Smallmouth Ecstasy - The Drake Magazine - Fall 2024

It was a misty September morning, and my buddy, Ryan and I had a short window to fish before careers and family lives called us back to reality. After shuttling a truck and gearing up, we walked along a nearby path and cut into the trees toward a spot I knew well from previous missions. The river was in excellent shape, surrounded by a forest slowly transitioning from summer’s bright greens to the reds, golds, and oranges of fall. We scrambled down a steep bank and crossed the river, feeling our way over a precarious chunk-rock bottom in water deep enough to challenge the top hem of our waders, before turning around and making casts down and across.  

Working downstream we peppered structure, depth, and flow with feather changers, bad hair days, circus peanuts, and rabbit strip zonkers, finding bold packs of resident smallmouth congregated near deeper holes. The lightning strikes of savage, sub-surface eats rattled our rods early and often with wolfpacked fish competing for prey. You gotta love this time of year. In a fairly short time, we landed around twenty fish, and were feeling pretty good about ourselves.  

A glance at my watch indicated that we still had a few minutes before we needed to hoof it back to the truck, so we agreed to fish one final run below our exit point. It was a deep, slow piece of water with broken rock along the bottom and a series of laydowns along the far bank. I tied on a white and yellow feather game changer, pulled some line off the reel, and sent a cast directly across the river. It landed elegantly a couple of feet from the fallen tree on the far bank before I mended, setting an upstream bow of line above the fly. 

Feeding it slack, I let the full intermediate pull the fly toward the bottom as it drifted downstream, finally achieving tension down and across. As the fly swung and slowly danced across the bottom, I got that fleeting feeling of certainty. Something about the tension on the line coupled with the speed and depth of the presentation told me it was in the zone, and that it was about to get blasted. I held on tight, waiting for the lightning strike… It didn’t come. The fly swung down below me and undulated solemnly in the current. “Damn it.” 

 I stripped it back, stepped down, and made another cast, but it was a flub and fell in a pile short of the mark. “Damn it,” I thought again. Fighting the urge to bring it back and re-cast, I took my medicine and instead let the line play out and swing across the stream. As it came parallel with the flow, and the fly approached the hang down, I felt weight in my hand. For a split second I thought I had found the bottom, and I almost let out a third – and this time audible - “damn-it!”, but then the weight throbbed and pulled. Game-on. Without a positive hook-set, I leaned on the fish and prayed to the smallmouth gods it didn’t come unbuttoned.  

As the fight escalated, Ryan thrashed upstream with a net. The fish dug deep, as most big smallies do, doubling my 7-wt over before darting toward the surface, providing us with a clean look at it. “That’s a 20! That’s a 20!”, Ryan yelled as he prepared to scoop the fish. Feeling moved by that commentary, I applied even greater side pressure to horse the fish in before catastrophe could occur. I’d searched unsuccessfully for a 20-inch smallmouth on this water for years, and now I had one on the line. Every tense second seemed like a minute, but the fish eventually began to fatigue. This was my chance.  I backpedaled, wheeling the fish back toward the near bank and Ryan struck with rare accuracy, netting it in one thrust. After fist bumps and expletives, as is customary following any successful high-pressure net job, we examined the beast and agreed that it was certainly a very large fish, but it required a true measurement before any labels could be given. After retreating to the shallows, we confirmed that it was indeed…not a 20-inch smallmouth. It was a little over 19-inches. Disappointment flashed momentarily before a wide smile swept across both of our faces. “It’s a 19!”, I exclaimed.  It was the largest smallmouth I’d ever caught in that system, and it came at the end of a great wade, with a great friend, and on an awful cast. My search for a 20 continues, but I’ll forever look back fondly on that session, and the 19 that capped it off.