No shutout on Super Bowl Sunday!

Smallmouth No. 2 for 2024 caught on a Z-Man Finesse TRD worm.

Karen and I went camping for her birthday this weekend, and I managed to catch one smallmouth bass -- about 12 inches. Got it this morning just behind our campsite on a Z-Man Finesse TRD worm bouncing it on the bottom.

Skies were overcast, and it in fact started to rain lightly before I caught the fish. The water temp was around 50, and the Shepardstown gauge was just under four feet.

I tried a swimbait, too, with no luck. I think I might have had a sunfish nibble, so other than that, the smallmouth bass was the only action of the day.

I fished a little last night but we got to the campground just after the sun had gone down. I can barely see anything in daylight, so I only fished for 10 to 15 minutes.

Looking back on my blog posts (other than for the tens of viewers, I write stuff so I can remember shit), the earliest smallmouth bass I've caught looks like Feb. 25 back in 2017. And this year, I've already caught two. The smallmouth action usually doesn't start until late March.

Here's a short video I captured using my Olympus Tough TG-6 while releasing the fish:

Fish don't care that it's raining because they are already wet

Personal best Potomac walleye, 22 inches!

Since I had the day off for Veterans Day (I'm a veteran so I should have the day off anyway), I was figuring out how to occupy myself during the day. The weather has been great the past few weeks -- around 70 degrees and sunny -- but as I was looking ahead the past few days at the forecast for today, it was projected to be mid-50s and rainy.

Not ideal conditions, but the fish don't care if it's raining because they're already wet.

I trekked up to Dam 4 on the Potomac River since I haven't been to that section in awhile. I was hoping for some smallmouth bass but this area sometimes surprises with walleye.

I got there around 9:15 a.m. and at first it didn't look like anybody was around. But after I waded into the water below the dam, I saw somebody else fishing on the small island just below the dam. It looked like he had come over from the West Virginia side with a kayak. Somebody else with the bright idea of fishing in the rain!

To start things off, I tied on a Reaction Innovations Little Dipper, basically my go-to lure. After one hit in about 10 casts, a shallow-running Rapala Shadow Rap went on my other rod. Speaking of "go-to" lures, Shadow Raps are my go-to jerkbait -- they have been great since the first time I used them, and enticed my first 20-inch smallmouth bass to bite one. I would fish with them more often, but in shallow waters, they are more of a danger to snag. At $10 a pop, I'm always tentative using them.

However this morning, the first cast with the Shadow Rap, I had a hit. This felt like a nice fish, but it was using the river current to its strength. Got the fish closer and saw it was a about a 13-inch smallmouth bass, although fairly chunky.

The first dam fish of the day.

A few casts later, another smallmouth bit the Shadow Rap just as I was pulling the lure out of the water. Although it was only pushing 12 inches, it also had some girth. The smallmouth are likely fattening themselves up before wearing their savage face of cold.

After landing two smallmouth bass in about 20 minutes, I didn't even have a hit for almost two hours afterward. I moved down river, tried a few areas below some protruding rocks that were creating small pools and breaks ... and nothing.

Fall is in full swing along the Potomac River.

That's why they call it "fishing" and not "catching."

At this point, I was thinking of leaving but decided to try below the dam again. I hiked up the C&O Canal Trail and waded to about the same spot where I caught the two smallmouth bass earlier. For some reason, I kept getting bird's nests on the spinning reel with the Shadow Rap and had to strip line and re-tie. Now I didn't have enough line on the spool to cast! So my only option was the other rod with the Little Dipper.

After a handful of casts, I had one hit on the swimbait. After that, I kept peppering the area with casts and was about ready to call it quits. Not quite, "Just one more cast," but it was close to that.

Then something slammed the swimbait. It felt like a nice fish, but the 13-inch smallmouth from earlier felt like it was bigger, so I was skeptical at first.

This fish kept tugging and tugging. Without my sunglasses and their assistance of polarized lenses to cut the glare off the water, it was hard to make out what kind of fish it was as it got into visual range. It wasn't football shaped like a smallmouth.

"Oh man, I hope it's not a catfish."

Then I saw the gold coloring and recognized it was a walleye, and a good-sized one at that! I cradled it out of the water and immediately saw it was big enough to keep (the minimum in Maryland is 15 inches), so I put it on a stringer and ended the day fishing right there.

In case you've stumbled across this blog for some reason -- maybe a fan of my Camaro autocross blog? -- and don't know anything about fish, walleye are one of the best tasting freshwater fish on the planet. 

Of course there wasn't nobody around to see me as I went back to my truck. When I get skunked, there are always people along the trail asking, "How'd ya do?" "Ya catch anything?" I usually keep my head down and try not to make eye contact in those cases. But here I was lugging a hefty walleye, and nobody was around to see it.

