Sometimes size does matter...

I wanted to talk just a bit on something that I think is often overlooked when fishing soft plastics. This is especially so when it comes to fishing soft plastics in rivers and streams and dealing with current. Here are a few of Vic's soft plastics that I dug out of my fishing pack. I put each of these in turn on a small digital scale to weigh the amount of plastic in each. BTW shameless plug for Harbor Freight, I think the scale was under ten bucks there, love that place. So the 3 inch grub in the middle weighs 1.5 grams while the bigger grub on it's left weighs 4.3 grams and the paddletail swimbait on it's right weighs 4.7 grams. So what's that got to do with anything? Well the paddletail has three times the plastic than the 3 inch grub and even though I don't know how to measure it's surface area I'm guessing around three or four times as much surface area. Or to put it another way three or four times as much area to be acted upon by the current. We often talk about the profile of our baits and how in certain situations the flatter profile of the curly shad better matches the profile of things like shiners or shad. And we talk endlessly and there are millions of theories on color. And we have all seen the times when a certain color outperforms all others. What we don't hear a lot about is a third variable, how you can change your presentation in a river by changing the bulk of the bait you are throwing. Soft plastics allow us to do that in a way almost no other bait does.
I'm drawn like a magnet to seams. Places where fast water meets slower water. Or the seam of a strong eddy right where the water running downstream rubs against the water coming back upstream in the eddy. I think these kinds of places were made for bigger smallmouth bass. It's my theory that a bigger bass has a distinct advantage over it's prey, and smaller bass for that matter, in this situation. You see a fish's lateral line is kinda like an antennae. And the bigger the antennae the better the reception. So in the jumbled up water of a fast seam a big bass is able to pick up an approaching baitfish with his 18 inch long lateral line when the 1 or 2 inch long lateral line of the bait simply cannot pick out the bass at all in the maelstrom of conflicting currents. I don't think we can emphasize enough the importance of a fish's lateral line. I once saw a study done on pike in clear water. In clear water pike that had been blinded hit a lure with better accuracy than pike that could see the bait perfectly well but had damaged lateral lines! Anyway whether or not my theory holds water I do know that I catch an awful lot of big smallmouth bass on seams. Show me a seam below a riffle in a creek, below a lowhead dam in a river or below concrete rubble in a big river like the Ohio and those are the places I'll fish the longest and put the most effort into. I think many really strong and conflicting seams may not hold a lot of small bass because they do not have the length of lateral line to take full advantage of the situation like a big bass does. But they often hold the biggest fish in any given stretch of water.
The problem is that it is pretty much impossible to come up with a practical rule of "well the waters this fast so use a lure this big". I once wrote a piece about how I spent an afternoon floating fallen leaves thru a pool in a little creek. Turns out the water the water acts nothing like the arrows we see in most fishing diagrams. These drastically oversimplify what the waters actually doing. It might be going much slower right on the bottom where its rubbing the gravel than it is just a bit higher. Or tumbling along downstream rolling like wheel and there are certainly dozens of band of different speeds of current across the width of a pool. Plus water curling upstream in eddies or stalling out before continuing downstream. I love the old saying that it is impossible to step in the same river twice. Well trust me its impossible to float the same leaf all the way thru a river pool twice. What you can do, once you do find that big sexy seam is to experiment not only with lure color and lure type in that seam but with lure bulk as well. If I find a seam I like well I'm going to run a three inch grub thru it then a 2.5 inch curly shad and then a three and half inch curly shad and a paddletail swimbait thru there before I move on and possibly all again on a different sized jig head. That's probably one of the few places I'll put that much time and effort into before moving. Even if I'm achieving the same depth with different sized baits they are moving downstream at different velocities. Which often makes all the difference in the world.
It's pretty hard to fish something like a 2.5 inch curly shad or a 3 inch grub wrong. Chuck the thing out and wind it back in and thru most of the year you are going to catch some fish. But you can add so much more to your river fishing by knowing what your bait is doing down there. I have a great little book by Tony Bean called The Last Smallmouth and in it he advocates if you're new to grub fishing going to a small creek where you can see clearly whats going on and dragging your grub over the bottom and paying careful attention to what it feels like.  And doing this on a mud bottom and a gravel bottom and a cobbled bottom and paying attention to how each feels. I've written some pretty ridiculous stuff over the years comparing fishing a grub to everything from Zen to traditional archery. All because I think anything that can help you develop that extra sense of what your lure is doing down there will help you catch bigger smallmouth bass. I can get kind of mystic and full of hot air on the subject pretty easily. You can certainly catch a whole bunch of smallmouth by wading a lot of river and chucking and winding a curly tailed grub or a roostertail or a squarebilled crankbait. But I think over time if you slow down and fish a grub or other soft plastic by drifting it slowly thru good seams you will catch bigger smallmouth bass in rivers and streams. That is one of the real advantages of soft plastics in a river, we can endlessly tinker with retrieve and jighead weight and lure bulk to get the best presentation for any given spot. Anyway like I said I can get kinda full of hot air on this subject but hopefully I've given you a bit of food for thought and something else to try out on the water...