Went out late afternoon to chase some smallies on the fly with a friend of mine from out of town. The weather was pretty decent, mostly cloudy with light rain coming and going for a couple of hours, then turned quite warm with more sun showing up. I started using a top water diver, with a few small hits. Scott was using a small minnow imitation with no luck either. I brough some spinning gear and put on some plastic worms to see if they were actually there and yep they were. Scott had never used a wacky style senko just using a plain hook. But it was catching fish.
We made a move over to a bay with some steep rocky banks and put on a deciever. We managed to get some light hits on the deciever and caught a few small fish with some plastic. Scott was having a blast using the plastic worm. I switched over to a crawfish imitation made by John from Great Lakes Fly Company.
Olive Estaz Crawfish
I will tell you he makes some tough flies. I was using the same fly for some small pike and large rock bass and of course some decent 14-17 smallmouth. The smallmouth were just hammering it. The fly still looks like the day I picked them up, the flies are made with some quality thats for sure.
We fish dock areas. Basically any type of deep structure that we could see with sparse weeds near the structure, but access to deeper water. We were fishing in less then 5 feet of water, which usually dropped out to 10' or more in a short period of time. The fish we found were using some type of overhanging structure, but did pull a few in some weeds.
The fish ranged from 10-18 inches, with quite a few over 15". It was a very fun day catching smallies using a fly bouncing along the botton near structure, then see your line getting pulled like a rocket, what a hoot! I think I might invest in some sinking tip line that I can attach to my floating line when fishing the Estaz.
Good luck out there and be safe.
Some photos of our trip. Thats Scott in the first photo and me in the second photo with some nice bass.
