Fishpalooza

Mother Nature threatened but stayed away.

Karen and I fished the Susquehanna River yesterday with Jason Shay of Susquehanna Smallmouth Solutions.  Mother F'ing Nature stabilized her wrath as far as dumping rain or unleashing miserable heat and humidity for just one day.  But it looks like she is going to fire a final (hopefully?) summer blast of heat over the next week.

Monitoring the gauges all week, the Susquehanna hovered around 4.4 feet at Harrisburg.  No crazy rains or anything either, so it looked like Sunday would be a nice day for fishing.

Jason and me with a double --
fishpalooza!

After getting to the boat ramp at 6:30 a.m. and hopping into Jason's jet-prop boat, Karen and I armed ourselves with a Reaction Innovations Little Dipper, a spinnerbait, and a Whopper Plopper on each of our rods.  For the first few hours, we were switching between them and couldn't get anything consistent from the fish.  Except the Whopper Plopper churning across the surface wasn't working, even though the river just screamed "TOPWATER!!!+11," especially early on, but the smallmouth didn't cooperate.

It looked like rain was going to hit us early after jetting upriver, but all we got was misting for a short time.

At the first spot, Karen caught a dink smallmouth on the swimbait, and I got a 14-incher a little later on the swimbait, too.  Jason swore he was only going to throw some flavor of Double J Twisted Tackle spinnerbait from start to finish even as Karen and I got those two early fish on the Reaction Innovations swimbaits.

We caught a few more here and there.  I had two more smallmouth bass that looked to be a solid 17 inches.  (Just about every fish today we caught had a chunky belly.)

Karen with one of her fish.

But nothing consistent.  After a few fish, the bite went cold.  At one point, I went almost an hour or so between even getting a hit, but Karen and Jason caught a few but weren't exactly ripping fish into the boat either.  Like I've said before, this is why it's called "fishing" and not "catching."

Maybe around noon, we were drifting among underwater shelves.  Rock formations that protruded up through the water creating trenches barely visible below the surface.  And we went into a mini-spree of smallmouth activity. 

After getting some snags on a swimbait, I tried a Nichols spinnerbait in a crawdad flavor.  The lure (which I bought at Smallmouth Saturday upon Jason's recommendation) wasn't a revelation, but a few smallmouth hammered it like a freight train.

Trying to fish out (get it?)
my crawdad-flavored
Nichols spinnerbait from a
small mouth.

At that point, the fish were hanging around the shelves, and we peppered every single one with casts.  Again, nothing consistent, but when one of us got a fish, they put up a great fight.  One smallmouth Karen hooked, I could see the fish shaking its head and trying to burrow down in the rocky river floor.  It was angry!

I guestimate we landed 25-30 smallmouth bass (no other species) between the three of us.  I had eight, but nothing under 14 inches, and three were around 17 inches.

We saw turtles sunning on rocks, geese and ducks and other waterfowl, including a merlin or small hawk trying to prey on small birds.  Not a lot of fishing pressure from other boats on the river.

The weather was much more bearable than when we fished the river with Jason on July 1, and while we didn't light it up with quantity, the smallmouth were better quality than two months ago.

The funniest thing, as we were pulling up to the boat ramp at the end of the day, there was a guy "swimming" in the water.  Jason said something about, "Oh this is the guy on house arrest."  As he throttled the boat to the ramp, this guy - shirtless, wearing swim trunks -- walked up the boat ramp, and he had a bracelet around an ankle.  Then some other guy showed up out of nowhere with no shirt and swim trunks -- AND HE ALSO HAD A BRACELET AROUND HIS ANKLE!!!  Then when the boat was loaded on the trailer, another shirtless guy showed up with a bracelet around his ankle.  I kept thinking of the "Bracelet Buddies" episode of "Friends."

A perfect storm for catching fish.