Spooky Smallmouth

I fished with David & his wife, Carmin today on a local lake for smallmouth bass. We had severe thunder storms the night before & I was wondering if this was going to have any effect on our fishing. I thought I would start a little deeper than ususal, in case they moved away from the shallows. The start of the day saw heavy cloud cover that looked like another electrical storm might drop in on us at any moment, but it didn’t. The air temps began at around 73 degrees & eventually reached almost 90 by the afternoon, with high humidity. Winds were out of the N at less than 5 knots and increased to about 10 later in the day. The water temps still remained around 73 degrees in most places too. David hooked into smallies shortly after we arrived on our first spot and managed to land 5 or 6 of them on tubes. The largest bass went 4.6 pounds and was his personal best. Carmin was having a little tougher time and missed a few before she finally brought one to net. The fish were definately feeling some sort of effect from last night’s storm as most of the bites they got were very light, causing plenty of missed strikes. David broke off several other fish on the second spot with solid hooksets. He had never used Fireline before & was use to hard hooksets with mono. A slight adjustment and all was good! Carmine managed to hook a couple more as we continued to work this offshore shoal looking for bigger fish. Many of the shallower shoals that we tried to fish were holding huge bass that were not willing to take our offerings, so we opted for another deeper location not too far away. A couple of huge smallies were once again seen just cruising around but only one three pounder managed to get hooked up. Carmin did hook into a huge fish that turned out to be a freshwater drum. These fish are just raw power! We snapped a couple of pictures and returned it back to the water afterwards. With the afternoon getting on, I really wanted to get them into some bigger fish and tried several other locations. On almost every one, we saw giant smallies that would just not take anything. Finally on one of our last stops, Carmin got the hooks to a real beauty. This fish just went nuts, jumping out of the water all the way back to the boat. When I finally netted her, it was a great relief to see such a beautiful smallmouth come aboard. I placed her into the livewell and we continued fishing a little longer. Carmin had another huge fish on but unfortunately it threw the hook whent it went airborn. This too was another bass of more than 5 pounds! Carmin was looking for a wall hanger and had finally gotten one worthy of mounting. We took measurements and the weight of the bass and released her back to the lake unharmed, as this was to be a fiberglass replication and not a skin mount fish. There is really no need to kill such a magnificant fish with artificial replicas as good or better these days! The final weight was 5 pounds 9 ounces and the measurements were 20.5 inches by 16.5 inches in girth. This was definately a fish worthy of hanging on the wall! We fished a little longer without any luck, but did manage to see more huge smallies cruising around once again. Back to the boat ramp we went and called it a day. There were not a lot of fish caught today, but they were definately quality ones. Somewhere around 12 to 15 fish were landed with plenty more either missed or lost. All in all a great day on the water!!!