Tiny Bass and the Great Zoom Swimbait Experiment

First fish on Saturday. It was little.

Karen and I Crosstrek'ed over the weekend to camp at 15 Mile Creek along the Chesapeake and Ohio National Historical Park, and I fished Saturday night and Sunday morning on the Potomac River. I had decent action catching eight smallmouth bass.

On Friday, I picked up a pack of Zoom Swimmin Super Fluke Jr. plastic swimbaits to try for the first time after reading about them in a book on smallmouth bass river/creek fishing. They look similar to Reaction Innovation Little Dippers but don't have catchy names for their colors like "Dirty Sanchez" or "Money Shot."

Instead, the Zoom swimbait color I picked was albino. Not sexy albino, not cocaine albino. Just albino.

Swimbait comparison, the Reaction Innovations Little Dipper in sungill pattern on top, and the Zoom Swimmin Super Fluke Jr. in albino on the bottom.

The Zoom baits are a little lighter than the Little Dippers. They can't cast as far using the same eBay special jigheads I rig with the Little Dippers, but it's not a huge difference in distance -- maybe a couple feet. However, since they are lighter, they don't sink as fast in the water and can be fished up in the flow, which was ideal in this section of the rocky bottomed Potomac.

I managed three little smallmouth on Saturday night (and two other hookups).

And by "little," I mean. 

Little. 

The first fish stretched to six inches. The second fish maybe measured eight inches. The third fish felt better, but when it jumped out of the water I could see it was also a dink smallmouth bass.

These were caught just downriver from the boat ramp, a sec
tion I usually don't fish because the water is too low. However, the river looked to be slightly higher than normal (four feet going by the Hancock gauge reading from Saturday ... it's 3.4 feet now as I'm typing this), so I decided to give it a shot.

Sunday morning, I ambled down the C&O towpath to my usual hotspot on this part of the Potomac, which was around a bend from where I fished Saturday night. This area has a ton of rocks with four protruding above the surface. Here, I caught five more smallmouth with the biggest being 12-plus inches. One fish was caught on a Little Dipper but the "big" fish and the rest were on the Zoom swimbaits.

Releasing the "big" smallmouth:

Fish number four was interesting. I wanted to snap a couple "scenic" river pictures and tucked my fishing rod under my arm as I got my camera out. The Zoom swimbait was dangling behind the rod by about a foot. As I was setting up the shot, I felt something tug on the rod -- sure enough, a dink smallmouth bass was looking for something to eat.

The Swimmin' Super Fluke Jr. isn't going to replace the Little Dipper for me, but I will definitely add it to the arsenal. They worked best casting downriver and slooooowwwwwwllllllyyyyyy reeling them in. Or firing straight across and letting the current do the work of drifting downriver.

A picture of the big smallmouth.