Memorial Day Smallies

[Revtro]

Against my better judgment I got out on St. Clair on Memorial Day...but I'm sure glad I did.  We got out about 6:30am and headed South.  The water temps were hovering around 59-60 in the areas we were fishing.  We found a nice trench that dropped off to 12 ft up close to shore and started working it.  For fun, I started throwing topwaters and was getting bit on nearly every cast and a couple of times I had more than one fish fighting for my lure.  The only problem with all that...they were all Silver Bass.  Ok, so that wasn't what we were looking for, so we started to slowly work our way away from shore. 

Once out of the trench we were in 6FOW and started working out deeper and in a Northeasterly direction.  We started picking up a few good Smallies in 9FOW, but 10FOW was the deal.  And the deeper we got the bigger the bass got.  We did manage a few bloated females who didn't appear to have spawned yet, which was what we suspected we might find in the areas we were in.  The water wasn't as clear as we were hoping, so we couldn't see if we were over beds or not, so the speed of the action wasn't what it would have probably been if we'd be able to see the cover more clearly.  But nonetheless the action was steady. 

Unlike the other day when they wanted something green, purple was the color du jour.  We did manage a few on watermelon colored dropshot tubes, but when we switched it up to Canadian Mist, the fish really turned on.  The bite was best from the bottom.  We threw lipless baits, spinnerbaits, and Jerkbaits, but good ole fashioned tubes were what they wanted.  Interestingly the fish were all shortstriking.  All day long we learned that the fish needed to chew on it a second or two before we set the hook.  They just weren't aggressive and we needed to give them a chance to really get it.  It was a tedious way to fish but once we figured that out, it was a blast because we were catching good quality bass.

The bottom was classic smallie habitat.  Sparse weeds, with occasional big clumps, plenty of gravel and some boulders and rather large rock piles.  We got a lot of hangups in the rockpiles, but the bass were there. 

The most fun part of the day was figuring out how to get the followers to bite.  It was a blast to see a follower to a hooked fish and tossing a tube in front of his face and getting a double header.  It doesn't get any better than that.