Big Brown Bass

I picked Leonard up at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in downtown Montreal this morning at 6:30 AM and headed to a local lake for smallmouth bass. Being from Oklahoma, he doesn’t get a chance to tackle the brown bass as much as the largemouth and was really looking forward to fighting some of these big smallies. Mother nature wasn’t going to make it an easy one as we drove through the first heavy rain of the day on our way to the boat ramp. It was a cold rain that chilled the morning air to below 60 degrees. The winds were almost non-existent as we began to fish our first spot of the day. Sunshine greeted us upon arrival and water temps were about 67 degrees at the start of the day as well. Not having fished Senko’s before, Leonard was about to see just how effective they really were! The first couple of bass caught were on the small side at 2 to 3 pounds, but some of over 4 pounds were caught a little later. Several huge fish were seen just cruising the areas we fished, but they had absolutely no interest in feeding at all. We fished several rocky areas before we were forced to retreat to a sheltered area when thunder & lightning began. These storms seemed to last for more than an hour before we were able to venture back out, safely! We got into a great largemouth bass bite immediately after the storm and pounded them for almost an hour on senko’s, up to 4 pounds or so. When the sun came out again, we opted for the smallmouth once more and headed back onto the open lake. I thought I would try something a little different and had Leonard cast spinner-baits to aggressive smallies on offshore rock-piles for a while. The hits were viscous as they really didn’t want to be caught. Aerial displays were amazing as some of these fish just seemed to go ballistic! A few more were caught on soft plastic jerk-baits before the winds kicked up so bad that we were forced to move. We tried a few other places for smallmouth before we decided that largemouth was the way to go and got completely out of the wind. Leonard landed some more green bass and almost another brown bass before we called it quits for the day. A pretty good day with plenty of bass caught & released and many more lost as well!!!