# Food for thought



## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

I have been kicking around the idea of writing another book. It would be mostly fishing of course with a little bit of hunting and other outdoors thrown in. I was thinking this might be an okay place to jot down some thoughts ideas musings etc since 95% of what I do is fishing in southwestern Ohio. Maybe I will add something every week or two. Anyway I thought I would start with wintertime fishing.

Well the weather has finally broken. It seems like it's good a time as any to talk about one of my favorite subjects wintertime smallmouth fishing. I do not have all the answers, far from it, anyone that says they do is full of it. I do feel I do okay and catch a few trophy smallmouth every winter. So I thought I'd throw out there how I go about it. First off I know completely nothing about fishing in lakes. I'm a stream fisherman thru and thru. Everything I say will apply to rivers and streams only.
I'm a nut about tracking studies. I would rather read one tracking study done by a university than 10 articles in bassmaster magazine. And tracking study after tracking study has shown that bass in different streams do completely different things but also do exactly the same things. Let me explain.
In some streams a bass may migrate 30 yards to spend the winter and in some rivers might migrate 30 miles. And anything in between. And it can vary wildly in the same river. The fish might move a hundred yards in one part of the river and 3 miles in another. 
But in reality they are all doing the same thing. A bass is looking to spend the winter somewhere it can get out of the current in all flows of the river. If when the river is flooding your eddy breaks down then it isn't any good. And one thing I have learned is that it doesn't have to be a very big spot. Yes the big classic wintering hole has a lot of fish but also there's plenty of places that two fish or three fish or something can tuck in and spend the winter. It took me way too long to figure that out. It just has to have sufficient habitat all winter long.
Those same tracking studies show that for the most part if a bass spends his summer in one stretch of river he spends every summer of his life there and he migrates to the same places to overwinter. So if it takes a bass 10 or 12 years to get to be trophy size and you catch one in winter you know that that spot is good for bass to overwinter year after year. 
I honestly think you could wintertime bass fish in rivers the rest of your life and just use one lure and never have a need for any others. And that lure is a lead-headed jig. You could use a hair jig, skirted jig, or in my case (since I know a guy in the lurebusiness) a soft plastic grub or tube. If I had to bet my life on catching a winter time small mouth bass I would use a smoked metal flake 3inch grub probably. You almost never catch enough bass in the dead of winter too narrow down which color they prefer. I throw something natural like a smoke metal flake grub or something bright like chartreuse metal flake. And give them a choice of one or the other. 
In the middle of winter I don't think what you put on that lead-headed jig is nearly as important as the jig head itself. I'm a soft plastic fanatic so I mold a thousand or two jigheads a year. You will have out of that many quite a few where the mold wasn't hot enough or the lead wasn't hot enough or something that causes that jig head not to fill the cavity completely. So you end up with a hook for a quarter ounce jig head that maybe only has a 16th or a 10th of an ounce of lead on it. I do not re-mold those I save all those for winter time fishing. 
The idea is that you match the weight of the jig head to the water you are fishing. Even though you were trying to find somewhere out of the main flow, it is a river after all and there will be some current no matter how imperceptible. Taking that and the depth of the spot in the consideration you try to use the lightest jig head that will get you down to the fish. The idea is that you chuck it out there and it slowly circles the bowl moving as slow as possible without getting hung up on the bottom. You reel more to keep slack out of the line than to retrieve the lure. 
With this kind of fishing a strike is likely to just be a sort of mushy weight on the line. After fishing for an hour or so in 35° weather having that mushy weight turn into a nice smallmouth can seem like voodoo or magic sometimes.
Back in the day there used to be warm water discharges into our rivers. Those are few and very far between nowadays. There are tho what are termed cold water discharges from things like wastewater treatment plants or factories that use river water to cool their machinery. When the river gets really cold these can sometimes be several degrees warmer than the river. Mostly these kinds of places draw rough fish like carp or suckers but if there is a wintering hole nearby they can have smallmouth in them when the fish are in the mood to bite. But there needs to be a wintering hole close for such spots to produce a trophy.
It has been my experience that you want the last day or two of a week long warming spell. That water warming from 39 to 40 degrees is better that even water cooling from 45 to 44. But like anything else the more effort you put into it the better your chances, I also once caught a 20 inch smallie when in was 6 degrees out. I also think as winter wears on bass become hungrier and more likely to bite at the same water temperature than they did in late fall. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking, but it feels that way to me. 
In the winter our streams can get extremely clear. Under those conditions I usually throw 6 lb test 8 if the water is not perfectly clear. Let's face it the fish are reluctant to bite the water is clear and our bait is moving as slow as we can possibly make it move light line is going to up your catch rate. I would much rather use 4 lb test than 10. Heck Billy Westmoreland used 4 lb test in winter to catch 10 lb smallmouth out of Dale hollow lake back in the day. 
If it is the tail end of a warming trend I find that bass in the mood to bite are usually located right where the soft mucky bottom of the hole first meets firm gravel or rock. Also a 45° gravel bank in our hole that faces the afternoon sun is somewhere that a fish in the mood to bite might locate on. I find it much more difficult to get a bite over the soft mucky bottom of the whole itself. Of course many of the small one or two fish over wintering spots may not have a soft bottom at all since they are basically just a little cut in the bank or a spot behind a huge piece of concrete rubble or bridge abutment.
In late fall after the leaves have fell you will often see back waters and eddies that have a slowly revolving lid of leaves on them. These are prime spots to look for a wintering hole. Often I have waded out into them and waded around seeing what the bottom is like. Even though the universal term is wintering hole it does not need to be super deep I find mid-chest is plenty deep enough. What is important is that there is protection from the current that protection can be depth but it does not necessarily have to be. 
There you have it my simple uncomplicated system of winter time smallmouth fishing. I just wish it wasn't sometimes so doggone hard. You can fish all day for two strikes or you can go out and catch a trophy in 5 minutes you just never know.


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## RodsInTheMud (3 mo ago)

oldstinkyguy said:


> I have been kicking around the idea of writing another book. It would be mostly fishing of course with a little bit of hunting and other outdoors thrown in. I was thinking this might be an okay place to jot down some thoughts ideas musings etc since 95% of what I do is fishing in southwestern Ohio. Maybe I will add something every week or two. Anyway I thought I would start with wintertime fishing.
> 
> Well the weather has finally broken. It seems like it's good a time as any to talk about one of my favorite subjects wintertime smallmouth fishing. I do not have all the answers, far from it, anyone that says they do is full of it. I do feel I do okay and catch a few trophy smallmouth every winter. So I thought I'd throw out there how I go about it. First off I know completely nothing about fishing in lakes. I'm a stream fisherman thru and thru. Everything I say will apply to rivers and streams only.
> I'm a nut about tracking studies. I would rather read one tracking study done by a university than 10 articles in bassmaster magazine. And tracking study after tracking study has shown that bass in different streams do completely different things but also do exactly the same things. Let me explain.
> ...


Excellent start on Chapter 1…. 👍😁


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## kycreek (May 31, 2006)

Good read...


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## Pike (Apr 7, 2004)

I always enjoy your posts, but this one is outstanding. Thank you!


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## mn4 (Oct 14, 2020)

Awesome post - I’d definitely buy the book. Love reading your posts so I’m sure the book would be awesome. Plus I need something new so I don’t have to keep re-reading Holschlag’s book all the time - LOL. There’s a guy named Allbraid that posts in the Central Ohio forum about winter smallie fishing (I’m sure you’ve seen his posts over the years - heck you may have even fished with him for all I know). You guys should team up and do one of those “ask me anything” deals that famous people do on social media - except do it here…with normal people…talking about something that’s actually cool.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

some old stuff...
I guess I was 17 when I first got the key to the gate. The gate blocked entrance to what I'm sure was just about the best farm pond in Ohio. I guess it was about the size of the average gravel pit maybe a little smaller. You could clearly see someone on the other bank but you couldn't be 100% certain who they were.
The old man that owned the place was a cranky old curmudgeon that didn't seem to really like me. Though I was only one of a handful of people he let on the farm. I think what he did like was that I never kept any fish, I was there all the time, and I watched the place like a hawk. He never had to worry about it when I was there. The fishing was amazing. You never caught less than 20 or 30 fish a day and I think the one year that I kept track I caught almost 3o 5 lb Bass. My brother caught the biggest though, a giant over seven and a half. There was a bush that stuck out of the water and he even called his shot like Babe Ruth. He threw a big oversized Zara spook past it and said watch this. The spook swung out away from the bush then back towards the bush then disappeared in a boil like a concrete block being dropped from an airplane. 
I also had a few days that were among the most amazing fishing experiences I have ever had. I got to the pond one afternoon and mayflies were hatching by the thousands. There was slight breath of wind that had all of the downed mayflies blowing onto the same bank. This bank was probably 150 yards long and had a thin scattering of reeds all along it. It seemed every panfish and baitfish in the lake was in these thin reeds gorging on the mayflies. I fished out of a belly boat and threw an unweighted plastic worm up to the bank and slithered it back out towards the deep water. For the next three days it was hard for that worm to make it far from the bank before a bass nailed it. I caught over 200 bass each day. I worked in my father's tackle store at the time and was used to outrageous fish stories so I didn't tell anyone but my brother for several years about those three days. I didn't want it spoiled in my memory by disbelief. 
On this bank I also once saw a panfish that looked like a dinner plate on the nest. But I was a dumb kid who thought he was a big time bass fisherman and never tried to catch it. I still kick myself for being such a young stupid punk and not catching that fish. To this day forty years later it is still one of the most impressive fish I have ever seen. We caught several one pound to pound and a half gills out of this pond and this fish dwarfed those. Stupid kid. 
I did try really hard to catch a big bass. There was an old aluminum row boat and I don't know how many nights I spent floating on that lake throwing a big musky jitterbug or a giant two ounce willow leaf spinner bait trying to top my brother's big fish. But I never did, I'm pretty sure it was the biggest fish in the lake. 
I did finally catch my ten pounder but that was down south. My biggest Ohio bass is another seven and a half that I caught out of a pond hidden in the woods at a local wildlife area. That fish hit while I was fishing out of a float tube and spun me around in circles and towed me a little bit. 
I'm pretty well stuck now on catching smallmouth out of streams but if I tried to catch a big largie now knowing what I do now I'd probably stick to the same lures and tactics but I'd concentrate more on the many gravel pits that dot the southern Ohio landscape. Lately I have found out that night fishing our streams is where the future of trophy smallmouth fishing lies in my little part of the world.
But more on that later, I want to tell you about the trophy I caught that I didn't even know how big it was at the time. This fish also involved night fishing. I was again a dumb teenager and was trying to catch a big smallmouth. I'd just met Billy Westmoreland and also had gotten to go fishing with legendary guide Benny McBride on Dale hollow. We fished short armed strike king spinnerbaits, dropping them down rocky banks at night. Later trying to apply what I'd learned, I was dropping a short armed spinnerbait down a rocky bank on the Ohio river when a nice fish hit. It was over 20 inches and probably 4 and a half pounds. This was way back in the day and I kept it to have it mounted. My father was an accomplished taxidermist and was wanting a big smallie for his display. Well in the light of day my big smallie wasn't a big smallie at all but a brute of a spotted bass! Dad was a great taxidermist. When he retired Bass Pro shops bought all the mounts in his show room and I've been able to recognize several of his mounts in the different bass pros I've been in. (As you go down the escalator at the Cincy store that big tom turkey strutting on that limb is mine btw)


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## thedudeabides (Apr 13, 2009)

Thank you for waxing nostalgic. Well written and insightful as always.


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## Saugeyefisher (Jul 19, 2010)

Please keep em coming stinky! Thanks!


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

That feeling of leaving behind the world I'm used to didn't begin in the boundary waters. It didn't even begin in Ely. It began at a stop sign on a two lane way back on a two lane at the very edge of the Superior National Forest. There on the other side of the road stood the Antler Inn. A run down bar with a twenty year old pickup and two four wheelers parked outside, a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign glowing neon in the window. It was about as far removed from Cincinnati Ohio as you are ever going to get. I sighed, looked at this s#%thole bar I'd never laid eyes on before and felt instantly at home. And that feeling of ease just kept getting stronger. All thru Ely, then at the outfitters to spend the night and then on the long boat ride up Moose Lake with the canoes lashed to rack on top. Then the deep quiet as the sound of the boats motor slowly faded leaving us the short portage into Birch Lake. The first of many portages in the BWCA. Into heaven. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness or simply the BWCA is a 1,090,000 acre wilderness on the Canadian border in northern Minnesota. Abutting the BWCA in Canada is Quetico Provincial Park, 1,180,000 acres of wilderness. So well over two million acres of roadless wilderness where no motors of any kind are allowed. This entire area is a vast network, maze really, of tiny ponds, brooks, rivers and lakes both huge and small piled one atop another in absolute chaos carved out by the last ice age. You better not get lost in there. You cannot get lost in there, they might just not find you.

