More nighttime smallie action

Another predawn trip and another nice smallmouth. I've been doing so well before the sun comes up lately that I've been trying to find more information on smallmouth fishing at night and the predawn in rivers. Google searches turn up a few articles mostly on smallmouth fishing at night in deep clear reservoirs like Dale Hollow. In other words fishing that little or nothing to do with fishing shallow flowing rivers and streams. If you know of somewhere online that talks about smallie fishing at night in rivers please let me know. So even though I do not consider myself anywhere close to a night time river smallie expert there is so little out there I'll put out there how I do it. At least for me pre-midnight hasn't been nearly as good as 4 or 5 am. I don't know if bass just feed heavily as darkness falls and so it takes them a few hours to start feeding again or if bigger smallmouth simply wait till the very dead of night to come out and play. And the clearer the water the better the fishing is during the middle of the night. In more colored water the bass seem, at least to me, to wait till the sky is just starting to brighten before feeding. For sure in clear water or stained, the time from when the sky first begins to lighten till before the sun actually breaks the horizon is by far the best time to catch a big smallie when the river is low and the water warm. I almost never catch little 8 or 10 inch smallmouth at night, in fact I don't catch a lot of fish total at night. But the smallies I do catch average much larger than the ones I catch in daytime.
I've  kept my lure selection really simple. A big buzzbait and a big curly shad are about the only two things I've been throwing. In MY rivers a skirted jig fished on the bottom traditionally doesn't consistently produce bigger smallmouth. But I do intend to try one, I'm thinking the noise of the heavy jig clicking along the rocks on the bottom might attract fish after dark. I think the steady retrieve of the buzzbait helps the fish zero in on the bait in darkness. The curly shad I'm also retrieving at a slow steady simple pace. I'm thinking I might try an old fashioned jitterbug too after dark.  The two places I've done the best are in slow back eddys right next to really fast deeper water. Pretty deep for fast water in the river actually, both are probably mid chest to head deep runs and the slow water I'm catching the better fish in probably averages waist deep.
And yes that second pic is a cat that hammered the buzzbait in the dark last night. Pretty cool till that four pound smallie you are fighting rolls up and its really a channel cat...