Pouring lead and dreaming of spring today...

The Grube

Something else to do while waiting for the Winter That Never Ends to finally be over. Kind of a skirted jig-tube-grub love child, the GRUBE...
Ones a crawfish imitation that isn't too big for river smallmouth like most crayfish imitations and the other a darter imitation with pec fins that have a bit of orange.



Easy to make with some rubber skirt material and some grubs. Use a jig head like a crochet needle, poking it thru the grub, hooking the rubber with the barb and pulling it back thru the body.


Pretty close to the average assortment of stuff you can fish on a jighead that ill carry in my wading pack...

Several kinds and sizes of hair jigs. (this year there will be a lot of kinds and sizes, its been a long winter and Ive tied a few hundred). Motoroil with red flake grubs made into darter and crayfish imitations. Chartruese, smoke metalflake and glow colored grubs. (The glow is just a great daytime color I don't carry it because it glows in the dark even though it does. Sort of a more natural version of white) And a color or two of shad bodies swim baits to imitate shiners.

The world of OGF...

Years and years ago my brother and I spent a day fishing in the rain. We stopped in Angelo's Pizza in Morrow to dry out and get something to eat. The lady took our order then said, "You guys been fishing?" "yep." "I thought so, you smelled like it"

Well one day I decided to join the ohiogamefishing forum. We had just been talking of that day long ago and I made my handle Oldstinkyguy. A decision I would come to regret. For you see OGF is huge. 48,000 thousand members that post plus a legion of guys that just come there to read fishing reports. In the dead of winter there may be 500 or 600 people on at once, in summer thousands. Tons of great fishing information. Probably dominated just a bit by Lake Erie because, well because Lake Erie is just so good.

So I began to post my little fishing reports. On wading streams for smallmouth or catching shovelheads at night. I'd tell how many deer I saw, what birds were around. Lots of photos. If you've read my blog you know the drill. I think I struck a cord with the guys that only got Erie every now and again or never, that didn't own a $20000 boat but still loved to fish, loved the outdoors.

A couple times I'd be out fishing and someone would say aren't you Oldstinkyguy. Dave, the guy I fish with all the time said I'd better start watching who could see me park where to go fishing, that I was getting famous. Never in a million years did I take him serious.

Well at the end of January every year OGF has an Angler Of The Year contest. First they take nominations, then people can vote for ten days. I was nominated, then renominated, then again till the moderator told people to stop. A couple dozen guys were chosen. Several fantastic fishermen. Charter boat captains and guides. And this good old boy who caught smallmouth wading creeks and wrote stories about it.

Long story short. I won. Oldstinkyguy. By the largest margin in the contests history. There's a lot more of us out there than you might think. Guys that stop at the river on the way to and from work. Guys that care as much about seeing a beaver or a deer as catching fish (well almost as much). It's nice to know sometimes that people do read what I put out there. That the world of fishing and the outdoors is bigger than what they are selling in the magazines and on TV. Hopefully in my small way I'm making a difference. Getting a kid out from in front of his playstation and into the water. Getting a dad to just once in a while skip the local tournament to spend the day floating a river in an old canoe. Falling in love with nature as well as fishing. At least I like to think so. Or hope so...

I started out early. Fishing where the warm water of a water treatment plant dumps into the river. Too early, I like to froze to death. The radio driving in said it was 13 degrees. It felt worse. After about ten minutes I had a fish on for a second then off. Then a half hour later caught a nice five or six pound buffalo...


...right in the dorsal so he could pull like he had a harness on. It was nice though to have a fish take drag after the last few frigid weeks.

then came the cool part. Downriver I could see two big raptors. A bit too far away to give an ID but close enough to have a great view. One would swoop down at the other and the one being bombed would roll over on its back midair. For a second or two they would lock talons and then tumble towards earth before breaking their grasp and pulling out of the fall. Then went downstream out of sight then back up even with me before finally going back downstream out of sight. The whole time diving and chasing. I guess love is in the air.



A bit later I found some muddy mink tracks on the ice crusted snow.