Dave and I had two solo canoes from the outfitter. Lightweight kevlar ones in which paddling was no longer a chore but a pleasure. Sometimes there is real pleasure in having the right tool for the job. Each day at dawn we would go our separate ways, completely on our own till we met up at camp before dark. I felt completely alone but never lonely. It was just the place I was supposed to be. And I wasn't alone, loons called their haunting cries across the waters, otters caught fish or played along the banks, in one bay a cow moose and her nearly grown calf stood in chest deep water eating lily pads as a grand bull moose stood nearby staring at me unafraid. Floating there in my little canoe watching those magnificent moose was one of those pure moments that unfortunately come so seldom in a life dominated by bills and worried and responsibility.

I distinctly remember thinking you will always have this moment, this here, this now. Bands of birches, their leaves turned into golden flames by the years first frost lined distant hills. Thoughts, worries, cares slipped away like water over these ancient stones. Some of the most ancient rocks on the planet, too old to have fossils, predating even life itself. The same crisp mornings that produced such gorgeous fall colors had me thankful for fleece long johns and my wool hat. A hat I was too self conscious to wear back home. A hat Fred Bear or Lee Wulff might have worn back in the day. But out here no one was around to think I was putting on airs. I was free to wear it simply because I liked it and it was immensely practical.

Every day was as long or as short as it really was. Morning sliding into mid day, slipping into evening, like the bars of a good poem following one another. Even the tedium of camp chores was anything but tedious. In the quiet of the north woods the sound of the tiny camp stove was clear from thirty feet, the coals of a dying fire visible a half mile away across a still dark lake. One night I heard sniffing just outside my tent. Some small animal I thought, hopefully it would show up on the trail camera I had strapped to a tree a few feet from the tent. A week later back home looking at the images captured by the trail camera, that small animal would turn out to be a very large bear.

The fishing was slow in the cooling water but never boring. When you caught a fish as often as not it would turn out to be huge, much larger than any you were liable to catch back home. And no matter the size each felt somehow more fierce, certainly more wild out here.

An eagle flew overhead. Then another swooped down and the two turned in an aerial cartwheel before going their separate ways. I caught myself thinking of telling my father about it. Then realising I never could, not anymore. I sat there for a moment, the only sound that of water dripping off the paddle that lay across my lap. Would my stepsons feel the same way? Or when left someday with my fathers and grandfathers guns, will those things priceless to me just be burdens to them? relics of dead men long past?

The woods can do that to you if you are not careful. Wilderness can lay bare your soul and brush aside all the extraneous till only the truth remains, no matter how gentle or harsh. If you are going to spend significant time alone in the wild you best be comfortable in your own skin. Hopefully you can make peace with your demons and realize you aren't such a bad guy after all, give yourself a break. Here as far from your normal life as you can ever get you will find yourself.

I remember camping on this large island on the Great Miami River back home. It was early summer and I was camped reasonably close to this great blue heron rookery. It was a dead calm night and I was tending a little campfire. The light of the fire flickered off of the bushes and the trunks of some huge sycamores. Every now and then the quiet was broken by a cry of one of the birds in the rookery. And I distinctly remember thinking this is the way it's supposed to be. I guess some people are made for society and business and all the trappings of a modern life. And some of us aren't.

I hear people say they go fishing to get away. When I float the Little Miami or the Great Miami for a couple days I don't feel like I'm getting away I feel like I'm going home. The last overnighter I made this fall a lady at work asked me wasn't I afraid camping on the river by myself. I answered no I'm honestly more uncomfortable when I stop at the speedway to get gas on the way to the river.
At least once a week all summer someone will read one of my fishing posts on Facebook and message me. I love your stories, I want to go fishing with you, I'd like to see how you approach a river, let's go fishing.
I find these really awkward. I'm sure they are wonderful people. Heck I'm sure half of them could probably fish circles around me. I'm a social misfit. I don't go to the river to fellowship. I know sharing the day with a friend means an awful lot to a lot of people. And it's a failing of mine that I don't do that. I'm the one missing out.
I'm finally old enough, self-aware enough, to realize I'm made that way. I really can't help it. If we meet at a fishing tackle show or at a bar, I will happily talk fishing with you for hours. I will get a lot out of it. I will enjoy it immensely. After all this is my life, it's what makes me happy and I do enjoy talking about it. But don't get upset I'm probably not going to go fishing with you. Nothing against you. Fishing is where I meditate, fishing is my therapy. And God knows I could use some therapy.


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## RodsInTheMud (3 mo ago)

Wow that’s some more great stuff stinky!


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## Hawg Wobbler 52 (Nov 19, 2021)

What's the name of your 1st book. You have hooked me and I want to read more....


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## 9Left (Jun 23, 2012)

good read stinky… I have your "knee deep " book… Very enjoyable book( chris sold me that doen at fishermans quarters).... Look forward to another one...👍


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

halcyon

Halcyon is a small stream, a short cast across mostly, a long cast across at it's widest. About three quarters of a mile before it hits the main river it hooks sharply and runs alongside the river separated by about a hundred and fifty to two hundred yards before hooking again and joining the river. I think halcyon used to run straight into the river instead of hooking into a lengthy detour because if you continue straight from the hook to the river the ground is a low swampy mucky mess creating what is essentially a large island surrounded by river, small stream, and swamp. Here on the island gigantic sycamores approaching record size grow. I almost always encounter deer or wild turkey, and at one time or another I've seen everything from eagles, raccoons, coyotes and foxes to box turtles and skinks. In late spring and early summer huge stick nests high in the giant trees echo with the cries of a great blue heron rookery. These huge pterodactyl looking birds gliding in out of the treetops always give the island a "land that time forgot" feel to me. Like all quiet places it's very noisy because you actually register in your brain the sounds you hear instead of not even hearing them like you do in the rest of your life.
As you kayak down the river a large rock marks the landing. Cylinder shaped and waist high I've given it the unglorious label of the "garbage can". But beaching the yak on the tiny gravel bar in front of the garbage can always feels like coming home. I will pull the yak up the bank and back out of sight into the paw paw and spicebush. I then shoulder the pack and strike out across the island to camp. Straight across the island from the garbage can is a beautiful little clearing carpeted in grasses, moss, and ferns atop a high bank overlooking the creek. Sitting on a fallen log in camp you can look down a hundred yards of creek. Rare is the breakfast eaten here that isn't accompanied by wildlife watching. Shoved under the fallen log is a grate I salvaged from an old grill at home and a folded up tarp. The grate is propped up on some rocks carried up from the creek. Dug out of the pack and on another large flat rock is placed a small backpacker style stove, a pot, a tin cup, a bowl and a spork. The kitchen is now complete.
A rope is strung from the base of a small tree to as high up another tree as I can reach. The tarp is thrown across this and is stretched tightly in a diamond shape. Two corners stretched along the rope with prusik knots and the other corners tied out to stakes. Under the tarp goes a ground cloth and a sleeping bag. The pack is then hung from a cut off limb on another tree and camp is complete. I then usually spend a few minutes gathering firewood so I won't have to waste those precious minutes right before dark that are better spent fishing.
If it is still early in the day this is the time I'll usually shoulder the day pack holding tackle, water bottle and snacks and start hiking up Halcyon. I will cross the stream at the first riffle and follow the stream along the other bank to avoid the swampy ground mentioned earlier. Once the stream leaves the flat river bottom I veer away fifty or sixty yards till I hit the remains of an old roadbed melting back into the woods. All that is left now is a flat bench carved into the hillside above the creek. After about a ten or fifteen minute walk the old road angles down the hillside to cross the stream at the site of a long forgotten mill dam. Once you hike more than a half mile from the river I've never caught a smallmouth longer than around a foot longer. Except for here that is. Sometime in the distant past what I think might be the remains of the old mill were pushed into the stream and right up against the dam. I guess this was done to keep the dam from being undercut over time and washed out. This creates smallie habitat like no other. Well, no I take that back. On the Great Miami there used to be a small dam that had the exact same conditions. This was unfortunately bulldozed level by some government agency three or four years ago so I know it can exist in other places. In fact when researching my book on the Little Miami River I learned there was at one time or another fifty mills on the mainstem of the river and another three hundred on the tribs! All that on one fair to middling sized river system, so my secret smallmouth habitat surely exists elsewhere. But here, here is special. It would be probably waist deep if all the rubble wasn't here. But instead six or ten inches under the water in most places lies the rubble, big chunks of broken concrete. And then between the chunks are huge cracks ranging from a few inches to maybe a foot across but many seem reach all the way to the actual stream bed. So hiding down in the cracks are smallmouth growing big and fat on abundant food rushing over them while they lay there out of the current hidden. I sometimes catch some so conditioned to their specific hide that they are almost completely black in color while a fish ten feet away will be normally colored. The drill is you climb on top of the rubble, wading slower than you have ever waded in your life so you don't step in one of those leg breaking cracks. Instead of the normal eight pound test you would use on a creek this size you put on the extra spool that is filled with braided line and you lower a grub into each crack. The strikes are sudden and with just a couple feet of line out past the rod tip violent. It's like no fishing I've ever seen and turns everything I've always known about small stream fishing on it's head. One day as a sort of experiment or maybe stunt I guess, I went into the nearby woods and cut a long limber pawpaw sapling. I know, pawpaw isn't the strongest of woods but it does grow very straight and skinny. I tied on a few feet of heavy braid and a jighead and grub. Wading wet on a hot summer day, hoisting smallmouth out of the creek on a line tied to a stick, I felt like Huck Finn. 
There is another big chunk of concrete rubble on another stream that I have consistently caught smallmouth under that are almost black even though if you catch a bass ten feet away it has normal coloration. I'd love to know how long a bass has to stay in a spot for that to happen. Hours? Days? Longer? I wish I knew more about it. 
The water below the little dam at Halcyon doesn't freeze even though the rest of the stream will because of the current. I've caught bass in the cracks in late October when they should have left for a wintering hole. Do they spend the winter in those cracks? They certainly could I'd think. And tucked down at the bottom of a crack they would be out of current even in a wintertime flood. Another thing I wish I knew more about. 
I try to limit myself and not fish this spot too much. After all it's a small dam and there are only so many cracks. I think even one guy if he beat it to death could abuse it. I'll often just fish the stream and leave it alone. But it's nice having these fish up my sleeve if the fishing is rough that trip.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

The old trestle is a fine bit of architecture. The actual rail bed itself, the bridge I guess, sits on three columns of huge stone blocks which create four passageways between them. There is probably on average twenty to twenty five feet of height to each passageway. Under the two middle passages runs the stream through two concrete tunnels. Each tunnel is about shoulder deep with a couple feet of that being above the water line in normal pool. The top of these tunnels is covered in dirt and fill. So you can walk across the stream and fish each side and the tunnels themselves . Each tunnel is about 20 ft long roughly. Dark current filled tunnels that alternatively at one time or another each hold shovelheads, hybrid stripers and smallmouth bass. The trestle is located right in the roughest part of town and I was one of the few brave enough or more likely dumb enough to to fish it. It is actually fenced off by a high chain link fence but whoever built it conveniently set the last fence post just far enough from the stone trestle you could squeeze through. No fat men ever fished under the trestle. A walking path ran along the outside of the fence through the first passageway which wasn't fenced. Then inside the fence are the two openings with the stream running through them and then one more opening that is up on the bank on the far side. The drill was to stand above the tunnels and fish a swim bait directly under the rod tip. The fish held tight to the walls of each tunnel or to the walls leading into the tunnels. Whenever the river was up often a big puddle would be formed on top of the tunnels in the earthen fill right in the center of each passage. So to get from one end of the tunnels to the other to fish you would circle out and use the far passageway which is on the bank. The first time I saw her I literally just about ran over her while tying on a jig and walking at the same time. I was cutting through the far passageway intent on my knot. I wasn't paying attention and I surely wasn't expecting a beautiful woman to be sitting cross legged on a blanket under a railroad bridge either. She had on a white tank top with a bright blue bra peeking out from underneath and nylon running shorts. She was brushing her hair. She had very pretty hair. I found out later that her name was Sarah. The next time I saw her she was asleep in the same spot on the blanket wearing a red tank top with the same blue bra and running shorts. We never spoke more than to say hi the first four or five times I saw her. That year the water level seemed to stay perfect to fish the trestle and I fished there a lot. I remember catching the same 20 inch smallmouth bass three times in about a month. He had a split fin that made it easy to tell it was the same fish. Mostly I saw Sarah alone but sometimes there was an older man with her. One day he was on the outside of the fence as I walked up the bike path towards the trestle. She was on the inside talking to him through the fence. As I neared they finished their conversation and he walked away passing me. I'd just been to Wendy's and had a $5 bill in my pocket. I walked up to the fence and stuck it through. She walked over grasp the money and held on waiting for just a second before pulling it away from my hand. Looking me right in the eyes, she said very quietly "thank you" and turned away.

