Two Mondays

Twelve inches of Little Patuxent fury from today.

Fished the Little Patuxent last Monday and managed to catch one dink smallmouth and two failfish.  I switched gears a little bit and tried my original secret weapon, which I really hadn't used much since discovering the Z-Man TRD Finesse Wormz.

Downriver from the secret spot in a new (to me) stretch of water.

Cookie-cutter (being generous) smallmouth from last Monday.

I fished the secret spot but tried a new flow just downriver.  I had some action on the Gulp! worms and finally hooked into a fish -- the first failfish.  A little while later, I hooked another failfish.  Finally, I managed this dink smallmouth to the left (ain't he cute!) on the Gulp! worm.

Catching the failfish was weird because they haven't shown much interest on bottom-bouncing jigs.  Usually I catch them on swim/crank baits.

Water temp was just shy of 60 degrees, and the river depth was down to normal after the heavy rain the previous Friday.

Today and exactly one week later was a trip to the Little Patuxent, but this time was further upriver to a spot that has easy access and plenty of different fishy areas.  Since last week, the area was hit with another good rain storm, and the river swelled to at least five feet higher than normal but had calmed down over the weekend.  Today it was flowing normally with around three feet of clarity in most areas.

It was a bluebird sky with air temps in the low 80s -- somewhat different than last week.  But water temp was only a couple degrees higher.

In the first half hour, I hooked another wet sock (AKA, failfish).  But I was still getting interest in the Little Dipper swimbaits but nothing would clamp on.  Smallmouth, redbreast sunfish, failfish, even the stocked "golden" rainbow trout were following the lure.

Finally after moving downriver to another section, I felt that tug -- THAT SMALLMOUTH TUG -- when casting a Little Dipper swimbait.  At the other end was the 12-inch smallmouth pictured at the beginning of this post.  I just knew it was a smallmouth this time and was a decent size.

The water here was fairly calm but was a 50-yard section between two dams of rocks and riff-raff.  It made a nice little reservoir, plus it had plenty of rocky cover.  I had a couple more hits after that 12-inch smallmouth but didn't hook anything.

Nothing for the next hour or so moving downriver but had more strikes and nibbles. I even tried a topwater Hubs Chub with a few rises from what I think were sunfish.  The topwater bite will be on soon. I can feel the hate starting to build in them ol' brown fish.  Everything is picking up for that April-September window of smallmouth frenzy.

I mentioned before that Karen and I were going fishing on the Susquehanna River last Friday, but with the heavy rain on Thursday-Friday, the river was near flood stage.  So we decided to push the trip back to next Monday.  Hopefully Mother F'ing Nature stays away this weekend.