Cold Front Smallies

Chris & Betty were with me this morning for our first cold front of the season. We had a couple of days of on & off again thunder showers followed by a huge temperature drop. From average days of 90 plus, it was now just over 60 degrees for the start. Would the fish bite today? A light NW wind had me heading to a quick stop area to see if they could catch a few smallies. What was supposed to be 10 minutes soon turned into a couple of hours as our answer was a definite yes! From spinnerbaits to crankbaits and even soft plastics, they ate it all. Both Chris & Betty hooked and landed plenty of feisty smallies up to four pounds before we finally moved. A couple of idiots in an inflatable had run right through the shallows, hammering their motor on the rocks & creating quite a show. Although funny to see, not so funny for the fishing! Love the weekend warriors! The next area wasn’t any different as Chris was pounding smallies on a spinnerbait once again. Betty was throwing soft plastics and unfortunately missing most of her fish. This soon changed though with a little instruction from me and she was back in the game. In fact she was getting the bigger smallies and this was great to see as she usually struggled in the past. They both enjoyed just how good the fishing was with multiple hookups, pretty much all day long. In fact it was stated that they had seen and caught more fish so far than their entire previous season back home in Tennessee! This day wasn’t even over as we kept at it each and everywhere we moved. With very little down time, smallies were eating like it was their last meal almost all day long. Another section of the lake proved to be our last fishing spot as we remained there well over an hour. It’s always hard to leave fish biting and we made sure we didn’t. Unfortunately when it was time to go, I found that the motor wouldn’t start. I guess leaving the structure scan on all day and not running the big engine wasn’t such a good idea. I had done this a few days earlier too and the cranking battery had received only 1 hour of charge this morning when I found out. A small booster pack in the boat didn’t seem to have enough power to fire the main engine so I decided to try jumper cables instead. Same problem, as we had been in current on the electric motor all day and drained them as well! Being slightly smarter than a fifth grader, I came up with an idea that just might work. I would use the booster pack to fire up the small engine, idle at fast speed for several minutes and hopefully put enough charge in the battery to start the engine. Well it worked and we were finally able to crank her up and on our way! With a series of steps, I was able to turn what could have been a problem into just a slight inconvenience. We ended on a high and laughed all the way back to the boat ramp. They had seen the best smallmouth bass fishing of their lives and left wanting more. In fact, they liked it so much that I will be seeing them again at the end of their trip. After travelling to the east coast and returning to Montreal in about ten days, I will have the pleasure of repeating another incredible day of smallmouth fishing for them once again. Hopefully the fish will cooperate and the memories will be even better, the second time around!!