Like I said the fishing was good that year and I fished there a lot. If she saw me, often she would walk down, sitting nearby while I fished. Sometimes she would talk about her life, sometimes she was quiet. I learned she had lived with the older man and his wife. I cannot remember the circumstances but his wife had died the previous year. He lost the house and that was how they ended up here under the trestle. He worked some odd jobs cleaning in a factory which is why he wasn't always there. It was also obvious they both had some sort of a drug habit. Which probably explains losing the house.

Besides me there was an albino who fished the trestle often. I fished with lures for smallmouth bass and hybrids while he fished live baits for shovelhead so we really didn't compete. He told me he had seen needles lying around their camp tho I never saw any.

I think the trestle taught me more about reading water than anywhere I've ever fished. Water flows swiftly over seemingly featureless concrete walls but over time patterns began to emerge. Patterns that with my limited knowledge at the time I was powerless to explain. Which then sent me down the rabbit hole of researching things like hydrology and fluid dynamics and sometimes just SWATs. SWATs is an acronym for scientific wild ass theory by the way.

At the ends of each column wedge shaped structures stuck upstream and down and in many flows a whirling vortex will peel off of one side of the edge and then the other, creating alternating vortex on the surfaces they slipped around away downstream. With a little research I found out that these were called a karman Street vortex. Fish can lie downstream of the point and by rhythmically bowing their body first one way and then the other in time with the flow a fish can catch the upstream swirl of each vortex and hold in one place without much of an effort while the stream brings dinner.

Some of the very biggest fish at the trestle, those 19 and 20 inch smallies, seemed to love some of the fastest and seemingly most featureless walls right in the middle of the swiftest current. But looking down on these walls from above you could often see a tiny wedge of turbulence form and then continue down the wall. Often this would extend only out from the wall five or six inches but it might continue down the wall for 8 or 10 ft. It seems the fast flowing current flows along the edge of the wall slowly dragging further and further behind the rest of the current until It breaks free and creates a wedge of turbulence or in simple English a calmer spot for a big fish to tuck in and once again have dinner brought right to him.

Simple English was often in short supply when researching this stuff. For example here is just one sentence from an article on boundary layer separation: "it is evidence that the primary two-dimensional instability originates from the free shear in the bubble as the free shear is inviscidly unstable via the Kelvin-Helmoltz mechanism".
And in some papers that gibberish can go on for pages and pages I think sometimes you throw enough vocabulary at the problem to cover the fact that you are not 100% certain about what is really going on.

Sarah was not interested in all of that. Often she would sit nearby brushing her hair and watching me fish. Since I fished often early and late in the day, the running shorts would sometimes be replaced with yoga pants and there was no bra peeking out the tank top. I kept expecting someone so out of place among the 40 to 60 year old male bums you usually see in such a situation to be gone the next time I showed up to fish. But she seemed content to just sit by the river and let the world go by without her that summer. One warm afternoon as I fished down the bank about 20 yards away, Sarah tended a pot of water on the fire. She then carried the water towards the middle of her passageway where would be hard for anyone to see her, except for me of course fishing 20 yards away. Using a wash rag she washed her arms, face and neck and then the pulled the tank top over her head and washed her upper body. She slid down her shorts and underwear and bathed herself 20 yards away completely nude. When she finished she poured the leftover water the from the pot over her head and then unhurriedly toweled off and dressed. She then walked over by me and sat down on a piece of wall and brushed her hair while I fished.

I think at least one of the two of them was receiving some sort of assistance check along with the money from his odd jobs. Over the course of the summer I guess I gave her 50 bucks, a five or $10 bill at a time, and brought an extra sandwich from Wendy's a few other times. Once I stopped in the Family Dollar about a half mile down the road to buy some pop before fishing and she was in there shopping. She had a few personal hygiene items and some cookies which I just paid for along with my pop.

So I helped her out a little bit but not much really, most of the time we just talked while I fished. Fall came in and then it got colder. They still slept under the trestle, just under a bigger pile of ratty blankets. 75 yards upstream of the tunnel was a long straight concrete wall along one bank to control erosion. The upper end of this wall then curved over maybe 10 ft into the bank. Here in this curve some of the strongest current in the stream hit full force. The water at the walls lower end was knee deep and slow. To be such an unconventional spot it really had all the makings of a classic fall smallmouth spot.

Now bundled up in a hoodie and sweatpants Sarah tended to her fire under the trestle most days while I fished. And the fishing was amazing. Right along the curved section of wall, big smallie after a big smallie attacked my jig. I literally could carefully approach the wall and dunk a grub or swimbait on a jig head right along the wall. The drill was simple enough really. I used a longer six and a half or 7 ft fishing rod and about 7 or 8 feet of line. I would creep up to the wall and flip the jig upstream and lower and then raise and then lower the rod again to try and keep the tight line to the jig. The bait then swept downstream. When the jig passed me I would often just let it hang in the current before flipping it back upstream. Often this period of hanging in the current with the tail of the grub or swim bait working while the bait just hung in place drew the most strikes, some days all of the strikes. I experimented with how long to let it hang there. Sometimes it would swim for a minute or even two before drawing a strike. These were violent strikes. With the short line and often very big fish it was all very exciting. Most of the hybrid stripers were also caught in this fashion.

There was about a two-week period where I caught at least one Fish Ohio smallmouth every day. A Fish Ohio fish is one of a length designated by the department of natural resources as being a trophy. One day I fished across the bank from the wall. As I worked my way up to it I cast across the stream to the wall. The grub landed perfectly an inch just so off the wall and drifted about a foot before being hammered. It was a smallmouth a bit longer than 21 inches that looked short it was so fat. This obese giant probably weighed 5 1/2 and considering I wasn't in Tennessee or the Great lakes but on the stream in Southern Ohio it was an astounding smallmouth.

And then it rained an inch in 24 hours and then another half inch in the next. The stream shot straight up, ending the fishing and forcing Sarah and her friend to leave their camp. When the water dropped the fish was gone and so was Sarah. It was late in the year anyways and I can't imagine they were planning on staying much longer although I caught more fish that fall I never called another big small mouth there the rest of that year and I never saw Sarah again and The trestle never gave up big fish again like it didn't numbers it did that year. It was like when Sarah left she took some of the places magic with her...


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

Hawg Wobbler 52 said:


> What's the name of your 1st book. You have hooked me and I want to read more....


I'm sorry but I don't think there are any copies available right now of anything I've written.


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## RodsInTheMud (3 mo ago)

oldstinkyguy said:


> I'm sorry but I don't think there are any copies available right now of anything I've written.


Just keep the posts coming, I feel like I’m already reading your book! 👍


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

One of the things that the internet age has brought us is a brand new sport, spot hacking. I know, I spent half the winter at it when the weather is just too bad to go out and actually fish. I can think of a few great successes. Once a few years ago a fellow posted a picture of himself and the 20 inch smallmouth bass. In the background was a nondescript section of riverbank with nothing notable in the background. Nothing that is except for an electrical tower and a set of wires crossing the river. On his post under his name he had posted his hometown, a Larry from Lima sort of throw away tagline. 

So first I brought his town up on Google maps. Now his hometown wasn't on the river. But it was only five or six miles away from a pretty good smallmouth stream. So I then zoomed in on the river about 20 miles downstream. Really tight, as close as Google maps would let me zoom and then began crawling the mouse upstream. A few minutes later, voila! Towers and wires crossing the river. The next evening I drove out to test my theory. I parked the truck, grabbed my rod, and headed over the bank to the river. And there he was standing there fishing his hotspot! 

Sometimes it's just that easy. Sometimes it's harder of course. You have to match bits of different photos and try to name unnamed features. Stuff like trying to match the piece of a smoke stack sticking above the trees with photos of power plants in the area you find on Google images. Or take tiny snippets of text from two or three different posts and add them together. It can become a sport all unto its own. And I'm not alone, there are at least six or seven guys I know personally that practice the art to varying degrees. 

And of course these are the guys you have to watch out for. Never con the con man as the saying goes. And never trust these fellows fishing reports. Oh they caught those big fish for sure, that's a thing of honor. But where they said or implied? Probably not. If I say what river I caught it in, then it was that river. After all my two favorite rivers are well over a hundred miles long each so I don't have to worry about that. But give you details? Never. And every photo is checked for landmarks in the background before it's posted online. Not everyone does this. I have a friend who last year posted some dandy fish he caught right in the middle of winter. But the river he said online was an hour's drive from the river he caught them in... caveat emptor.

Today's electronic fishing world has also brought us the photoshopped pic. You've seen them, the ones where the background is all blurred or just painted over with a layer of white. I once went fishing early one morning with a good friend. It was a picture perfect morning, mist rising, the sun just kissing the treetops. And he caught a huge fish, a trophy bass. Well back at home on the computer in the background of the photo was an obvious landmark. Anyone that lived within 20 miles would know instantly where we were. A little bit of photoshopped mist and it became a magazine quality shot. Minus the landmark of course.

And then there is the opposite of the paranoid fishing zealot. This is the worst. That guy that makes us all cringe with fear when he posts. The fishing neophyte that lucked out and hit a good spot on a good day and managed to catch a few quality fish. Now he doesn't do that very often so he asked to share his good fortune with the world. "Yeah you parked behind Larry's used appliances and you follow the path down to the river. It's a super spot!" 

And he's just posted it on a website that gets thousands of views every week. My biggest fear in life is it one of these jokers is unwittingly going to stumble upon one of my most secret spots. It is enough to keep you up nights and make you shudder on a warm day. If you want the guys who are good fishermen to think you are a good fisherman for God's sake don't go posting directions to where you caught that hawg.

The best use a serious fisherman can make of the internet though is to find spots on his own. Google maps and sites like that have made it possible to look at more water in a day sitting at home then you could in a lifetime on your feet. If it is in Southern Ohio and it's flowing water I've looked at it at least once. Some spots dozens of times before I finally go there in person. You can zoom in close and begin slowly working your way up the river, noting the rock bars, the riffles, the bend pools. Now of course a lot of these will never pan out in the real world. But the more experience you get at it the better your results with this sort of thing. But even a little bit of knowledge is better than just going out blind. After all the old saying that 90% of the fish are in 10% of the water is Gospel truth. 

But then it's possible to turn that on its head too. Me, I'd rather catch one 19 or 20 inch smallmouth than a hundred smaller ones. It's what I live for. I am not after the 90%. And let's face it, a really big 20 inch smallmouth is something like less than one half of 1% of the total population in the river around here. It takes well over a decade for a fish to grow to that size. So back we go to those mapping sites online. Now, instead of the obvious classic spots I'm looking for that out of the way, not so obvious spot that might just hold a few fish. But hey look, it is away from any good spot to park so there is little pressure. And it is not so fishy that some guy on a float trip is going to beach his kayak or canoe and get out and fish. At most he's going to sling a cast or two at it as he floats by. And besides most of those guys are hardcore catching release fisherman. So it's a pretty ordinary spot except that it gives a few fish that magical thing that they can't get anywhere else, Time. 

