Last winter I read somewhere that 75 percent of a smallie’s diet is crayfish. I had just finished up a great fall season with over 20 smallies in the 17-20 inch range. Caught most of them on clousers. I tied up a variety of crawdads and was pleased with the way they looked and acted in the water. Trouble is that I didn’t catch nearly as many big fish this year as last. The flies I had my most success with this year was a wooly bugger (probably could be considered a crawdad imitation) and a black leach. The stream I fish the most has a TON!!! of minnows of varying sizes and while there are plenty of crawdads in the stream they are way outnumbered by minnows. Any thoughts or theories on what to fish would be appreciated. Had low water this spring and the fishing was decent, then had a couple of weeks with high water, then normal and then a month of high water and it continues to be running high even now.
What makes up any fish’s diet is going to vary by what is available in a given enviroment . I’ve caught smallmouth on imitations of minnows, crawfish, stoneflies, leaches and some things that defied nature.
My non-scientific opinion is, most of the time if you can put something infront of a smallmouth that looks alive and convince it that that ‘thing’ is trying to escape, it will generally hit it , if they are in a feeding or agressive mood.
When they don’t want to hit…pretty hard to change their minds.
For 25 years I have fished the same lake in Ontario. At the beginning there were plenty of crayfish in the rocks, now not so much. In the beginning (when I was beginning too) the successful flies were buggers in black (leeches) or olive (crayfish). For the last 3 or 4 years a SMALL minnow - mostly white - has been the answer, because the new perch minnows are more abundant than crayfish. I agree with the above, bass will key on the dominant forage, but mostly you can entice them to eat when they see something Twitch, Tremble and Twinkle.
Around here gear fishermen talk about hellgrammites being the best bait for smallies, although they talk about crayfish too. There’s a fair amount of smallie water around here, and I love fishing for them. #8-#12 Black, or brown and black wooly buggers or wooly worms do pretty good as an imitation for the hellgrammites, although I have seen actual hellgrammite flies at Slate Run Tackle Shop in PA.
The hellgrammite is the larval form of the Dobsonfly. Check out Troutnut.com for pictures and more information. They’re ugly suckers. Wikipedia has info too. I’d post links but I haven’t figured out how yet.
Here are those links:
The little SOB’s can BITE too!
I always wear gravel guards over my boots when I wet wade because I do NOT want one of those things swimming in where it doesn’t belong!
And if by “bite” you mean “take a limb off”, I can imagine they would!
My home smallmouth river also has a good population of hellgramites. Some big ones too!
For a hellgramite pattern, tie your buggers with rubber legs. The fish in my home waters seem to prefer the rubber legs every time.
For imitating some of those minnows, get ahold of a variety of streamers and experiment, until you find one that they key in on. Zonkers, muddler minnows, black ghosts, black nosed dace, mickey finns, whatever. Vary your presentation, play around.
A stream is a stream, and current is current. I imagine smallies try to stay out of the heavy current to conserve energy just like trout. Maybe the high water you’re talking about has made them change position in the stream.
Check out the warm water forum also. Maybe someone over there has talked about this very thing in the past.