Time not spent on the three rivers...

I spend an inordinate amount of time fishing three rivers here in SW Ohio for smallmouth bass.  They are pretty much my home waters. Let them be unfishable for a week and I'm okay. I love fishing below the big dams on the Ohio but they are too far away to fish every evening. Same with mountain trout streams. I'm okay with wading tiny creeks with the fly rod or fishing a farm pond or gravel pit for big bluegills or largemouth. But that seems a bit like a bachelor party at a strip club, fun at the time but not something a gentleman (or a river rat) spends a lot of time on.  This is all coming from a guy that fishes a half dozen states most years. But time after time, three or four days a week year round I can be found haunting these three rivers. And once they are unfishable much past a week I start to feel it. Just this morning I turned the alarm off and slept in on a perfectly good morning rather than hit the pond I'd planned on fishing.
But a fisherman has to fish. I'd rather spend an evening trying to catch minnows out of a ditch with sewing thread than attend a birthday party or go out to dinner with too large a crowd or any of a thousand other indoor activities that don't involve water but instead too many people.
Like I said a fisherman has to fish and with my smallmouth streams not cooperative I did find a way to spend some quality time on one of my favorite rivers by catching catfish. I caught six. Two nice channels, three small ones and a shovelhead. Unlike many of my smallmouth fishing addicts I don't look down on catfish at all. If pressed to name my favorite fish I'd name smallmouth first and then hybrid stripers and shovelheads tied for second. In fact I've written before on how I think your average nice channel cat has much more in common with a 20 inch smallmouth than a 10 inch smallmouth does. And it shows in how I caught these. I was hoping for a nice smallmouth so I hit a favorite stretch of one my rivers. Just one problem it was a up and muddy and still rising. Not so perfect conditions to catch a big smallie but perfect for cats. Six cats, all on Vic's paddletail swimbait. Zero smallmouth.
Then a trip to a pond for some big bluegill on the fly. Which got a bit exciting when a big largemouth hammered a small bluegill on the way in. I began stripping line off the reel like crazy feeding line to fish as it slowly swam off with my bluegill. After what seemed like forever I tightened down and set the hook. The little 4wt bent into the cork with the weight of a fish way too large for it. After having the fish on for over a minute and thinking I might actually have a chance the hook just came free. Or at least out of the bluegill. It's hard to say if a tiny fly in a bluegill in a bass ever actually made it into the bass.
I think we are now at about two weeks without a smallmouth bigger than 18 inches. It's probably been January since that's happened and it's getting old quick. But the water on a favorite stretch of nice fish water should be perfect in a couple days so maybe we can fix that....