Cold Front Conditions

Warren & Yves joined me on Lake St-Francis for smallmouth bass today. The air temps dropped to 68 degrees overnight when a cold front came through and the water temps also went down to 74 degrees. A 5 degree water temp drop since Sunday can’t be too good, I thought! Light winds from the S/SW soon increased to 15 to 20 knots early in the morning and never let up through the day. Blue bird skies and high pressure were going to make for a tough day! Senko’s were used right off to get a couple of fish in the 3 pound range, but each place we tried only produced one or two bites as well. We did see plenty of big bass cruising around that just didn’t seem to want to hit. Yves had the worst of luck, as he just couldn’t seem to keep the bass on the end of the line for very long. At one time while fighting a 2-pound bass for 30 seconds or so it came off and a 4 pounder nailed his crankbait immediately. Unfortunately, that one came off as well! There was only one spot that had any real concentration of fish and they spooked shortly after Warren boated a few on a spinnerbait. I knew that this was going to happen and tried to monopolize on the situation by changing lures quickly. We must have seen about 12 to 20 big fish in this one area, but only got into about 4 or 5 of them. Typical of schooling smallies in a tiny area, spooked! We continued jumping around the lake looking for more active fish and even went for largemouth bass during the afternoon when the temps warmed up. Several blow-ups in heavy vegetation on surface lures only turned up a couple of largemouth, so we opted for the smallies once again. More cruisers, but not many takers in the afternoon were what we had the pleasure of experiencing once more. A few more fish were caught, but the activity level was definitely not what we would have hoped for! A tough day to say the least with around 15 fish landed up to 3 ¾ pounds. We must have seen over 40 fish, but not many takers! Tough bite today!