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.