After getting home, I measured and weighed the fish -- 22 inches and 3.7 pounds! At least length wise, it was my biggest fish from the Potomac.

Although Karen and I caught a bunch of walleye on Rainy Lake a few months ago, this was my first Potomac walleye since 2020.

If you've stuck around this far, here's a bonus video releasing the first smallmouth.

Two-foot long rainbows are actually pretty big

 

First fish of the year, a monster rainbow trout!

I was not expecting my first fishing trip of the year involving a monster rainbow trout, but here we are.

I decided to hit the Little Patuxent River this morning in the usual stretch and try out Bass Pro Shops Mean-Eye Swimmers (2-1/4") for the first time as well as a new two-piece Daiwa Tatula XT spinning rod (maybe the best $100 rod on the market).

First time using BPS Mean-Eye Swimmers.

As I was wandering down the river, a little movement to my right near the water caught my eye. It was a large, dark animal that I thought for a split second was a dog. As I turned my head to get a better look, the creature ambled down to the water, and I could clearly see a flat tail -- a beaver! I saw what I am sure was a mink a few years ago on the Little Patuxent, but never a beaver.

The black blob in the center is the beaver paddling
away to mess around at Metzger's Field

I made a stop upriver from my usual hot spot and made some casts with the Mean Eye Swimmer. It has a more subtle action compared to the Reaction Innovations Little Dipper I usually use for swimbaits. Just the rear tail paddled in the water as opposed to the oscillations Little Dippers produce.

On the fifth or sixth cast, I tossed the Mean Eye (shad pattern) near a rock protruding from the surface, turned the handle on the reel two or three times and WHAM! Wake me up before you go go, a big fish was on! It thrashed to the surface, and I could tell it was too long to be a smallmouth bass. Maybe a carp?

As I reeled in some more and the fish again came to the surface, I saw the horizontal pink band running down the fish's side -- a rainbow trout! This wasn't a little dink; this fish was BIG.

I was standing on the river bank about two to three feet above the water and came to a realization -- what was I going to do? This fish was probably five pounds, and I couldn't just heave it from the water. So I slid down the bank into the water. I didn't have a net, and the trout was a little too big to scoop with one hand while holding my rod in the other.

I held the rod tip up so the fish's head was out of the water, took a picture, then removed the swimbait -- thankfully it wasn't deeply embedded in the top of its mouth. The fish then rolled belly up, so I grabbed the fish's tail and turned it over. After pulling and pushing the fish a few times to get water flowing through the gills, I released my grip, and the trout slowly swam away.

I was stoked/shocked/whatever for about five minutes just trying to process what happened. I didn't measure the fish but eye-balled it with the Daiwa rod next to it as I was trying to revive it. When I got home, I pulled out a tape measurer -- the trout was 24 inches at least. Easily the biggest fish I'd caught on this river eclipsing the 16-inch smallmouth from five years ago.

This trout likely didn't grow this size in the Little Patuxent. When Maryland DNR stocks trout around the state early in the year, they release trout in varying sizes with a few trophy sized fish in the mix. So this rainbow likely grew up in a hatchery before being released to the wild. It feels a little like cheating -- I'd rather catch another 16-inch smallmouth again from its legit home turf.

After colleting myself, I moved down through a couple more spots. Finally caught a run-of-the-mill Little Patuxent smallmouth on the same Mean Eye swimbait that tricked the trout. A few casts later, had another one hooked -- likely in the 10- to 12-inch range -- that clamped the lure just as it hit the water.  Then it did an SDR (short distance release) just before I could pull it out of the river. Both smallmouth were in the same general area, tailwaters behind a rather fast flow through a rocky section.

Now that's more like it -- a cookie cutter smallmouth.

My other rod had a Heddon Zara Puppy tied on, and it wasn't getting any action.

Nothing other than a couple nibbles on the Mean Eyes before I donated them to the river. Switched over to the usual Reaction Innovations Little Dipper and had a couple sniffs at that, but I think they were timid sunfish.

The Mean Eyes are $3.50, so it sucks to lose them, as opposed to a Little Dipper swimbait, which comes in a pack of 10 for $7 or so. The Mean Eyes are a little more durable plastic, though, so as long as you don't snag them, they'd last longer than a Little Dipper. They each behave differently, so it's almost an apples-to-oranges comparison anyway.

The Daiwa Tatula XT rod seemed to do the trick. It's fairly light and had good sensitivity through the rod as the swimbaits skimmed rocks or the river bottom. Or hooked fish! Definitely a bargain at $99 (and I used a $25 gift card from Susquehanna Fishing Tackle that Karen got me for Christmas, so the rod was even less).

In addition to the beaver, I also saw three separate hatchling turtles -- that appeared to be snappers based on their long tails and knobby shells -- swimming in the water. I had never seen turtles in the Little Patuxent either.

Little Little Patuxent turtle.