Battling All The Elements

Tim was joining me today to learn a little about the smallmouth bass and he brought Kevin along for the ride. The weatherman was once again, bang on with their predictions of possible thunder showers very late in the day! We were in the rain from before 11 o’clock until just about 5 o’clock, when we called it a day and headed to the ramp. Add the terrible east winds instead of the S/E ones that they called for and you have the makings of a perfectly disastrous outing! Although we did have sunshine to start, it was very short lived when the clouds arrived. The air temps were probably the best part as they finally dropped below 80 degrees and topped out closer to 75. I wasn’t sure what to expect so we began shallow and threw soft plastics just looking for some fish. Unfortunately only a couple of smaller ones fell victim to the baits and we moved on. It didn’t seem to matter what type of cover we were fishing as the fish just didn’t seem to want to bite. Big bass were seen in almost every location we stopped at but they just refused everything we sent their way, annoying us even more. When I finally had enough we went to a couple of current breaks in deeper water and it was here that Tim managed to get a decent fish to the net before the hooks just fell out. There had been a few others taken on tube jigs but they weren’t up to my standards so we relocated to deeper water along the channel looking for some schooling fish instead. Unfortunately do to the direction of the wind, it was impossible to manage a drift and have control of the jig so we had to abandon that idea too. Mother Nature was making my life a living hell trying to locate some of the better bass and the fish weren’t cooperating either. The next area saw plenty of huge smallies and every one of them refused the baits without ever even looking at them. All we could do was watch them swim by in the pouring rain! On to the next area and Kevin managed to get hold of yet another small bass with sightings of giant cruisers and passers by. I just kept relocating to new areas hoping for the « Holy Grail » but it never happened. We managed several more not so great medium bass from a number of tried locations before we called it quits. Not too many pictures today but we still managed to get a few shots off nonetheless. Overall it was a pretty disappointing day by my standards with neither quality nor quantity coming aboard. Hopefully the guys at least had a better understanding of what to look for, on any future trips on the water and just how the smallies actually behave. Days like these make me want to troll even more!!