All of this also takes time as well. Lots of it. You can spend a lifetime developing a library of tried and true hotspots. And an even bigger list of hope for hot spots that you haven't tried yet. But will. Just as soon as you get time.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

Since it "tis the season", the start of saugeye and sauger season that is, I thought I'd share a little bit of what little bit I know about fishing for these toothy critters in rivers. There are three ways that most of the best saugthing fishermen I know use ninety plus percent of the time.
First of all, you young guns out there at midnight in the middle of winter in insulated coveralls throwing a minnow plug may not know it but you pretty much owe the technique or at least the spread of it all across the country to one guy, Doug Stange. 30 years ago Doug and a band of hearty anglers first began fishing big minnow plugs at night for big walleye and writing about it in In-Fisherman. (actually about half of what we do as anglers in the US we owe in one way or another to In-Fisherman but that's a whole nother story..)
Pretty much the way those guys fished 30 years ago is still exactly the way you want to today, the only thing that has changed is the tackle has gotten a whole lot better. Go to your local tackle store and buy yourself a suspending rogue to start. A big one. That's enough to start with though if you want to get completely set up buy a selection of long minnow plugs in both floating and suspending. Things like Rapala husky jerks and shadow raps, Rebel minnows, Bass Pro XPS minnow, Cabela's mean eye jerkbait, Yozuri crystal minnows and on and on. Long skinny minnow plugs all, and all of them big. At night you want a lure a big saugthing can see, can feel with it's lateral line and can strike. Notice none of these run very deep. The idea is that at night when sauger, saugeye or walleye (saugthings from here on out) are in the mood to feed they move up shallow. Not all, but at least aggressive active fish. Even in the dead of winter when your line is freezing in the guides you can often catch big fish up shallow at night. Often our rivers get very very clear in the coldest weather. Usually the clearest they get all year and this makes the saugthings even more nocturnal. Like I said all you really need to start is a suspending rogue but who wants just one lure when they can buy dozens. But there are a whole lot of old farts out there who will tell you who wants to buy dozens of different minnow plugs when you can buy dozens of rogues instead. The key is where you throw that minnow plug more than anything else. The best places to try are rocky banks below lowhead dams and places where the river is constricted like around bridge abutments, big gravel bars, wing dams etc. Also try rocky banks at the mouth of feeder creeks, the glance structures off of big dams, basically anything that has current and rocks or concrete. Okay Now for the most controversial thing I ever say. I swear I get hate mail every time I say this. I don't care if the box says your supposed to jerk and pause or retrieve and pause or do any of a dozen things that might be triggering cold weather bass into biting, DON"T DO IT! Throw the thing out there and retrieve it back real slow and steady. Every time, dang it. You can catch them in different ways but over the course of a year you are going to catch a lot more fish. At night, slow and steady wins the race. I know a couple guys that catch big saugs by standing along the wing walls at the base of dams and just fish their minnow plug in place on a short line just holding it there and letting it swim in place against the current. I know a thousand guys will say to jerk it to trigger a bite. And try it, it is fishing, after all every rule is made to be broken. But I feel if you give both methods equal time and equal attention you will catch more fish on the slow and steady. At least at night, in winter, in a river, most of the time.....

Another technique for catching winter saugs is using soft plastics on a jig head. Things like paddletail swimbaits, the curly shad and grubs. These enable you to cover all the water you cannot reach with the minnow plug. Deeper eddies below lowhead dams, the bases of wingdams and rubble walls as well as water that is too swift for minnow plugs like the fast current seams below lowhead dams or even right in the hydraulic jump at the base of the dam itself. Saugthings are coldwater fish and can often be found actively feeding in swifter current right in the dead of winter. A plastic swimbait also lets you probe deeper slower water for inactive fish as well as fish for deeper fish during the day. As for jighead weight, I try and match the weight of the jig head to the force of the current. You want a weight that lets you comfortably swim the jig back slowly just off the bottom. Saugfish, especially in winter are the most piscivorous fish I know of, they aren't poking around the bottom looking for hellgrammites or taking moth off the surface or any of a dozen other things you might find a bass doing. They are, at least as adults, strictly after baitfish. Which is why the most effective retrieve is to swim the bait back to you slowly off the bottom rather than jig or hop it on the bottom, your imitating a minnow. The other retrieve is to let the jig sweep down a seam of current on a tight line like a helpless minnow being swept along. Again you want to match the weight of your jighead to the speed of the current more than anything else. Saugs do not suspend nearly as much as walleye and strongly relate to the bottom so again you want that jig close to bottom. Most of time in the medium sized rivers I fish the most I'll use a 1/4 ounce jighead more than any other, and unlike smallmouth fishing, I'll use a 3/8 more than a 1/8 ounce jighead. Mostly because some of very best saugfishing occurs below dams and a 3/8 ounce head is sometimes needed in the swifter reaches below the dam. I am perfectly comfortable heading out saugfishing just about anywhere with a bigger four inch grub and some curly shads and a few assorted jigheads in a baggie stuffed in my winter jacket and no other lures. They pretty much let me fish effectively anywhere I'm going to find saugs and are my go to lure. If I'm fishing the Ohio River I'll actually often go smaller on lure size than I will in our other rivers andfish a three inch grub because in the Ohio your most likely just going to find sauger which is a smaller fish than the saugeye. At night and at anytime in rivers that contain saugeye I find myself using a bulkier bait like a curly shad, a paddletail or a bigger grub.

A third very effective technique for catching saugfish is on a jig and minnow. The best setup is a leadhead jig with a small treble tied on a two inch long trailer of braid. I'll usually take a three inch smoke metalflake grub or a clear with silver grub and put it on the jighead and then pinch the tail off. Next I hook a minnow up thru the bottom of the mouth and out one nostril on the jig hook and then lightly hook the minnow on the treble right in front of the tail. You can catch fish on a jighead without the trailer but you will catch many more with the addition of the treble hook. Without it a lot of minnows are simply knocked off the hook without getting the fish getting hooked. This is probably the mot effective presentation in deep water like below the big dams on the Ohio. The big disadvantage is that you are messing with bait and getting your hands wet when it's cold outside. In the dead of winter with a stiff wind blowing up the river this can be a very big deal, trust me.

So how do you tell the difference between these three often very similar fish? Well I'm just going to copy and paste that from the ODNR website. After all who better to tell the differences than the biologists who actually raise and stock the things.
"Saugeye are intermediate in appearance between their two parent species, the sauger and walleye. The best character to look at for identifying this hybrid is the dark bars or oblong vertical spots between the spines of the first dorsal fin. The membrane of this fin in the unmarked areas is often a dusky color and not as clear as that of a sauger. A large dusky spot at the rear base of the first dorsal fin is usually visible on a saugeye but not as clearly defined as it is on a walleye. Saugeye have dark laterally oblong blotches on their sides but they tend to be smaller than those of a sauger. Saugeye also have white tips on the lower part of the tail and anal fins. These are more defined than the very thin light colored margin of a sauger but less defined than the large white tips found on a walleye"
Notice all the "often and usually" sometimes even the experts cannot be sure just by looking and have to perform genetic testing to be sure. All this uncertainty bothers me a bit because a few years ago I landed a saugfish in the Little Miami that was longer by a half inch than the state record sauger. In all outward appearances it looked exactly like what a sauger is "supposed" to look like. It was midsummer and the fish was obviously much lighter than the state record which was as round as watermelon and full of eggs so I released it. So though I'll never know for sure but there might be a state record swimming in the Little Miami. The world record saugeye if I remember right was caught thru the ice in Montana and looked exactly like a walleye so who knows. Though stocked saugeye are born in the lab they are a regular natural occurrence as well. Everywhere that walleye and sauger meet,mostly in big rivers like the Ohio something like 4 or 5% of the natural population is a saugeye. 
So there you have it for what it's worth, the way I saugfish. Pretty much everything you need you can carry in one of those big pockets of that insulated winter parka you are going to want to wear. I'm lazy, most of the time I am fishing soft plastics on jigheads. It keeps my hands warmer than bait and doesn't cost me $14 everytime I hang up.


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## sjwano (Sep 13, 2018)

Appreciate the posts and insight. Conduct a lot of research myself when not on the water, love to review maps and imagery. And I spend a lot of time on foot trying to go beyond the common starting points. There is a lot to be learned from the folks posting video in today's era, not so much the location but with their technique...sometimes words just don't the little things justice. 

I am curious though about finding those "winter holes" as it seems so hard from my perspective. Not asking for specific locations but help to get beyond obvious community spots and know what to look for. It seems like from the descriptions a hole can actually be a pretty small space...is a cube yard enough for a smallie to comfortably spend a winter in an otherwise shallow river? Bread box, sandbox, or bread truck sized space? Do more travel those 30 miles to find ample depth or find "good enough" nearby? 

I happen to fish the middle sections of the LMR & GMR most often being located outside of Dayton, and look for these pools in summer and winter. And as noted you can catch the little guys up and down the river, but I'm wondering if I need to just look a little closer for tiny pockets of depth in an otherwise shallow stretch, if fish will hold to them. Or am I better off using another tool, my truck, and driving further south where the river is wider, deeper, more alive?

Thanks again for the words of wisdom!


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

sjwano said:


> Appreciate the posts and insight. Conduct a lot of research myself when not on the water, love to review maps and imagery. And I spend a lot of time on foot trying to go beyond the common starting points. There is a lot to be learned from the folks posting video in today's era, not so much the location but with their technique...sometimes words just don't the little things justice.
> 
> I am curious though about finding those "winter holes" as it seems so hard from my perspective. Not asking for specific locations but help to get beyond obvious community spots and know what to look for. It seems like from the descriptions a hole can actually be a pretty small space...is a cube yard enough for a smallie to comfortably spend a winter in an otherwise shallow river? Bread box, sandbox, or bread truck sized space? Do more travel those 30 miles to find ample depth or find "good enough" nearby?
> 
> ...


The real Ohio smallmouth record ( not counting lake Erie) was caught in the Mad river not far up from the GMR in the 1940s. 
Michael Teach catches tons of big smallies all the way up in Piqua. So don't let where you fish discourage you. 

I'm an old guy so most of my wintering spots I've fished for years but I'd think the best way to know for sure is fish the first riffle upstream and down from a suspected one in the late fall when the river is between say 52 and 60 degrees. If there are nice smallies there they will be feeding on those two riffles till the river drops below 50. Then they will drop back into the hole.
But the longer I do this the more I realize how little I know. There are small spots that just hold a couple fish. And it is just anecdotal but most I've found were man made and not natural. I chunk of an old dam, a bridge abutment, just concrete dumped in the river, that sort of thing. 
I think most of the really long migrations in tracking studies were in shallow rivers in Wisconsin that didn't have good holes to spend the winter. I can't imagine an LMR or GMR fish traveling too far. Though some of the smaller tribs might have fish that travel all the way out to the river. 
Unfortunately every fish AND every spot is an individual and nothing beats trial and error.


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## 9Left (Jun 23, 2012)

oldstinkyguy said:


> One of the things that the internet age has brought us is a brand new sport, spot hacking. I know, I spent half the winter at it when the weather is just too bad to go out and actually fish. I can think of a few great successes. Once a few years ago a fellow posted a picture of himself and the 20 inch smallmouth bass. In the background was a nondescript section of riverbank with nothing notable in the background. Nothing that is except for an electrical tower and a set of wires crossing the river. On his post under his name he had posted his hometown, a Larry from Lima sort of throw away tagline.
> 
> So first I brought his town up on Google maps. Now his hometown wasn't on the river. But it was only five or six miles away from a pretty good smallmouth stream. So I then zoomed in on the river about 20 miles downstream. Really tight, as close as Google maps would let me zoom and then began crawling the mouse upstream. A few minutes later, voila! Towers and wires crossing the river. The next evening I drove out to test my theory. I parked the truck, grabbed my rod, and headed over the bank to the river. And there he was standing there fishing his hotspot!
> 
> ...


Very true stinky! You and a couple guys that fished with you on ogf posted a bunch of nice pictures of big fish During the span of a couple years…A little zooming and googling led me right to the Meldahl damn on the kentucky side..,😉. A few of your pictures, compiled over the years, had the same distinct chip in a piece of concrete in the background.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

Yep it's hard to hide a 1000 foot long dam. It might be just about the best hybrid spot around but gawd I hate it. Too many people. Too many people climbing right on top of you. And the bottom riffles on the LMR were almost as bad. I am so glad they stocked them all the way up the GMR now. The biggest hybrid I caught last year was an hour's drive from the Ohio!


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

I guess it's been 12 or 15 years ago now but I remember it better than last week's fishing trip. It was late fall and I was fishing a riffle right below a big hole on the river. I threw a smoke metal flake grub on a 1/4 ounce jighead. Thump and the rod bent double. Like into a C shape, right into the cork, bent double. Then the fish jumped. It seemed like a cover of Sports Afield shot. I saw it perfectly, as good a look as I have ever had of a fish jumping. It was huge. Like 6 pounds plus huge. I'd never caught a smallmouth even close to that. But I'd caught a bunch of big largemouth back then. Including some down south ten pounders. It was a 6 pound plus smallmouth. And right after the apex of the jump the bass fell one way and the grub flew off the other way. 

I was scarred by that fish. Haunted. This fish changed me from a guy that was a bit of an all around river rat into a guy obsessed and I mean obsessed with trying to catch that smallmouth of a lifetime out of the river. I studied everything I could find on big smallmouth. Read everything I could find on the James Bayless smallmouth caught out of the Mad River in 1941. Everything I could find really on every big smallmouth I could find. 