Then Greg called wanting to know if I could meet him at a wildlife area to ice fish. It was a bit of a drive from where I was at but I instantly said yes. I could thaw out on the drive. By the time I got some waxworms and made the drive to meet Greg it had warmed up to the balmy mid-20's. Which seems to be as warm as it gets any more. The wildlife area was deserted and quiet and beautiful.



Greg stationed himself between two holes and with an ice rod in each hand put on quite a show pulling in one gill after another. We didn't catch any monsters just average sized ones but I guess we must have caught 50. We didn't see any one all day but two guys out after rabbits. A very nice trip considering the earth has obviously moved on it's axis and the north pole is now somewhere close to Dayton.

So big it broke my rod...

Saturday was the big fly fishing show and then Sunday I had to meet Dave and Greg for some fishing. Well I'd been rushing around getting ready for the show and hadn't really put any thought into getting ready to fish. But we weren't fishing till 11, plenty of time. My wife said after I'd passed her perch on the couch about a dozen times, "a bit disorganized this morning?". I'd rigged up a cool (I thought) little ice fishing rod out of an old cork handle from one old rod and the broken tip of another. But the tip section wouldn't quite fit into the handle. I had to sand it down just a smidge. Better remember to check that before I go. Well I couldn't find the spud bar. How do you lose something like that? Really? Only took an hour to find it and now I'm running close on time so off I go. I roll into our meeting place at exactly the right time and we head out to the pond. A good six inches of ice. But between Greg's auger and my newly found spud bar we soon had several holes open and were lowering waxworms in. I get a bite and whack I set the hook. Without ever checking the new joint on the little ice rod I'd made. I snapped it off right at the joint and had to hand over hand in a pretty gill. Im holding it admiring the colors and Dave says with perfectly deadpan delivery "so big he broke your rod wasn't he". Luckily Greg had a bucket full of gear that was bristling with little ice rods sticking out like antennae at the old Voice of America station. As badly prepared as I was Greg was well prepared and soon I was back fishing. He even had little zip lock bags full of deer jerky and deer baloney to snack on. He needs to start an ice fishing guide business. I wouldn't say the fishing was fast and furious but it was steady and a couple times we all three had fish on at once. Okay this ice fishing thing is pretty cool. If its going to be miserable and cold I can do this for a couple weeks... after I perfect this cool little ice fishing rod idea I have...

A new kinda jig.

So if you only ever click on one video I ever post make it this one. This I tied out of silver fox. I threw it a couple weeks ago in some clear water and was amazed. Ive been tying them like crazy ever since getting ready for spring. I can't imagine why this isn't the number one jig material going. And this video doesn't really do it justice as to how good it looks coming back to you thru the water.

So you wanna catch a 20 inch stream SMB?

I'm sure there are dozens of ways but this works. And I'm only talking rivers and streams here, where a 20 is a true trophy. Not Canada, not Lake Erie, not Dale Hollow. Do it for a year and you will catch one.

