Why has the smallmouth fishing been so poor this year?

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Colin

Colin

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What are the reasons for the lack of smallmouth action this year? We only caught a few during our trip the first week of August and we can usually get a dozen or more every morning.
 
Can't answer that as I have not had much of a chance to fish this year due to family health issues. I did fish in May and June and noticed the numbers were down both times and size was way down in June. At that time I suspected the rapidly rising water had something to do with it. It's also possible the smallmouth have spread out more with the newly flooded habitat meaning there aren't huge numbers concentrated in one place as in the past. We'll have to see what happens with the fall fishing as conditions are stable by then and the smallmouth usually have the urge to eat with the upcoming winter looming.

Ed Gerdemann
 
I guess we were just plain lucky weekend of Aug 24 mid lake. Very unserious fishermen who troll behind a cruiser entering and exiting slot canyons and around open points with hard baits running at 3 depths to about 30 feet. We hooked decent to large SMB’s on most trolls and a few stripers to filet. At evening and morning anchorages caught mostly dinks on soft baits. So, from our limited angling I told folks fishing was good.
 
Colin said:
What are the reasons for the lack of smallmouth action this year? We only caught a few during our trip the first week of August and we can usually get a dozen or more every morning.
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Not sure what happened during your visit but last week of August we caught smallmouth everywhere. What I can say is they were very fat and spitting up shad. Could be the abundance of baitfish made them a bit harder to catch than usual. They are also moving alot chasing the shad schools.
 
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