To the point really that sometimes it hurt my appreciation of some really great fish. Cases of yeah that fish really hammered that top water and jumped like a kangaroo but it was "only" 19.75 and not 20. Really stupid s#$t that for a year or two tarnished what should have been great memories. But it also gave me the drive to learn. Learn to the point that catching a 20 wasn't the lifetime accomplishment I once thought, but became a yearly occurrence, then multiple times a year. Then came the first 21 out of an Ohio stream. Then another. 

After those two I started not carrying the tape measure so much. Who cares if it's only 19.5 or if it's 20.25? It's a grand fish anyways. And was a 19.75 out of the Little Miami bigger than a 20.25 out of the Great Miami? Or what about that 18 out of a little creek? It took a long time to realize they were all trophy fish and enjoy them all. Too long. Losing that giant all those years ago was both a blessing and a curse for all it gave me and all it took away.

And every year now the fishing has been getting better as well. We are entering the golden age of stream fishing here in Ohio. Water quality is just so much better that what it used to be. Everywhere really, it seems every stream is the cleanest it's been in decades. And just as importantly catch and release has become almost a religion nowadays. Don't get me wrong, I love a mess of crappie or a good saugeye fillet but that doesn't change the fact that it takes over a decade to grow a trophy stream smallie. If you want trophy smallies you are going to have to throw them back. It's simply fact. 

Which brings us to a fish story. It's the last week in June. And I'm in the middle of a multi day float trip down the river. Well one day my wife drove out and instead of floating down the river I spent it in one place and we cooked ribs and veggies over the fire and swam. And just enjoyed a summer's day on the river. But before she was due I had an hour or so to kill and decided to wade a bit close to camp. I put on a curly shad and waded out to a riffle to keep cool. It was midday, hot, not a cloud in the sky. In three or four feet of water a thump and the rod bent double, the drag screaming. I thought for sure it was a hybrid. Then it jumped just as I was looking where I was stepping and I only saw it out of the corner of my eye. Okay what is a largemouth this big doing in the river?

Then it jumped again and I got a good look at it and about died. OMG that's a smallmouth! I stuck the rod tip under the water every time it looked like it might be even thinking of jumping and finally landed it. It turns out I had nothing to worry about it was actually hooked so solidly it was hard to unhook. I waded ashore and measured it. I didn't have a bump board to take a picture of the length so I am reluctant to say but I catch several 20 inch fish every year and this guy dwarfed those length wise. 
I'd just seen too many arguments online about lengths and weights to go there and I don't think I ever posted just how long this fish actually was, even on my own personal facebook page. I knew how long it was and that was enough for me. 
I honestly don't think the pics I took did the fish justice. In the middle of the day, no clouds in the sky, boiling hot, who would have thought? I've spent 30 years trying to figure out big smallmouth here in Ohio and catch the fish of a lifetime by sheer luck. 

Anyways now half a year later and not on Facebook with all the haters I'll say how big. It was 22. Yes a real life, river, 22 inch smallmouth. Like I said the photos don't do the fish justice. Everyone could see it was a long fish a few people even guessed it was over 21. But 22? I measured that fish three times 

I will never catch another fish like that. I mean I've caught bigger smallmouth. But that was in the Boundary Waters not a stream in Southern Ohio. And that fish and knowing I'll never top it changed me again. 

I haven't carried the tape measure since that day. I mean what is the point now? And I've found myself up some tiny creeks I haven't fished in 30 years doing some serious fishing to some fish that top out at 10 or 12 inches. A few weeks ago I caught a big fish in the river. It hammered a buzzbait and jumped like a tarpon. A deep bodied brute. I held it up against the evening sky. The light shown thru the fish's fins, lighting them up in a beautiful gold. I snapped a quick photo and quickly released the fish. Was it 19.75 or 20.25? Who cares. It was a big gorgeous fish and it was perfect. 

It's funny I still go ridiculous extremes to catch big smallmouth. I seem to be as ready as ever to fish when it's 6 degrees and the lines freezing in the guides or it's 2 am and raining. But I'm also now also able to go to ridiculous extremes to catch a big bluegill or that 10 inch smallmouth that rules his pool in that creek so small you could jump across it. I don't have anything to prove to myself anymore and I've really enjoyed it. And somehow I've caught as many big fish this year as ever.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

You want to go where? okay. You have my permission but call when you get out nobody goes back there. You would lay there until we just found bones. Which is exactly why I wanted to go. Had to. I had looked at it for a couple years now on Google Earth. In late fall/ winter after the crops were in, I guess you could drive a four-wheel drive and get close to the woods. This time of year entailed a mile and a half walk just to reach the woods edge. 
I packed the day pack with three liters to drink, a notebook and pen and a lunch. The next morning about 30 minutes before daylight I started walking down an old tractor path. As it got daylight I checked my position on Google Earth and struck out across a gigantic corn field. Sometime later I reach the edge of the woods. Unfortunately the edge was a tangled mess of amur honeysuckle. After crashing thru this mess for ten minutes or so uphill I came to a double row of hedgeapple or Osage orange. These lined a flat about ten feet wide angling up the hill, the remains of an old wagon path. I followed this uphill for a while till it crested a small ridge. Here a deep hollow dropped off sharply. And here the beech trees started. I pulled out my little notebook and jotted down gps coordinates. These weren't normal beech trees. Most it would take two men with outstretched arms to reach around. A lot were broken hulk's dying of old age. Of course there were other tree species but beech were dominant. This is a big thing. You see a woods dominated by beeches is in the final stages of succession. Beech saplings can withstand more shade than other trees. In a clearing first come cedars and/or poplars here in my part of Ohio. These form a thick woods shading out most trees. The beech saplings grow slowly but steadily waiting for an opening. Then a tree falls and the beech has a head start and fills the gap.

Beeches have thick interlocking branches and form a dense shade, shading out everything but more beeches. This process can take decades. And some of these beeches were dying of old age. A beech lives a 150 to 300 years old on average if left to its own devices sometimes even more. Had this hollow never been cut? I decided that it had been selectively cut a long long time ago because even though there were some 100 year old looking oaks mixed in I never found one the entire day older than that. So a mostly uncut woods that was hard to get to with straight up and down steep hollows, I was starting to get excited. Sure enough not twenty feet past the hedgeapple I could see a big ginseng plant. Right out in the open where anyone could find it without even trying hard. I walked over to it and down the bank I could see another and past that a small patch of a half dozen plants. 
I didn't dig anything. There is a season on ginseng here in Ohio. You cannot dig until September 1st of every year. This gives the seed time to mature. But I'd learned in a lifetime of sang digging that you didn't waste the actual season on scouting new woods, you did that preseason. The notebook has thirty years of ginseng hunting and scouting in it. Maps drawn and in recent years gps coordinates. This also insured I didn't go back to the same woods digging too frequently. I usually waited 7 or 8 years to return to a woods to dig so I didn't put too much pressure on the population. 

I also at four or five year intervals ordered seed from a grower in Wisconsin and scattered that thru all my woods. Like catch and release small mouth fishing, ginseng digging has been a lifelong hobby and I've tried my best to do it in a sustainable manor. Once when wintertime fishing with a buddy on the Ohio river we ran into a game warden. My buddy knew the guy and said "do you know Steve"? He said "yes, what I want to know is where do you dig all that ginseng"?

The second day of September was the day I kicked off my season. A pair of tough North Face pants, a lightweight tee shirt, some high top boots with lug soles and a good knife. A canvas knapsack which contained lunch, a water bottle and water filter, and my digger. You spend all day prying and digging in rocks and tree roots. An ordinary garden trowel lasts about five minutes, a stout one a half hour. My digger was an inch and a half wide chisel with the rubber handle was cut off the shaft and the shaft welded into a metal pipe about 16 inches long. You could probably pry open a tank with it. 
Also in the pack is a limited medical kit consisting of an ace bandage, some assorted band aids, some super glue to seal a bad cut, and some pain pills. In the ziplock bag with the medical kit is a bic lighter and some fire starters and a map. Usually the map is a screen shot of Google Earth. 

There is a serious reason to take all this into the woods. You see ginseng has been worth a lot of money for a long time and to dig serious amounts of ginseng you have to go to really hard to reach spots. I live where the Appalachians are pootering out. There aren't extensive forests or mountains. The ginseng here is in the steepest most out of the way hollows where no one goes. Hurt yourself badly and if no one knows where you are you are in deep trouble. No one is just going to happen along anytime soon.

Another reason ginseng hunters need to carry whatever it takes to take care of themselves is that ginseng hunters trespass. A lot. I'd say half the serious ginseng hunters out there have places they have permission to dig on and places they they are best are unsure. Places where they walk up the tracks a ways, cross an overgrown river bottom then up a hollow. It's just a fact of life, it happens. I have permission in this woods though it's so out of the way it wouldn't have mattered, it's just no other sang hunter had found it. 

So how do you go about looking for ginseng once you are in the woods? Well I start out by not looking for it. I start out cruising a woods pretty fast mostly looking for ginseng's companion plants. Plants that like the same conditions to grow that ginseng does. Things like maidenhair fern, ramps, rattlesnake fern, cohosh, goldenseal, etc. And in my neck of the woods the king of these is baneberry. It differs in different places of course. In some places rattlesnake fern is the most dependable, in fact in the mountains the diggers there call it sang pointer.

But in the woods I frequent it is baneberry. I'll cruise till I find some and then stop dead in my tracks and start looking hard. I figure in my territory if a woods has baneberry thick and no ginseng that means the ginseng has just been dug to extinction. You will of course find the scattered individual ginseng plant growing without it's companion plants, you just won't find a lot. It's a frequent occurrence to cover a half mile of woods and find no ginseng. And then spot some baneberry and there's a ginseng plant twenty feet away.

Baneberry or dolleyes is the deadliest plant we have around here. Every bit of the plant is toxic and it's said that just five or six of the white waxy berries could stop your heart and kill you. Supposedly tho the berries are supposed to taste so bad no one could stomach eating a half dozen of them. Baneberry is also called dolleyes because the berries kind of look like those old china eyes you see in those creepy dolls you sometimes see in antique stores. Symptoms of non fatal doses of say the rest of the plant include severe stomach cramps, dizziness, headache, diarrhea, and hallucinations. It doesn't sound like a good time in any way shape or form.

Although it might kill you and I, small quantities of baneberry berries seem to be consumed by several species of birds. Small mammals, such as mice and moles, reportedly also consume the berries, sometimes removing the pulp and eating only the seeds. 
Anyways if you aren't a ginseng hunter or a witch brewing up a potion this interesting plant is best left alone.

That first day I think I dug about a pound of ginseng on a half day hunt. The next day hunting from daylight till late in the day I found a bit over a pound and a half. But I never did unlock the places full potential because my season was cut short by an injury in another woods a week or so later. 

About a decade before I'd found several pounds of ginseng growing on the hillsides along a smallmouth stream. The farmer where I could park owned the land along the creek but he didn't own several of the farms that bordered the creek. From his place it was probably eight miles as the creek winds up to the next place a road crossed the stream. I'd gotten my brother to drop me off and spent a long and productive day walking the length of the creek back to my car. 

Well I wanted to do it again badly. But I didn't have a ride. Well if you road walked it was only four miles up to a spot where you could get into the woods without trespassing too badly on the adjacent farmers. But following the winding creek out to the car might be six or better. 

So I arrived a good hour before daylight to start my road walk because it was going to be a long day. And it started off productive. By late morning I had dug three quarters of a pound. I was expecting a huge day before I made it back out. 

And then it happened. I stepped on a two foot long limb buried in some leaves. The limb didn't have any bark left and the leaves were damp. I slid sideways grabbing a sapling to keep from falling. I could feel something in my back but it didn't seem too bad. I continued to hunt ginseng for another 20 minutes or so with it slowly becoming more painful all the time. I stopped, took some pain medicine and took a break sitting on the ground leaning back against a tree. 

When I went to get up I found that I could barely do it. This was serious. I decided to bail on the woods. The only problem was the nearest best exit was across the creek and up the far hillside. And then a road walk back to car of a couple miles. I took literally forever to wade the creek, I could just imagine the consequences of slipping on a mossy rock. The other hillside was a drier hillside, not good ginseng woods. But under a bunch of oak trees I struck gold. 

