Busting Big Bass

Ben & Luc were to accompany me today on a lake that was to yield only big bass all day long! The weather was a chilly 60 degrees when we arrived, but sunshine throughout brought the temps to over 80 degrees by days end. Winds were from the S/SW at about 10 knots creating a nice smallmouth chop! The water temps were below 70 degrees at the start and up to 73 by the end as well. A slow presentation was definitely going to be the ticket today as the fish seemed to be really lethargic. Senko’s accounted for the bulk of the fish with tubes and soft plastic jerk-baits catching a few as well. Luc drew first blood as he battled a fish of almost 5 pounds almost immediately on our first spot. Ben doubled up with a smaller one at the same time too. The next fish was almost equally as large as Luc managed to bring another big smallie to the boat on a senko again. A few more huge smallies were seen just looking at the baits, but not really interested in commiting to the bite. Luc had a shot at one of almost 6 pounds twice, but didn’t manage to get the hooks to her on either occasion. I found the fishing to be rather slow in the morning with one or two fish coming from each spot and decided to try deeper water instead, for the afternoon. Apparently it was to be the right decision as we found aggressive, schooling smallies eager to eat our baits. Both Ben & Luc had multiple hookups and several doubles for the next few hours. These fish were also huge and eventually became wise to our offerings and just shut down. We had to slowly finesse them into biting in the end and just picked one here & there for a while. I decided that we had put enough pressure on them and switched locations once more. For the last hour or so all we could do is pick one here & there once more and called it a day. Both Ben & Luc had managed to land over 20 bass combined today with the average size being over 4 pounds. All in all a slow but productive outing once again!!