Timing...

 Although the very best time to go fishing is whenever you can there are a few moments worth planning for.
It's midsummer and it's been hot for a week or two. The best fishing has been early and late and that's been slow. But the weather man says a front is going to hit today. Possibly even some severe stuff. A major break in the weather. You might think the best time is after the storm, But if your brave and don't mind risking a bit of wind or hail in your quest for THE fish the best time is right when all hell breaks loose. Those sheets of rain, that muddy water pouring out of tiny normally dry drainages off the hillsides. The very first inch the river raises, All of these can trigger magic. That riffle that has seemed dead for the last hour suddenly seems a different place. Where no fish were present you get now get a strike on five of ten casts. And one of those is the best fish you've caught in a month. I remember last year a half hour before the storm it was ninety and I was melting down. Up out of the rivers cut you could hear the storm rumbling as it bore down on my location. Big rain drops began splatting the water's surface as the trees up on the rim began to sway in the wind. Twenty minutes later I was pressed against the trunk of a big sycamore trying to hunker down even further into my rain poncho. But in those previous twenty minutes I'd landed six nice smallmouth with one stretching the tape past  nineteen inches. Thirty minutes after I'd sought shelter under the sycamore the sun was out and  the river had risen a foot and was the color of chocolate milk. Soaking wet I hit the trail muddy soaking wet and happy.
 Just the opposite weather can be the ticket in midwinter. You want that week of abnormally warm weather. When you can venture out with a hoodie and light jacket instead of a heavy winter jacket. The sun has warmed the cold clear winter water a couple degrees. In afternoon during the heat of the day river smallmouth might be tempted to move a couple dozen feet to a shallow hump or up a steep rocky bank in their wintering hole. Up to where sunlight was making things comparatively warm. Here I like to throw a hair jig. My favorites are ones I tie myself out of coyote. Not our course Midwestern coyotes but from ones I get online from Montana. These create a jig with wonderful light hair that simply comes alive in the water. You need a light flowing hair on your jig whatever the type because the best retrieve you can use is the slowest one you can manage. But if you have done your homework in the fall and tracked big smallmouth to first riffle up or down from this hole you know your showing your jig to fish. Often instead of a solid strike you simply feel a weight on the line an find yourself attached to a nice fish. But sometimes a nice fish will surprise you and really thump a jig. Either way any fish caught in winter is a great fish to me.
  Jumping back to that hot steamy stretch of late summer weather. Sometimes the best time to go on small rivers and bigger creeks is right in the middle of the heat of the day. What?, how can that be true? It kind of goes against everything we instinctively know about smallmouth. But those smaller rivers and creeks don't always have really deep cool refuges for fish to escape the heat. Even the deepest pools might only be barely waist deep and as warm as a hot bath. Well the most comfortable place for a bass then is right up in the fastest riffle he can find. His metabolism is also ramped up and that riffle provides lots of food as well as much needed oxygen. If you can keep yourself cool and avoid heatstroke the work of finding the fish is done for you. I find the best riffles are the very first ones upstream of the deepest holes in the creek.