Ya pays your dues and ya takes your chances....

So a couple years ago we moved 20 minutes or south. Now my circle of "home water" that is comfortably reachable in the evenings from my house now includes some prime hybrid streams along with the typical smallmouth water I'm used to. It's been a bit of a learning curve. The main thing that took a bit of getting used to hybrid fishing is that you can seemingly be in the right place at the right time throwing the right bait and still catch nothing. My smallmouth are homebodies. Big ones are hard to come by but thru a combination of past experience, a bit of knowledge and avoiding overfished locations you can sometimes "know" you are at least fishing over nice smallmouth. But the hybrids you hooked yesterday might be a mile away chasing bait today or even out of your creek entirely. Or the opposite might just as easily be true. You might fish a good looking riffle for an hour catching nothing when all of a sudden the fish show up. These fish are true nomads. It takes a bit of faith and zen like patience and possibly a bit of masochism. The last few days have been pretty typical. The first day, striper genius Rob Orr and I went on an expedition to find some clear water running into our up and muddy rivers. What we found was a head high jungle of weeds and briars to wade and machete thru only to find we had to wade out thigh deep in flooded grass to even be able to cast at all. A few small stripey fish came to hand but the big guys were obviously somewhere else. A pretty serious paying your dues type day. The next morning found me catching one tiny hybrid (or was it a white bass? I didn't check) and a few ten inch largemouth. But on the bright side an eagle flew low overhead and an osprey flew by repeatedly. Then today fishing one of the spots Rob and I hacked our way into a few days prior this stud of a hybrid just absolutely crushed my swimbait.