It was Indian Pipe. Indian Pipe is a parasite of fungi that are in symbiotic relationships with trees. The fungi and the trees both benefit from their relationship with each other and Indian pipe is a parasite of both. Indian pipe is completely without color and frankly a bit creepy looking. And when you read about it, well, it is a bit creepy. I hesitate to really even talk about it but I think no one in their right mind or not on deaths door would consider using it. A tincture of the whole plant has been used for people in intense physical pain, but it doesn’t make the pain go away. Instead somehow you just don't seem to mind. You don't hallucinate, instead supposedly you think oh that hurts but you don't really care or mind. You can think "oh look I have this cancer and terrible pain eating me alive but somehow don't care. But it doesn't produce a high or euphoria like opioids so no one would take it recreationally. So supposedly people with very severe pain, say from a degenerative bone condition, have used it instead of opioids. The herbal website wisdomoftheplantsdevas.com says: "You will know that this plant is for you if you are willing to journey into your pain, bear witness to your pain, and be an active participant in your healing process."
This extreme calming seems to work for emotional pain as well. People with severe panic attacks, paralyzed by anxiety etc have found the plant brings them outside themselves where they can look at their emotional pain for what it is and become calmer. 

Anyways I knew about it but never had the nerve to try it. Until then. I sat right down next to the clump of pale sickly looking stems and picked one and stuffed it in my mouth. I then lay back and took a big swig out of my water bottle and waited. A few minutes later the pain was still there but manageable. I ate another, picked the rest and stuffed them in my pack and began the long walk out. 

I ended up digging just over six pounds of ginseng that year. Not a record year with it cut short by my injury but still a solid one. Two pounds when dried. After harvesting you lightly wash the roots and lay them out on a screen somewhere they will plenty of air circulation and will dry. I'd say on average it takes about 200 average sized roots to make a pound of dried ginseng. The remaining Indian Pipe I stuffed into four small glass bottles with eyedroppers for lids and covered in vodka. Every day till my back was better the tincture of Indian Pipe worked better than anything else I tried. By a long shot. 

Should you use Indian Pipe medicinally? No, probably not. Hurt yourself up a holler hunting sang and use it to self rescue? Absolutely.


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## ohiotuber (Apr 15, 2004)

While being short of time tonight, I WILL be reading every word of this very interesting thread. I am reminded of the ultra interesting articles in the old "Ohio Fisherman" magazine written by Soc Clay. In fact, I find myself wondering if you ARE Soc Clay. 
Thank you for stepping up.

Mike


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## sjwano (Sep 13, 2018)

oldstinkyguy said:


> The real Ohio smallmouth record ( not counting lake Erie) was caught in the Mad river not far up from the GMR in the 1940s.
> Michael Teach catches tons of big smallies all the way up in Piqua. So don't let where you fish discourage you.
> 
> I'm an old guy so most of my wintering spots I've fished for years but I'd think the best way to know for sure is fish the first riffle upstream and down from a suspected one in the late fall when the river is between say 52 and 60 degrees. If there are nice smallies there they will be feeding on those two riffles till the river drops below 50. Then they will drop back into the hole.
> ...


Your words of wisdom certainly influenced me today and it paid off. Tried a new location today and a couple new presentations. It was slow till the end and this one made it all worthwhile.


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## mn4 (Oct 14, 2020)

sjwano said:


> Your words of wisdom certainly influenced me today and it paid off. Tried a new location today and a couple new presentations. It was slow till the end and this one made it all worthwhile.


Awesome fish man!!! Definitely have a good chance of getting some bigs this time of year. I noticed the float under the fish. Were you running a float and fly rig? Are you willing to expand on your tactics today? Picked this one up earlier today slow rolling a small paddle tail (and I mean sllllllooooowwww rolling) - not exactly revolutionary but definitely works. Finding the right type of water is the real key. Not exactly a tank but pretty chunky 14-15”.


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## sjwano (Sep 13, 2018)

mn4 said:


> View attachment 499717
> 
> 
> Awesome fish man!!! Definitely have a good chance of getting some bigs this time of year. I noticed the float under the fish. Were you running a float and fly rig? Are you willing to expand on your tactics today? Picked this one up earlier today slow rolling a small paddle tail (and I mean sllllllooooowwww rolling) - not exactly revolutionary but definitely works. Finding the right type of water is the real key. Not exactly a tank but pretty chunky 14-15”.


I had been throwing small jig heads with smoky grubs and lost most of the appropriate weighted tackle given the depth and river flow. And to be fair it was slow going, so I thought I would downsize to catch something, smaller bass or panfish. So it was a crappie sized jig head and Bobby garland shad (chartreuse and white). light enough that I wanted a float to cast decently into the wind and detect a bite. Not the original plan but it worked out!


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

ohiotuber said:


> While being short of time tonight, I WILL be reading every word of this very interesting thread. I am reminded of the ultra interesting articles in the old "Ohio Fisherman" magazine written by Soc Clay. In fact, I find myself wondering if you ARE Soc Clay.
> Thank you for stepping up.
> 
> Mike


Thank you sir that means a lot


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

sjwano said:


> I had been throwing small jig heads with smoky grubs and lost most of the appropriate weighted tackle given the depth and river flow. And to be fair it was slow going, so I thought I would downsize to catch something, smaller bass or panfish. So it was a crappie sized jig head and Bobby garland shad (chartreuse and white). light enough that I wanted a float to cast decently into the wind and detect a bite. Not the original plan but it worked out!





sjwano said:


> Your words of wisdom certainly influenced me today and it paid off. Tried a new location today and a couple new presentations. It was slow till the end and this one made it all worthwhile.
> View attachment 499708
> 
> View attachment 499707


Thanks and nice fish!


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

A bit of bowhunting then back to fishing I promise...

The year before my father passed I had bought a new bow. I was always a fisherman that hunted and dad was a hunter that fished. I am very passionate about bowhunting and I guess I've harvested 50 or 60 deer. But it wasn't all consuming like it was with dad. And I was always just a little more prone to harvesting a nice eight pointer for the freezer when dad might have let it walk looking for a big ten or twelve. 

Even as he aged Dad hunted pretty hard, killing a deer most years while in his 70's. I remember telling people with pride "yeah dad's hunting out of a tree and he's 80." But he was starting to slow. He took to hunting evenings mostly, saying it was better on his property when we both knew he had harvested some monsters in the mornings. And if it was too cold he would say he's waiting on the rut, that sort of thing. 

I think the last couple years he was alive he was always planning to go but never quite made it. 
I remember as a kid being amazed at his planning. He would start I think loading that old blue van that he used as his hunting camper sometime in late summer. Thinking and rethinking stand placement and ever piece of gear. And around the 4th of July he started practicing with his old Bear recurve. With all that practice he was an incredible instinctive shooter and harvested several deer with that old stick bow.

He was the first person I know to shoot a compound bow. An original Bear Whitetail Hunter. It was ugly, heavy and he was deadly with it. By the time he was retired he was hunting with a Horton crossbow. And then a newer Horton with a red dot scope. He was always searching for an edge.

When he passed as the son who hunted I got all the guns, hunting, and camping equipment. Going thru his stuff, I saw the Horton. I was shocked at it's condition. There was only two arrows in the quiver, one had a fletching barely hanging on and the broad heads were definitely not new. A younger Dad would have never let that happen.

I'd bought some land to hunt on a few decades before. Dad and my uncle and I built a little cabin on it. Dad had a great deer woods right outside his back door. So we rarely hunted together any more, only on the rare occasion one of us had a tag left during gun season. I hadn't seen the bow in several years. I almost didn't take it but decided I'd take it to use as a spare in case mine broke in mid season. 

Towards the end of summer I decided go up and work on the roof of my now old hunting cabin. Along with some tin and and some tools I threw in Dad's bow and a target. On the way I stopped at Walmart and purchased some new arrows for it. That's one of the nice things about the hill country of southeastern Ohio even the Walmarts have a decent sporting goods section. 

Dad and my uncle used to tell the same hunting stories year after year. They enjoyed the ritual of the telling I think as much as anything. And he never quit telling those old stories along with the new ones. I must have heard about some deer 50 times. And if he told me once he told me twenty times about how much better crossbows shot if you really concentrated on holding them tightly against your shoulder. I just chalked it up to just another of his hunting things he liked to tell over and over.

Well I shot the bow and struggled with it. It was a crossbow with a scope so I should have been driving tacks with it. But sure enough if I didn't really concentrate hard on holding it tightly I found I'd pull left when I pulled the trigger. As much as six or seven inches. It was the hardest crossbow I've ever seen to shoot well. 

And of course now that I'd played with it I wanted to harvest a deer with my father's bow. I practiced hard. Bought new broad heads to go with the new arrows and put in for my vacation at work. A four day weekend at Halloween and the first two weekends of November. Prime time, I shouldn't have any problem killing a deer, especially with that much time to hunt.

Well October I hear had a record harvest. Perfect weather and big numbers of deer. We had a lot going on, contractors working on our house and other things and I didn't hunt. Why would I, I had all the prime time coming up. Then came my time. And the heat wave. 69, 75, 73, 78. Then 81 degrees in mid November. I think I was up a tree like ten times before I even saw a deer. Ten times!!! Was the old bow jinxed now? I found myself fishing during midday, sometimes just in shirt sleeves!

Every night my scrapes would be cleaned out. The corn I put out eaten. All at night. One morning I climbed a tree overlooking a corn pile to find a scrape ten foot from it and another ten feet from that and a scrape five feet across thirty feet behind the the tree. All at night. During the day I was kept entertained watching the dozen squirrels on the corn pile living the good life enjoying the warm weather.

Then the weather broke. My last two days of vacation. Like almost a 40 degree swing in two days. It broke by way of a cold rain. I was heartbroken. I put on every bit of waterproof clothing I had and went anyways. I hunted the corn pile with all the scrapes around it. It was close to the little dirt road that leads to the cabin and I figured I could get in and out without scenting up the place too bad. I've had an awful lot of deer scent me in damp weather. I think their sense of smell at least doubles when everything is wet. 

So I guess it's an hour after daylight. Only one squirrel so far, the cold and wet had really shut them down. Then I could distinctly hear a deer walking even though the leaves were wet. But in the still morning I could still hear him. The problem was he was behind me working the scrape. 

As the days added up during the heat wave I knew my chances were slowly lessening. I climbed higher and higher. Even adding a bit of rope to the end of my pull up rope. Instead of my usual 17 or 18 feet up, I was 20 then 25, then 28. The buck began working his way around to my left. I moved slightly and began to slowly raise the bow. And 28 feet up he spotted me! You could see him look then take a double take then look again. He wasn't completely scared off but just stood there for seemed an eternity. 

He was just an average 8 pointer. I'd killed at least dozen bigger I guess. But man I wanted him as bad as I've ever wanted a deer. Between the terrible hunting conditions so far and it being Dad's bow I wanted him very badly. Then he took a big high turning step to leave and go back the way he came. I swung the bow up and hurried off a shot and immediately regretted it. Images of that bow pulling left flashed before my eyes as the buck ran. 

With most of the leaves now off it was easy to watch him run off. He ran across the little creek bottom and across the lane and up the steep bank on the far side. He ran about thirty yards up the hill and then stopped looking back at me from 100 yards away. I was mentally cursing myself out when he just fell over. No warning sign, no noises, nothing. He just fell over. I was just over the moon. It turned out to be a perfect shot. After gutting him I got him turned the right way tugged on his antlers and got out of the way. He slid down the steep bank all the way to the road. 

A week later on a Saturday since I'd used all my vacation during the heat wave I'm back. And up the same tree. There was just too much sign not to hunt it. Tracks and poop all around my corn. Poop broadcast in and around the scrape. Now trying to harvest a doe instead of a buck the corn held my attention more than the scrapes. Back up to 28, the highest I've ever hunted. The woods was bone dry and as noisy as it ever gets. 

I like to try and get up the tree 30 minutes before daylight to let the woods settle down. I don't always make it but I try. And right at good shooting light. You could hear footsteps. It's funny I'm constantly getting all worked up over a squirrel. They can sound like an elephant sometimes. But even though I might think a squirrel is a deer whenever I hear a deer I know it's a deer. And this was a deer. It was coming the same way the buck had. 

With the noisy conditions I heard it much further away than the week before. I got turned around and ready before it got into view. It turned out to be a big doe. She was just meandering slowly along. As unconcerned as a deer can seem to be. Slowly angling towards me she was coming almost under the tree. 

The knock on hunting high is that on tight shots you are at such a steep angle that you do not as big of a target as you would hunting lower. Too low or too high of a hit might only clip one lung. Which would kill the deer but a deer can go a long long ways on one lung. And you want to avoid a deer going a long ways at all costs. I feel every hundred yards you have to track a deer doubles your chances of not finding it. 

