Welcome back smallmouth

A monster 12-inch Potomac smallmouth bass!

Yeah it's been awhile. I haven't posted much here mainly because I've been trying to create content for this other blog. That and I haven't caught a single fish this year. I've been out three or four times and haven't landed a single thing. A couple times, I didn't even get a bite.

Plus the weather hasn't been cooperating on days I wanted to hit a river. Either the water was too high due to rain, or the temperature was too hot.

Finally this weekend, that all changed.

Karen and I camped at our go-to spot on the Potomac River (although not at the go-to camp site -- we settled for the one next to it).

Friday night fishing for a couple hours, I caught three smallmouth with the biggest being about 12 inches. Ned Rigs (TRD Finesse Worms) and Reaction Innovations Little Dippers worked tossing them in current.

First fish of 2025, a dink smallmouth. But it did all the smallmouth things -- jumping and getting into the current pretending it was a bigger fish.

The river was about two feet higher than normal, which wasn't terrible. This area of the river has what I call "trenches" that are good ambush spots. This time of year, I don't think the smallmouth are holed up in one area -- I think they travel around to find cooler water and baitfish.

Anyway, every fish did the typical smallmouth things -- jumping like an ICBM missile trying to get free. I had one really hard hit on a Little Dipper Friday night that felt like a really good fish, but I didn't even see it. It smashed the swimbait about 10 feet in front of me, tugged hard twice when I pulled back on the rod, and then it was gone. It was probably a catfish.

First fish from Saturday morning.

Here's a video releasing a couple of them. They disappear with a quickness!

Six in one, half dozen in the other

Loved watching people fishing up ahead of this ripple, and they weren't catching a thing.

This is a late writeup from fishing a couple weeks ago, but as they say, better late than never!

I mainly write this stuff so I can keep track of my fishing prowess not to generate single digits of views!

Anyway, Karen and I returned to 15 Mile Creek Campground. Last time I had some luck near the boat ramp, which had not really happened before.

First fish of the weekend, and they were all this size.

My preferred spot is tough to get through either by wading or venturing through thick vegetation (usually easier early or later in the year), so I decided to try again.

Also, I was pretty sure I saw a small muskie last time, so you never know.

I caught six fish over a couple hours each day, and every fish was about the same size -- around 10 inches -- and caught on Reaction Innovations Little Dippers. I should have taken a picture of every fish to see if I tricked the same one twice, that's how alike they were.

One from Sunday morning that may or may not have been caught before.

I cast the lure out and let it drift in the current, which was rolling pretty good. It was really shallow, but the speed kept the lures from snagging -- I don't think I lost a single one.

Sunset on the Potomac.

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.