Rolling Waves & Big Bass

Darrin & I headed to St-Francis for a day of smallmouth bass fishing today in tremendous winds. The waves were three footers before eight o’clock and we knew they were going to get even worse. With winds out of the S/W at 15 to 25 knots and stronger gusts, they made their way into the 4 & 5-foot class before noon. Fortunately, the sunshine made it feel comfortable and with the Ranger, boat control was a breeze! We were throwing jerk-baits and tubes pretty much the entire day in these winds and fended pretty well. Darrin hooked into a few smaller bass up to 3 pounds before he finally got into a real giant of a smallie that brought up abut 5 or 6 of it’s friends during the battle. I don’t think either of us actually realized just how big this bass really was until it was finally in the net. She was 21.5 inches long and had to run close to if not over 6 pounds! I thought I would livewell her and take some pics later, so that we could continue fishing. Almost immediately, Darrin was into another big fish and eventually brought a smallie over 4.5 pounds to the livewell once again. I followed up with another bass close to 5 pounds on a tube shortly after and it was starting to look like we were going to have a big fish day. These winds were a bit of a pain to fish in, but thankfully the boat made it really comfortable and easy to control a decent drift through the area we were fishing. The entire day was like this with pretty much big fish coming from wherever we fished. We tried a few other areas and Darrin either got into big smallies or had them follow the jerkbait right up to the boat. I stayed on the tube and occasionally switched up to either a spider grub or another jerkbait, depending on the area we were in. I am sure that if the winds weren’t quite as strong as they were, we might have caught even more of these giants. There were probably close to 25 bass landed and plenty of others seen and lost! All in all it was a great day with a limited amount of action, but really quality results!