Another dog trip- Smallie eggs ready to drop.

Here's food for thought. I played hooky today and went north with dog to exercise her and hopefully some kite string too.


Interesting day.

First, fishing still sucked unless snagging 18-22" redhorses hand over fist with a jerkbait for an hour counts. Finally found a use for them...



The fish above was a 20" specimen which is pretty large for this species. BTW, anyone know if these are greater redhorse? The school I was playing with was probably 20 fish all 18-24"....


But...the water was like looking into an aquarium with polarized glasses on. I saw some great big schools of big redhorse in the shallows snarfing on algae! Picked out some quillback bothering smallies near beds, a buffalo fish! Haven't seen fish sitting in the open in push water in 2-3 years in these numbers. Saw about a half dozen gar tried snagging them too. You could make out the shadows of moving, spooking fish for remarkable little noise caused.

BUT...

I counted no less than 10 fanned nests the size of big smallmouth. When I was able to see them from a high bank first without crunching up to the area, I witnessed paired up large smallmouth patrolling the area.

I had multiple pickups that didn't hook before I knew what was going on.

Couple fish to 15" and a couple of very obvious pick up and drops...

On the walk back, I finally figured out how to use pointer 78 type jerkbaits on stream and am kind of excited about it. Throw at front of laydown, two jerks to get it down, drift it past the side of laydown, twitch, drift.... mostly drift with the twitch coming to bring fish out of the cover. Drift like a fluke. Can walk the dog with slack line twitches. Should be the kind of precise fishing that will be a fun challenge in clear water. Caught a mess of dinks with this little guy below truly making me happy. Been a long time since I've caught one that small.

Here's hoping the big boys get the deed done and things stay dry. If they are ready to egg up near Delphi, then maybe that explains the funkiness. Seems like the little ones are waking up.

The other thought on one or two fish per spot is if the larger fish schooling in spawning pairs (or would be suitors ). Mike and I witnessed this beahviour on Sunday and true to form, the smallmouth I spotted from above were in following in spawning pairs. So catching one spooks the other..etc...