The fishes we need are everywhere around us

This "fishy" area should hold fish, right?  Places like this
haven't so far on the Upper Potomac.  But on the North Branch ...

Fishing has been tough on the Upper Potomac for some reason this year.  I've caught one smallmouth and one walleye out of five or six trips.

Yesterday, Karen and I made the trek even further up to the North Branch of the Potomac to a C&O Trail Campground site.  She wanted to bike down the C&O Trail while I just wanted to fish.

I was anxious for some kind of success considering how far this spot was from the furthest point I fished this year.  Antietam Creek is just between mile markers 69 and 70 on the trail, while this site is near mile marker 173.

First smallmouth.  I usually take a picture of the first fish -- no
matter the size -- just to have evidence that I caught something.

Yesterday, we got to the camp site and set everything up.  No squatters this time, so we didn't have to call a park ranger to deal with the riff-raff.

We camped here about four years ago, and I remembered the river right behind the camp site was barren of fish-holding structures.  No ripples, eddies, weedbeds or large rocks.  Just straight, almost feature-less water.  But there was a spot downriver that had all those fishy elements.

I suited up my waders and headed down the trail and soon spotted a rocky point protruding the water.  After climbing down the bank, I tied on a Reaction Innovations Little Dipper on the first rod, and on the other rod, my go-to topwater lure, a Heddon Zara Puppy.

After about 15 minutes, the first fish of the day was landed on a Little Dipper.  It was a dink but had a cool color pattern (see picture above).

The Little Dipper was getting a lot of interest, and I soon had a couple more dink smallmouth with a few other misses sprinkled in.  The Zara Puppy wasn't getting anything.

Moving down to a weedbed with tassels protruding from the water, I said to myself, "Self, I bet if you throw that Zara Puppy just on the edge of the weedbed, there's a smallmouth there, and it will smack that lure."

Plus-sizing with a Rapala X-Rap Prop and
Nichols spinnerbait.  It didn't really work out.

If anything positive lately, since I haven't actually been catching fish, my casting skills have progressively gotten better.

That Zara Puppy landed about a foot to the right of the weeds.  I twitched it a couple times, paused, then twitched it again.  And a smallmouth exploded completely out of the water attacking the lure.

And completely missed.

Heart spiked, but still calmly didn't set the hook waiting to NOT see the lure.  But it was still floating on the surface ... and then ... and then ... nothing. 

A few more casts to the same area and still the fish didn't strike.  Even switching rods and tossing the Reaction Innovations swimbait couldn't entice even a nibble.

Moving on to other spots, I caught another dink smallmouth here and another there.  Six total for the evening.

After the big blowup on the Zara Puppy, the other highlight in "the one that got away" was seeing a couple fish that looked to be slurping bait on the surface.  I fired a cast with the the swimbait right on top of one of them, and the fish hit the lure immediately.  But just seconds later, it got off.  It felt like a better smallmouth than the dinks I had been catching.

This morning, I wanted to plus-size the lures to maybe plus-size the fish.  I started off with a Nichols spinnerbait and a Rapala X-Rap Prop topwater lure.  The spinnerbait didn't get any bites, so I switched to a Rapala Shadow Rap ... and caught another dink smallmouth and a sunfish.  Plus-sizing with smallmouth bass doesn't seem to work, as I should have remembered from a few years ago at another spot a few miles down river.

Finally, something bigger than the dinks.

I had one fish hooked on the Rapala prop, but the fish was next to a weedbed, and it made a beeline among the vegetation and managed to unhook itself.  Then the Shadow Rap got snagged in the middle of the river, so I went back to the Reaction Innovations swimbait.  And caught two more dink smallmouth before finally getting a legal-sized one.

At the end of the day(s), it was 10 smallmouth and a sunfish in five- to six-hours fishing.  Much better by a longshot on the Potomac this year, even if the majority of the fish were dinks.

Interesting to compare the last time we were at this spot on the North Branch four years ago.  Back then, it was another overnight camping trip but in August, and I caught eight smallmouth bass, two sunfish and a fallfish.  Similar numbers to Friday and Saturday.  Yet still further down river on the Upper Potomac this year, the smallmouth fishing has been bleak.

Next Sunday, Karen and I will flush the Potomac fail with another trip with Susquehanna Smallmouth Solutions.  Then, almost exactly a month later, we will be fishing on Rainy Lake for northerns and smallmouths and (Oh my!) walleye.