Saturday swimbait smallies

Somewhere on the Potomac.

It is officially Smallmouth Season.  The rainfall has diminished and the Potomac River looks to be at normal summer flow -- low and really clear.  Finally.

First fish of the day on a "penetration" colored Little Dipper.

This morning, I woke up at zero-dark-thirty and headed for the Upper Potomac.  I got to my favorite spot -- The Plateau -- at 5:30 a.m. and was in the water shortly after.

Man, this early morning fishing is AWESOME when smallmouth bass are supposed to be really active and nailing topwater lures!

Right?!

Nope.

I have yet to have any topwater activity for awhile.  The fish are just not interested in anything tied to the end of my line.  The only thing I haven't tried is a buzzbait, so maybe I'll dig one of those out for the next trip.

Hey Rocky!

It started off really slow -- maybe hindered by my stubbornness to keep trying topwater lures.  After the first three hours, I had three fish.  But I had a handful of legitimate hookups -- fish on the other end of the line, jumping, and then they did Harry Houdini impersonations and got off the hook.  Mostly they were hitting Reaction Innovations Little Dippers -- only one fish the entire day was caught on anything else, which was a Z-Man Finesse TRD worm.  Crankbaits, spinnerbaits, freakin' topwater -- they weren't sniffing at anything but the swimbaits.

Except that one on the Z-Man worm, which was too funny.  When I use bottom-bouncing jigs (worms, tubes, whatever), I wait a couple seconds after the lure hits the water before doing anything.  This fish couldn't wait that long.  The second the worm splashed down, I felt a hard tug.  It's like two fish were just chilling in the river, and one of them said, "Hey Frank, I bet you won't try and eat the next thing that falls out of the sky."  "Oh yeah, I betcha I will!"  And here came my lure sailing right on top of them.  The smallmouth was sub-12 inches, but I was chuckling for about 10 minutes about the whole scenario.

When I switched to this color Little Dipper,
things got interesting.

Out of the first three bass, one measured right at 12 inches.

After a lull without much action, I waded back to the edge of "The Plateau" where it's furthest from shore and caught another 12-inch smallmouth.  Then a little while after that, I waded closer to shore where the water is actually fairly deep -- right below my waist -- and started casting towards the shore.  Hey, another 12-inch smallmouth.  Then the rock bass, which was pretty chunky.

Then another 12-inch smallmouth!  This was all occurring within a span of 30 minutes after hits being few and far between for most of the morning.

Biggest smallmouth of the day, just under 13 inches.

Then I spotted a pocket of water nestled between weeds sprouting along the shore and fired the swimbait into that spot.  Perfect cast, and just as soon as I started reeling in, a fish hit it.  This one turned out to be the biggest fish of the day -- just a tick under 13 inches.  After exhausting the area, I waded to the spot where the fish was hiding, and it was less than two feet of water.

That made it four legal-sized smallmouth for the day, which I had never achieved on the Potomac.  My best has been two.

I caught one more smallmouth that may have been close to 12 inches but had to perform emergency surgery (it's always fun and games until the pliers make an appearance) to get the hook out, and I didn't measure the fish since I wanted to get it back in the water as quickly as possible.

Not a bad morning -- seven smallmouth, with four being "legal," and a chunky rock bass.  There were at least seven or eight hookups, too, where fish Houdini-ed their way free.  Also, nearly every smallmouth bass attempted some feat of acrobatic display -- nothing like seeing fish launch out of the water like a missile from a submarine.

Oh deer!  Passenger-side "step" on the bed of
my Ford Lightning.

The morning was also a hair closer to not happening at all.  Winding through the backroads to get to the river, I had an encounter with a long-legged rat (AKA, Bambi).  Practically stopped to avoid some that were trying to cross the road, then five minutes later came around a corner and this dumbass deer was standing halfway on the road.  I swerved, it fortunately backed into the woods, but I heard a small thud. This picture was taken later in the day -- there was a lot more deer fur snagged in the plastic.