First off there are a couple things you need to know. Smallmouth bass basically are extreme homebodies. Catch a big rainbow trout out of the best spot in a trout stream, knock it in the head and eat it. If you come back in two weeks another big trout has taken its spot. That isn't the case with smallmouth bass. Except for their migration to their wintering holes and spawning time a big smallmouth will faithfully live it's entire life in one or two pools of the river. Year after year! Study after study shows this. How is this important in finding big smallmouth? Well it means you have to find a stretch of river where a big smallmouth can live for seven or eight years at least without somebody knocking it in the head and eating it. From most studies I've seen smallmouth will use a defined riffle as a boundary and often will never go past it except to migrate in fall. NEVER. In summer the mature smallmouth on a really sharp, strong, across the river riffle will be two different populations. One upstream and one downstream.
So where to fish? You find a your access point to the river. The stretch everyone fishes. You go either upstream or downstream, either in person or on Google maps, till you find a well defined riffle. One that goes all the way across the river. That is your boundary. The fish above that are a separate population than the one's that are hammered back in the easy to get to stretch. Now follow that all the way to the next well defined boundary. No access points in between? No easy water to get to? Now we are getting somewhere. Now in between those two lines find the best specific spots to fish. It may be right at the boundary line itself. Just understand that one side of a riffle might be trophy water and one full of just small fish even though they are just thirty yards apart. Very odd isn't it? I'm not sure any other river fish is like this. Shovelheads are homebodies too but in times of high water will range wildly and repopulate fished out holes. A hole where the big smallies are fished out is just that, fished out. It might be chock full of smaller fish but this is no indication as far as big fish are concerned. So you create a list of spots. Very specific spots that have to fall between good (as in not overfished) boundary lines. You do this for as many different stretches of the river as you can. Every river around here has these stretches. Some are out in the middle of nowhere like many of the LMR and Whitewater stretches. Some are protected by having the riverbank lined with houses that are not home to fishermen or at least not home to fishermen that keep fish. Lets face it even kayak fishermen most often hit areas where they can launch and land easily and only take long, all day floats thru harder to reach stretches rarely. Plus most of these guys are catch and release guys. But it doesn't matter how hard a stretch is to get to unless it has that defined boundary to separate it for harder fished areas.
In that stretch we have found that we want to fish, I'm a firm believer that the biggest baddest smallmouth will take the best spot. Why do smallmouth in lakes school according to size? Because the bigger ones are mean bastards and the littler guys avoid them. In a river that means the big bass, the one we are trying to catch, takes the best spot. Sometimes that spot isn't obvious. Maybe something out of the norm is going on and that fish is cruising back and forth below a riffle nabbing stonerollers that are spawning or any of a dozen other scenarios. But some spots are obvious. Like I said maybe our fish is off doing something else that day. But if you come back time after time to the best three or four spots in that stretch and fish them over and over eventually we are going to find that fish home.
Find three or four potentially good stretches of river defined by specific boundaries at each one. Then find the best spots in each of those potential stretches. Now the hard part. Fish those. Fish them in the rain. Fish them in the middle of the night. Fish them at dawn. In the middle of the day. Fish them till you know them by heart. Until you can close your eyes and picture every tree, every rock, every nuance of current even though your home in bed.
Your probably going to catch half as many fish as you did when you just got in the river and waded throwing an inline spinner everywhere that looked even halfway fishy. Hell, your probably not going to catch even half as many. A quarter or a third is more like it. But your eventually going to catch THE fish. Like I said it's all about catching just that one single fish.
Most of time that best spot is going to be some sort of seam. Somewhere there is a well defined line between currents of differing speeds. Maybe a creek mouth that has a pocket of dead water with the main river current creating a lime across it. rubble from and old dam, a rock bar, a riffle. Any of a hundred different things that create that magical line. Sometimes its all hidden underwater but often you can see that sharp line drawn on the surface where the seam is. If you find one of these fish it to death. And then next trip hit it hard again and the next trip again. Sometime, in some flow, under some condition, that seam will become the best spot that day and our big fish will be there. Maybe not today, or tomorrow but someday. Never ever pass up a seam in your chosen stretches of river. Even if you have been skunked there five trips in a row. Who knows trip six seven and eight might yield big fish.
See it's simple. Painfully simple because it's not the river fishing we all learned how to do. And your probably going to catch less fish. Sure we still look for riffles and runs and currents and seams. But (and it's a huge Oprah sized kinda but) only look at those as defined by the specific boundaries in each section of river. It can be the greatest coolest fishiest piece of structure you have ever seen but if its on the wrong side of our boundary it's not a fraction as good as something much less sexy on the right side of the riffle.
Now for the disclaimer...with fishing there are always exceptions. You might catch a monster right in the middle of the hardest hit stretch of the whole river. Who knows you may know a better easier way to catch a hawg smallmouth. If so I'd love to hear it. Or just fish like you normally do and you might just catch a big one anyways. But this works. Follow it and you will learn what works, where to fish, where your boundaries actually are, and you will begin to catch bigger smallmouth more often. And you will eventually catch that 20. And the next one. It's repeatable year after year.