Rainy day rainbow (and smallmouth)

Smallmouth measuring about 13" on a swimbait.

I fished one of my favorite spots (easy access, about 20 minutes from my house) on Friday, and my game plan going in was to use two lures, wander downstream on the river to a halfway point, switch to two different lures and head back up hitting spots I had already fished.

First duo was the small no-name spinnerbait (bought it a couple years ago and can't remember where it was nor who makes it) and a Heddon Baby Zara.  The Baby Zara is a topwater lure similar in length to a Zara Puppy but has a chubbier body as opposed to a slender cigar shape.  Searching online while writing this post, Heddon doesn't make the Baby Zara anymore, which means it will probably catch a ton of fish the next time I use it, and then I will snag it in a tree.

Baby Zara Spook on the left, Zara Puppy on the right.

Armed with two rods rigged with different lures, I usually cast one lure looking for fish, and then if I'm getting activity but not getting hookups, switch up hoping to trick fish into biting something different.

Casting the spinnerbait, I was getting passive bites, but the switch to the Heddon topwater couldn't trigger anything more substantial -- just a couple swirls here and there, probably from sunfish.  They aren't aggressive at all -- just nipping at lures and not attacking.  Like they just want to snack on the tail of prey and not have a whole meal.

So as I got near my designated turnaround point -- a highway overpass -- it started to rain.  Then it really started to rain, and I scrambled to seek shelter below that overpass.   This part of the river has big rocks protruding from the water, which flows very fast but not doesn't provide much depth. Not really an ideal area for smallmouth.

First-ever sighting for me, an oriole!

But since I was there, I decided to try something to holdout the passing storm.  I picked out a small eddy below some big rocks, flipped the spinnerbait out and was rewarded with a hit on the first cast. Reeling fast trying to skim the fish across the water's surface to avoid getting tangled in the rocks, I could only make out the fish's white belly and figured it was a fallfish. Finally got it to shore, and it was a rainbow trout, the first trout I've caught since 2015! 

Maryland DNR stocks trout all over the state from March through May every year, especially in the smaller rivers and creeks, so I'm kind of surprised I haven't accidentally caught more.

This rainbow stretched about 12 inches. No picture though -- it came off the hook, flopped in the sand and I scooped it back in the water.

The rain finally died down some, and since I was at my halfway point, I switched lures.  It was back to a BioBait DNA swimbait like from last week, and a Rapala BX Brat shallow-running crankbait.

The fish were really going after the swimbait -- I had three or four hits in the first few casts.  One fish hit the so hard, it felt like the rod almost ripped from my hand.  Then about five minutes later, a fish clamped and stayed on -- about a 13" smallmouth.

I had another fish on the Rapala crankbait that looked like a good-sized smallmouth, but it didn't remain hooked.  Always amazing when fish don't stay on a lure with multiple treble hooks.

I capped off the afternoon by landing another legal-size smallmouth on the BioBait swimbait.  The clarity of the river by this point had dramatically changed from the rain, and I didn't get another bite after that last smallmouth.

Fishing for three hours, I caught three fish, which seems to be about average for this river.

Unfortunately as I'm writing this, Mother Nature appears to have picked up where she left off last year.  Rain, rain, rain.  Tracking the level of the Potomac, every time it looks like the water might be at something close to maybe perhaps being fishable, Momma Nature dumps rain.

Biting the BioBaits -- new swimbait review

I picked up some new (to me) swimbaits -- BioBait DNA -- after reading about them on a fishing forum.  The rubbery material is supposed to be more durable and water soluble (i.e. degrades faster and saves trees) than normal plastics.

They also have realistic color patterns like yellow perch, redtail chub, sunfish and brown trout, to name a few.

The 12" smallmouth on an Arkansas shiner.

I normally use Reaction Innovations Little Dippers -- I've tried several other types of swimbaits but prefer the action of the Little Dippers, so I was interested to see how the BioBait lures performed.  Karen got me an Amazon gift certificate for my birthday, and Amazon actually carried them, so they were basically free, right?

Unfortunately, Amazon only had four color selections so I bought Arkansas shiner (because they resembled fallfish) and sexy shad (because what fish doesn't like a sexy shad).

Yesterday I fished for a couple hours in a section of river I hadn't tackled much before.  My first impression of the BioBait lures was that they acted almost exactly like Reaction Innovations Little Dippers.  They oscillated through the water -- if you were to look at them in the water coming straight at you, they twisted back and forth like turning a door knob.

I hooked into a fish after 15 minutes, but the line snapped.  Either I tied a bad knot or the line was cut on a rock.  Moving around targeting pools below eddies, I got a few bites and follows before finally hooking and landing a 10-inch smallmouth bass.

On my other rod, I had a Heddon Zara Puppy and fish showed no interest in the topwater lure, and that was the story on that front throughout the rest of the morning.  It seems like now should be the perfect time for frenzied surface bites, but the fish were having none of it -- not even timid passes from sunfish!

Oh deer!

Later, I managed a 12-inch smallmouth on the BioBait swimbait.  Then in an area I don't recall ever fishing before, a smallmouth which looked to be at least 14 inches (a giant for this water) grabbed the swimbait and rose to the surface, shook its head out of the water, and the lure went flying from its mouth.  People walking on a trail on the other side of the river even heard the commotion.  Maybe it was because I dropped an F-bomb?

I stopped fishing a little while later after hooking the Zara Puppy into a tree branch roughly 500 feet above the river.  If I fished in a boat in the middle of the ocean, I could snag a lure on a tree branch.

So the BioBait swimbaits definitely work.  They're a little pricey in comparison to Reaction Innovation -- $7.99 compared to $4.89 -- but the tradeoff is that they are more durable and break down faster when getting lost in the water, or a fish actually eats them

BioBait does have "original" colors that are cheaper than the DNA patterns, and they come in packs of eight as opposed to six.  They also carry other lures like leeches, tubes, crayfish and Flippin Chickens.

I still have a ton of Little Dippers when I stocked up .... last year!  So I probably won't buy more any time soon, but definitely will consider them in the future once my swimbait supply starts running low (I type this as it's dumping rain, so it this year is starting to look like last year).

BioBait DNA swimbaits.