She passed maybe 12 or 15 feet from the tree. There were a few small logs and saplings scattered on the ground and as she picked her way thru those I shot. I held the bow very tightly and aimed deliberately thinking of the angle and squeezed off the shot. There was a huge clatter in the downed wood seemingly to me instantaneously with the shot and the deer exploded out of there. She ran only like twenty yards and stopped. I couldn't tell if I had a pass thru and the arrow clattered after going thru her or if I had missed. 
Then she slowly walked off behind me. I'm trying to watch and cock the bow and not make too much noise or movement and I lost sight of her. I could still hear her walking around right behind the tree. I finally get another arrow ready and settled in but she is directly behind me now. Walking a few steps pausing then walking again. 
It's a pretty big poplar tree. I had my climbing stand set for as big of a tree as it will go and it had still been tight. A pretty big area behind me was blocked from view. 
Finally I heard nothing. I sat for another ten minutes or so staring at where I had shot. I couldn't for the life of me see the bright nock of the arrow. But I could have sworn I heard it hit those logs. Had it hit and ricochet out thru the woods? At that angle I doubted it. I then heard a small crash right behind me. 

I couldn't stand it and leaned out around the tree and looked. I could see fairly well out the the woods that direction. I didn't see anything. I looked hard trying to find a patch of white from a deers belly where it had fallen. But I saw nothing. Maybe the noise was a squirrel or a bird or a dead limb falling. I sat back around and leaned back against the tree replaying the action iny head. There was nothing I would have done any differently. I waited 30 minutes and got down. 

I walked over to where I shot the deer. I couldn't find my arrow. No spots of blood, no arrow. Had I really missed at this ridiculously short range and the arrow clattered off thru the woods? I walked around in circles for a while. I just couldn't believe the arrow wasn't there. It had to be, I had heard it hit those logs or at least I thought so. 

I walked over to where the deer had stopped running and stood. I had marked the spot roughly by a forked tree growing beside it. There were a few splatters of blood. Not a ton but some. I stood there looking for more. I couldn't really find any which was concerning. I stood there and looked out the direction the deer had walked and there she was. The noise I had heard had been her after all. When she fell she had fallen right behind a fallen log. That log had hidden her from me looking from the tree. But here from a different angle I could see the white of her belly.

The arrow had hit perfectly. The loud noise of hitting a log was the arrow hitting squarely in the middle of a rib. It completely shattered that rib went on getting both lungs and was buried to the fletching. I guess breaking the rib prevented the passthrough. Normally a good lung shot sounds more like a solid thump not sticks breaking. 

I went and got my little sled. If you don't have one of those sleds they make for sportsman and sell at places like Cabela's or Bass Pro go buy you one. I don't know how I ever got a long without it. I haul firewood back to camp with it. Corn out to the woods. All my gear while ice fishing. And it makes the job of hauling a deer out of the woods 50 percent easier. We own an SUV but also a tiny Toyota hatchback. I like to drive the thing on fishing and hunting adventures because it just saves so much money on gas. And with a deer in the sled you can simply slide it in the hatchback and haul a deer in it and not worry about a mess.

But this time I decided that instead of taking the deer to the processer I'd do the job myself. My father and I processed our deer back in his younger days and it seemed a fitting way to conclude this season of hunting with his bow. The slow ritual of butchering and packaging gave me time to reflect on all the time we spent together in the deer woods. It had helped cement a lifelong bond between us.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

I realize that people succeed at things all the time even though their reasoning for doing what they are doing might actually be completely off base. A guy goes out and he kills a gigantic buck because he "knows" it is going to travel down a certain trail to feed on acorns. In all actuality it might be traveling down that trail to bed down in a briar patch for the day. But he killed a big deer this year, just like every year so he must be right.

So using this logic and having established that I may or may not know when I'm talking about here's my take on big smallmouth in average rivers and streams. One look at the list of Fish Ohio awards for smallmouth bass will show you that there are very very few smallmouth over 20 inches long in the rivers and streams of Ohio. For most anglers catching a smallmouth that stretches the tape to 20 inches or beyond is a once in a lifetime event, if it even happens at all. I honestly think that somewhere around 19 inches is the maximum size that most of our smallmouth can attain. It is entirely possible a smallmouth could live well and die of old age without ever getting to be 20 inches long. But I also think it is possible to get several 20 plus inch smallmouth from the streams of Ohio year after year if you fish differently. If you do not fish the classical method for stream fishing.

Postmodern smallmouth fishing is the silly name I coined for my method. It's painfully simple really, but that's also what makes it so hard to do. To try and explain my reasoning I'm going to switch gears and talk about a fish that has influenced my thinking a lot. A brown trout. Not just any brown trout mind you, but the 40 lb Leviathan caught by the late Howard Collins out of the Little Red River in Arkansas. For a long time this was the world record brown trout. I think it is since been surpassed by a fish from a lake in New Zealand but that's neither here nor there. The little red holds some big fish but huge outlandishly large ones over 20 lbs are rarer than a 20 inch smallmouth around here. So how did this fish then reach 40 pounds?

Well some scientists think that the giant may have employed the different feeding strategy than the other fish in the river. That instead of following the typical blueprint of feeding on a mixed bag of invertebrates with some fish mixed in as it got bigger, this fish found a spot where it could eat all it wanted of just prey fish. There are all kinds of stories like this. A giant 26 lb rainbow that was found dead in the Frying Pan River, one of the most heavily fished rivers on Earth. It is thought that that fish found the perfect spot below a dam where it could set in one spot it's whole life and gorge on shrimp. Look at the huge largemouth bass caught in California feeding on trout that act nothing at all like what a large mouth is supposed to act like.

My point is that you can find hundreds of examples of fish getting much larger than what is thought possible and they all have in common the fact that they employ an out of the ordinary feeding strategy.

So this is where my SWAT kicks in. SWAT by the way is a Scientific Wild Ass Theory. Read any study on smallmouth bass feeding habits in streams. Minnows in cold weather than ever increasing numbers of crayfish from spring to Fall. In some studies 75% of some smallmouth's diet consist of crayfish. And what do tracking studies of smallmouth tell us? That smallmouth bass in streams are extreme home bodies except when migrating to and from their wintering holes. This holds true in every study I've seen. Often a smallmouth bass will live its entire life in just one or two pools. Well what if a fish that is naturally inclined to be an extreme homebody would find all of its requirements met in just one spot? Not just the vaunted spot on the spot but for this fish the only spot. Say a deep pocket under a sycamore tree or behind a huge big slab of concrete rubble. So there is cover and a respite from the current and a super feeding lane right beside it filled all the time with juicy high caloric shiners.

No I'm not saying huge smallmouth don't eat crayfish or hellgrammites. All the better in my book if our super seam has a nice cobble bottom that lets our big fish gobble down some crayfish appetizers while waiting on the conveyor belt to bring the next meal. In fact finding the super seams to me is much more important than finding out what the fish are actually feeding upon. I might just be like that guy deer hunting and my big fish might be gorging on darters or crayfish or what have you right before it nails my swimbait fished as a shiner imitation. I've come to realize my limited lure selection is really what fishes effectively in these seams and not really a representation of what's actually under there underwater at all. After all most streams around here have like 10 different shiner species, 10 different minnow species and as many darter species as well as the multitude of invertebrates that smallies like. Our big smallmouth probably isn't selective.

But a grub or swim bait fished on a jig head allows you to fish fast super seams that are just too fast for most crankbaits or spinners. By varying the size of both the bait and the jig head you can adjust the lures path so it fishes naturally down the seam. Not so light it rips along over the fish's head and not so heavy it catches on the bottom.

Things that create super seams are the ends of rock bars thrown out by feeder streams in floods, concrete rubble, dams or the remnants of old dams, bridge abutments, rocks dumped in the stream to control erosion, a huge single rock... in other words anything that obstructs current flow enough to create a strong line between slack water and fast current. In my experience the more distinct and abrupt the line between fast and slow water the better. And this seam must be a permanent feature. A big smallmouth takes at least a decade to get that way so I don't often fish wood when targeting trophy smallmouth.

All this varies a lot I know from standard smallmouth fishing practices. You know where you fish the riffles and runs with lures like spinners and tubes and crankbaits. And it's probably less effective than standard smallmouth fishing. The guy covering four or five different riffles with a rebel craw will catch more fish most days than I will, but most of the time, and it's fishing so they're always exceptions to every rule, I will catch much bigger fish on average just not nearly as many.

Don't get me wrong I love conventional smallmouth fishing. There's not much better than wading a stream catching spunky smallmouth, covering water and also enjoying the sights and sounds of the river. But at least once a week I try to throw in a trip with one of those super seams as a destination. There I can slow down and fish one spot hard, hoping my big fish will feed. As long as I do this, I know a couple times a year I'll measure a smallmouth that hits the holy Grail of 20 inches. Whether or not it got that way how I think it did is another thing completely

So you want to go out and catch a 20 inch forever smallmouth and you want to find the right spot to do it? I'm sure there are dozens of ways to do so, but this works. And I'm only talking rivers and streams here where 20 inches is a true trophy not Canada not lake Erie not Dale hollow just an average smallmouth stream. But do this for a year and you will catch one

First off there are a couple things you need to know. Smallmouth basically are extreme home bodies. Catch a big rainbow trout out of the best spot in the trout stream, knock it in the head and if you come back in 2 weeks another big trout is taking its spot. That isn't the case with big smallmouth bass. Except for their migration to their wintering holes and in spawning time a big smallmouth bass will faithfully live its entire life in just one section of the river. Year after year, study after study shows how this is important in finding big smallmouth.
Well it means you have to find the stretch of river where a big smallmouth can live for 8 or 10 years at least without somebody knocking it in the head without theowing it in a 5 gallon bucket and taking it home and eating it. From most studies I've seen, smallmouth will use a defined ripple as a boundary and often will never go past it except to migrate in fall ,never in summer. The mature smallmouth on a really sharp strong across the river riffle will be two different populations, one upstream of the riffle and one downstream.

So where to fish? You find your access point to the river, that stretch everyone fishes. You go either upstream or downstream, either in person or virtually on Google maps till you find a well-defined riffle. one that goes all the way across the river, this is your boundary. The fish above that are separate populations then the fish that are hammered back in the easy to get to stretch, Now follow that all the way to the next well defined boundary. No access points in between, no easy water to get to now we're getting somewhere now. In between those two lines find the best specific spots to fish. It may be right at the boundary line itself, just understand that one side of a rifle might be trophy water and one side just full of small fish. Even though we're there just 30 yards apart. Very odd isn't it, I'm not sure any other river fish is like this. Shovelheads are home bodies too, but in times of high water will range wildly and repopulate fished out holes. A hole where the big smallies are fished out it's just that, fished out. It might be chock full of smaller fish but this is no indication as far as big fish are concerned.

So you create a list of spots very specific spots that fall between good as in not overfished boundary lines. You do this for as many different stretches of the river as you can. Every river has these stretches. Some are out in the middle of nowhere, some are protected by having the riverbank lined with houses that are not home to fisherman or at least not home to fisherman that keep fish. Let's face it, even kayak fisherman fish most often in the areas they can launch and land easily and only take long all day floats to harder to reach stretches rarely. Plus most of these guys are catch and release guys. But it doesn't matter how hard to get to our stretch is unless it has that defined boundary to separate it from harder fished areas.

So in that stretch we have found that we want to fish. I'm a firm believer that the biggest baddest smallmouth will take the best spot. Why do smallmouth in lakes school according to size? Because the bigger ones are mean bastards and the smaller guys avoid them. In a river that means the big bass, the one we are trying to catch, takes the best spot. Sometimes that spot isn't obvious. Maybe something out of the norm is going on and that fish is cruising back and forth below a riffle and munching on stonerollers that are spawning or any of a dozen other scenarios. But some spots are obvious. Like I said maybe our fish is off doing something else that day. But if you come back time after time to the best three or four spots in that stretch and fish them over and over eventually we're going to find our fish home.

Simple isn't it? Find three or four potentially good stretches or river defined by specific boundaries at each one. Then find the best spots in each of these potential stretches. Now for the hard part. Fish those. Fish them in the rain. Fish them in the middle of the night. Fish them at dawn. Fish them in the middle of the day. Fish them till you know them by heart. Until you can close your eyes and picture every tree, every rock, every nuance of current, even when you're home in bed.

You are probably going to catch half as many fish as you did when you just got in the river and waded throwing an inline spinner everywhere that looked even halfway fishy. Hell, you're probably not going to catch even half as many. A quarter or a third is more like it. But you are eventually going to catch THE fish. Like I said this is all about catching just that one single fish.

