, not even my usual 1$ Wal-Mart specials. Those Costa Rican buzzbaits suck, but seem ok for river smallies.
By then, we were learning secrets far better than buzzbaits.. Dad was having breakfast with an area guide, Gary Gangle, each day. Gary, a remarkably friendly and generous guy, said fish were spawning in about 7 or 8 feet of water. Throughout the next few days we began fishing some rocky points and sandy shorelines, keeping the boat over 10 feet of water, and casting towards shore, slowly dragging Strike King Zeroes (a Senko like bait that Phil likes to throw and stick on the ceiling of his garage) with a very light jighead. This resulted in several huge smallies, as well as one exciting double as Dad and I both fought nice smallies, unable to net for one another. A picture of the double can be seen below. Both fish were returned safely. We also found a bay that had a mix of sand and weeds with some wood along one end. This produced a nice mixture of smallmouths, and a couple huge largemouth bass. I should mention that the northern bite continued throughout the trip. My one regret about Roy Lake is that we never explored the mid-lake humps and rock bars where some other campers were having success. Maybe next time.
After starting to learn our way around Roy, we decided to hook up with Dad's breakfast friend Gary. He took us to Clear Lake, and Austin had the smallmouth experience of a lifetime. Gary positioned the boat just outside of fast current where a stream flowed into Clear Lake. Gary explained that we were near a classic spawning location, and bass would leave this in big waves to get up in the current near the mouth of the creek, where they would feed aggressively on yellow perch, which we then saw regurgitated many times. This was old-school stuff. We would pitch out a half of a nightcrawler, and set up a nice drift watching our bobbers make there way down with the current. We had dunk after dunk after dunk, and maybe caught 50 smallmouths within a few hours. It seemed like the median was 16" or 17", and some were over 19". Austin was reeling in so many that his arms were hurting. These fish would fight hard and dive under the boat on this light tackle again and again. It was a pretty amazing experience, and probably spoiled Austin for life.
July was an interesting month. Among other things, I made my first smallmouth fishing trip to Indiana. The drought was just starting and river levels were dropping. This is about the time in the year I switch from tubejigs to 7" plastic worms, as my plastic of choice. Also, topwater should start to heat up, though the upper part of the primary river I fish stayed kind of murky until fall, and topwater wasn't as good as it has been. Chet and I caught a bunch of bass in the lower and clearer part of the river one day, and about half were on buzzbaits. Another day I fished along an upper stretch with Chet, and used a Zara Spook in the river the first time. He kept getting bites but couldn't hook up with a bass along some narrow slot. I said I'd tie on that spook and see if it would react. On the first cast a big fat spotted bass blasted the spook, then shortly after I picked up a midstream smallmouth on it. At this point I was high on the spook, and then joined Phil the next week, along the river many miles downstream and in clearer water. This day I probably had 15-20 bumps on the spook, but fish didn't really want it, and I just caught 1 fish on it. Phil was getting more aggressive bites on a weightless fluke, a technique I need to utilize next year. We were picking up smallies on tubes in pools, in shady shallow spots with the fluke, and I had a good run throwing a rattle trap and working it back against the current in a deep bottleneck. That day we caught 41 bass. Another fun day in July (at least I believe it was July) was when Ben visited. He is really into fish, so I took him to a clear drainage ditch with a great variety of fish. It was kind of neat, we were basically sight fishing. He was trying to add to his species list and was more pleased with the little longear sunfish he caught than with his smallies. Ben there, done that, I guess.
August was another very dry month. It opened up the river to wading wherever we pleased. Mostly I threw a 7" worm and a Bandit 200 series crankbait in August, and of course tried hard to make something happen on a buzzbait. I need to learn not to fixate on forcing the topwater bite. Often it just isn't there. The go to bait was the Berkley green pumpkin 7" power worm, Texas rigged. In this hot and dry month, the fish became easy to find wherever there was deep and moving water. This combination was key to finding fish, and I would try to walk upstream and throw a long cast, and just let the worm wash along the bottom and wait for a fish to start running off to the side. I think I went through about 50 plastic worms in August and September. The river was low and we could access just about any part of it. Wood seemed to be less of a feature in this low water, and fish were in the middle of the stream, wherever there was depth and flow.
September was very similar to August and remained hot and dry. The fishing pattern with worms remained the same. One notable trip was with Chet to Indiana. We fished a spot on Sugar Creek that Phil had marked for us. The water was remarkably clear. We might have been able to see down 5 or 6 feet. I have the feeling we were spooking fish and chasing them in front of us, but we did manage to catch about a dozen nice bass. There were two situations in which there was a riffle and a pool at the bottom of islands, with side channels joined the flow to create even more turbulence. Tossing on the lift above the riffle, or even in the most turbulent spot resulted in some crashing violent hits on buzzbaits, and some of the biggest bass of the day. I somehow managed to hook a big sucker on a plastic worm, and Chet accidentally snagged and landed a monster channel catfish.
October saw the fish moving towards winter locations. Because the river was so low and growing colder, you could eliminate about 95 percent of the water from consideration. The most fascinating observation of the month was how the smallies and spotted bass both started going nutty for big spinnerbaits, both willow blades and Colorado blades, in mid-October. I'm not sure if this relates to their forage at the time, but I've never had so much success with spinnerbaits. I was catching them along deep bends, in pools, and next to wood. The hits were ferocious for about 3 or 4 trips, then by November they completely shut down on spinnerbaits.
November was a tough month with water low and cold, and not many chances to fish. Phil and I had an interesting canoe trip. We paddled downstream and anchored along several spots. Fishing tubejigs very slowly we picked up a nice mix of smallmouths and spotted bass. The fish were in the deepest holes, foreshadowing the winter season. You can see Phil pictured below with some of the fish. Along one bend, true to form, we caught spotted bass on the upper part that was deep with a soft bottom, and smallmouth bass at the lower end where the bottom transitions to gravel. Phil seems a little embarrassed about his spotted bass, not sure why. By this time, it all came down to fishing slowly with tubejigs, which replaced my plastic worms of summer and early fall. Many of the fish appeared to be in winter mode and just wanted a tube sitting on the bottom in a deep hole. I had a couple of fun drainage ditch trips in November, but these were in warm water with fish behaving like it was early October.
December was atough fishing month. I've just managed a few rock bass and a couple of tiny smallmouths, and you can see the cold and icy streams I've fished. Those tiny smallmouths continued my streak of at least one smallie a month, dating back to March 2009. 
2 comments:
Great wrap-up on the year. Those smallies make me envious indeed. Well done.
Terrific post, Jeff!
It's great to see you blogging again and I hope you stay at it throughout the year.
I'll see you in January, but frankly my blood is pretty thin after all that time in Belize and I might want a coffee rather than ice on my guides.
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