Latest Fall Fishing

I thought I would try again today to locate the mother load of smalies and decided to hit the lake with my brother. He hadn’t fished with me since early in the season and had never before been out this late in the year for smallies. The day was quite similar to yesterday except for the lack of sunshine. Instead, we had overcast skies throughout the entire day. I decided to start in the area that produced the best fish late in the afternoon yesterday and gave Mike first crack at the spot. I had told him that he would hook up on his first cast and obviously had forgotten who I was dealing with. It took him several casts to finally get bit and of course, he lost that one. Eventually, he locked up and landed a real nice one around four pounds. I didn’t even put it in the live well as I was sure there would be plenty more much larger to follow. The fishing was a little slow to get started as we only landed around 10 or so in this area and I moved on. Just like yesterday, there didn’t seem to be too many concentrations and we had to cover water to get bit. Some of the hits were so light that they were almost impossible to detect. It almost felt like there was weeds on the jigs as they just picked up the bait and held on. Fortunately, not all the fish were acting this way and others were easier to detect. A few fish came from as shallow as 6 to 10 feet of water and others were in the usual areas of 14 to 20 feet. We even caught a couple that were closer to 30 feet deep as we covered all the usual holding areas, looking for bigger & better. Mike managed to hook into what I thought was a real giant, only to find out that it was a Northern Pike just under 10 pounds. There were plenty more smallmouth hooked and landed as we neared the end of the day. I decided to make one more stop on the spot we began on and fished it for about 30 minutes more. Unfortunately there were only a few hits in that time and only 3 fish landed. I did manage to bring one aboard that weighed in at just under 5 pounds and my brother caught a nice one on his last cast too. Overall a pretty good day with about 30 fish landed in a five hour period once again. This fishing is definitely not over yet as I will be back several more times before the temperatures drop so low that it becomes an impossibility. It looks like this year I will be fishing into December, with all the mild weather we have had lately!!