See it's simple. Painfully simple because it's not the river fishing we all learned how to do. And you are going to catch much less fish. Sure, we still look for riffles and runs and currents and seams. But only look at those as defined by the specific boundaries in each section of river. It can be the grandest coolest fishiest piece of structure you have ever seen but if it's on the wrong side of our boundary it is not a fraction as good it's something much less sexy on the right side of the riffle.

Now for the disclaimer... With fishing there is always exceptions. You might catch a monster right in the middle of the hardest hit stretch of the whole river. Who knows you may know an easier better way to catch a hog smallmouth. If so I'd love to hear it. Or just fish like you normally do and you might just catch a big one anyways. But this works. Follow it and you will learn what works where to fish where your boundaries actually are and you will begin to catch big or small mouth more often. And you will eventually catch that 20. And then the next one and the next one after that. It's repeatable year after year.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

Oh h$!!, It wasn't supposed to rain. It's 2:00 a.m. and I'm 4 miles down the river. Camped with my sleeping bag laid out against a massive 3 foot x 10 foot rectangle of concrete with a small fire out in front. The heat from the fire reflected off the concrete and I was snug as a bug in a rug. 

That is, till the first few raindrops began splattering down. I ran down to the river and grabbed the canoe. By placing it half on the concrete and half hanging over I kept my bag dry while I rigged up something better. Out of my pack I pulled my tarp. A 12x12 nylon affair in a stuff bag. It doubles as the roof over my hammock as well when I'm using that. One side of the tarp I drape over the back side of the canoe and hold place by bungee cords. Then I let the other hangover the canoe really protecting my bedding. I dig in the pack and come out with a small folding saw. A couple straight pawpaw poles and some paracord lift the front into a lean-to shape with a concrete back wall. I restocked the fire, crawled back into the bag and slept peacefully to the sound of raindrops. 
That is the beauty of a tarp you can use an unlimited amount of ways. Even a tiny amount of time searching on YouTube will show you dozens of ways of rigging one. 

On another trip it was late October, trophy smallmouth time. It was warm but the big front was on the way, cold weather tomorrow, glorious smallmouth fishing today. 
And well, this spot had been eating at me since I knew it would be glorious, but to get to it you need to spend the night on the river. You just couldn't fish it in a decent amount of time during the short days of late fall and get back out in daylight. For this adventure I loaded a big 20x20 foot blue tarp in the canoe. A cheap blue one like you can get at harbor freight for nearly nothing. 

Right above and butted up against the wintering hole I planed to fish was a big rock bar. I beached the canoe here. Back into the woods I went with a hatchet. I cut two poles about 10 feet long that each had forks on one end and then cut another pole about 20 feet long. I interlocked the forks of the two shorter poles and lay across them the end of the longer pole propping up a lopsided tripod of sorts. 

Over and across the long pole went the tarp creating a triangle or wedge of sorts with the opening between the two shorter poles. Once I had everything situated just right I locked the three in place with some paracord using the tag end of this to tie to the center grommet of the tarp. Then I pulled the tarp tight and stacked big stones from the rock bar along its edges. It was, I dare say, hurricane proof. 

Since no one ever camped here driftwood was everywhere and in 10 minutes I had a pile of driftwood as big as my canoe. I built a small fire to make some coals and went fishing. 
And yes the fishing was glorious. Once in awhile if you swing for the fences enough you hit a home run and this time I did.

I caught one big small mouth after another and mixed in like you so often have when you fish a jig in the river where a couple channels. I kept the biggest channel and wrapped in foil and seasoned with salt and pepper and garlic it made a fine after dark feast. 

All this time the temperature was dropping like a rock. I'd started out fishing and was almost too warm in a hoodie. I finished fishing in my insulated North Face parka I used to winter fish with and was definitely no longer feeling too warm.

In front of the opening to my shelter I rolled a couple big logs as a backstop and stoked up the fire. An icy mix half rain and half ice began to fall as I crawled into my bag and drifted off to the sound of the fire crackling as the wind picked up. 
I woke up and crawled out a couple hours later to stoke the fire and the ground was covered with small ice pellets and a light snow was now falling.

Warm inside my bag with a fire going up front listening to the wind howling and ice pellets pelting the tarp I lay there feeling for once I had played my cards exactly right. The fishing would be changed for the year tomorrow and I'd managed to squeeze out that last exquisite drop of fall.

A friend texted me the other day. A bit of a new to the outdoors kind of person. Well they were outside, had a bunch of paper and were trying to start a fire and couldn't. I honestly think your average person anymore without lighter fluid or gas or something similar would really struggle to start a fire out in the woods with nothing but say a lighter or some matches.

So here's my little short course on getting it done. We are going to use a lighter and a pocket knife. Because well you should always carry a pocket knife, if you don't have one go out and get one. Better would be a nice fixed blade sheath knife but a pocket knife works. First, short of using a blowtorch you are just not going to get anything going bigger than a pencil. You really want stuff much smaller than that.
Look around, usually somewhere close to you is always drier and better drained than anywhere else. Walk over and look closely at the ground, even if you don't see sticks or limbs there are usually tiny sticks smaller than a matchstick down to say a third that diameter lying about in any woods. Gather as much of that as you can. You really cannot get too much. A nice big bunch that you would have a hard time fitting in a brown paper lunch sack would be ideal. Okay now lets try and find some good stuff. Are there any small dead bushes about? 

In most woods small trees and bushes are continuously sprouting up only to get shaded out and die when they are about head high. If not look for small dead branches on larger trees. If you find enough of these you can skip the first step of gathering tiny stuff off the ground. Break these up into short, say ten inch lengths and sort according to size. You want again a nice healthy pile of each size. Its much better to have too much than run out and have your fire die. All of the work in building a fire is in the preparation.

Now take a few of your sticks that are say as big around as your thumb and carefully shave off some till just the end of each shaving is attached. Then repeat over and over till the end of your stick has a big wad of shavings attached. This is called a featherstick BTW. Any shavings you cut off you should save too. If its wet these will be your main fire starters. In damp conditions using the pocket knife to shave down sticks will expose the dry inside wood so your fire will take.


So lets start our fire. Lay down a layer of sticks side by side as big around as your wrist to create a little platform to build your fire on. In the center leave out say three sticks so you can put your match or lighter under your small stuff to light it. On top of this platform lie a big double handfull of your smallest driest material and or any loose shavings you shaved off with your knife. Under this bundle of stuff hold your lighter or match till this tiniest stuff starts.
On top of this, as it burns carefully lean your shaved sticks and small sticks in a tepee. Adding bigger and bigger material till you have a fire.

All of this is a lot easier with a fire starter of some sort. I personally am a huge fan of cotton balls and Vaseline. Smear some Vaseline on cotton balls then shred the cotton balls as you work the Vaseline into them. They start super easy and burn long enough to start and even dry out small tinder like tiny twigs or shavings you have made with your knife. They then smash down to nearly nothing and you can stow a ziplock baggie of them in your daypack or even in your car and never know they are there. just pull out a bit, fluff it back up and you are ready to go. The shavings in the photo were made with a cheap 4 dollar Walmart knife. You don't need a survival knife and beautiful feather sticks you have created to start a fire though it certainly makes the job easier. Again we are not trying to recreate the wheel here or get too fancy and go into flint and steel or ferrocerium rods or other cool stuff like that, we are just talking the average joe thru a simple fire with a bic lighter.

I'm writing this laying on my cot in my little off great cabin waiting out a cold November rain while bow hunting. I'm laying on top of my winter bag so it's handy and so I thought I'd mention sleeping bags. 

I am an indifferent sleeper. It doesn't take too much to make me happy. Quite often in summer I will find a patch of fine gravel and lay on out my parka as a ground cloth and build a fire and sleep under the stars. But I also sleep outdoors year-round so a good winter bag is indispensable. 

Any old bag or blanket will work in summer. My winter bag is a Kelty Mistral, 0°, long. It is, I guess what you would call mid-priced, a bit over a hundred but not three or four like the top end stuff. And after all I am first and foremost a fisherman so the fill is synthetic. Things are always going to get damp around rivers and canoes a synthetic just works so much better under those conditions. 

I didn't intentionally set out to buy the long version it was just what REI had in stock when I went to buy one. Now when it's time to replace it I will definitely buy a long. It's just nice to have all that room to snuggle down in. My summer time bag is also a Kelty I think but I'm not sure, I bought it because it's lightweight and packs down fairly small. There's a hundred sleeping bags that can do that. 

The tarp I use the most I bought off of Amazon. It's 12x12 nylon with eyelets every couple feet around it. Like I mentioned earlier there are a million ways to hang it. Most often I rig it as a wedge or diamond. One end tied as far up a tree as I can reach in the other end staked out to the ground. Then each side tied off to stakes to form the diamond.

Another simple but hard to beat setup is a simple lean to offer ridgeline tied between two trees. An extremely useful not to learn if tarp camping is the prusik knot. A self-tightening knot is also easy to loosen. 

On a multi-day float trip I might have the tarp rigged over hammock a night and then as a wedge or lean to the next. If I am not having a campfire I like to hammock camp. But it's awfully hard to beat the comfort of a fire out in front of the lean to. 

If I winter camp I will rig the ridgeline for the lean to lower and make sure I have either a big log to bank my fire against or drive a couple stake in the ground and build a reflector behind my fire. 

In wet weather I have taken to carrying a simple teepee style tent from River Country. This little tent is dirt cheap just about the cheapest tent on Amazon. It's definitely not waterproof completely out of the box. But it is a steep teepee shape and with some waterproofing and seam sealing it sheds water like a duck's back. And it weighs nothing. I'll sometimes set that up and then set my tarp up high over top of it to give me some space to cook under, change clothes, that sort of thing. The combination of this little tent underneath the tarp will keep me dry even if it rains all day and all night. In the summer I love the fish in the rain but sleep not so much. 

I absolutely love to cook in the woods or on the water. That's a big part of the enjoyment for me on any overnight trip. My friend Jeff once said Steve is the only guy I know who can go to the woods for a month and come back fatter than when he went in. 

I've been known to scavenge the neighborhood on garbage nights for grates off of grills being thrown away. Several of my favorite spots along the river have one of these grills hidden up in the woods. What you want to do is to hang it in the tree when not in use. Up off the ground like that it will last for several seasons. 
I also use a griddle made by a blacksmith friend of mine named Dave Bradley. Dave's flat griddle has slots in the corner that specially cut legs slide into. That way it lays down flat and takes up no room at all in the canoe. I've made dozens and dozens of fine meals on it. It's only drawback as weight and is only good for canoe or car camping. 

Those wire baskets that clamshell shut are wonderful for campfire grilling. I take one every trip to places like the Boundary Waters where I'll be eating a lot of fish. Grilled fish seasoned with blackening seasoning on a bed of rice it's hard to beat for easy as well as delicious. It also grills veggies like asparagus and peppers better than any other method. 

I also use one of those metal pie irons that clamshell shut. It's something I use a lot especially in deer camp. Butter spray on bread and a slice of cheese and in a minute or two you have a perfect grilled cheese. When you are tired and hit camp after dark a hot grilled cheese sandwich feels like fine dining. The pie iron also bakes things like cinnamon rolls easily for a yummy breakfast or dessert. 

My land that my little off-grid cabin is situated on is blessed with quite a few flat rocks. The fire pit is encircled with a stone fire ring topped with these flat rocks which makes it easy to cook off of. Or for that matter to just prop your feet up on and stare at the fire. 

I also took some of these flat rocks and built a small oven. First I laid up a u-shaped wall about 10 inches high and the foot or so across the open end of the u. Then a bigger flat rock I set upon this to span the u from one side to the other but having a space of 4 in or so at the back of the u. On top of all this I laid up another little wall about 10 in tall and topped it off with more flat rocks creating a rock dome with a shelf inside basically. A bushcraft version of a pizza oven I guess. 

You build a fire in the bottom and the heat is pulled up through the space on the back wall and out the front creating an oven like effect in the top chamber. 

So far I made quesadillas, cheesy bread, pizza, cookies and muffins in it. The simple design is easy to recreate on many rock bars all along our rivers. I feel the limited size of the fire chamber limits the chances of a river rock exploding in the fire. The worst I've had happen is a shelf of sandstone crack but I was still able to finish my meal on it. 

At the cabin I have used a regular Coleman stove and a butane cartridge stove that looks like a hot plate. Any number of propane stoves taking the small green tanks sold everywhere work well out of a canoe. I've used a lot an alcohol stove but since you cannot adjust the heat it seems to work best for things that you are going to cook that only require boiling water like pasta or to heat up water for hot chocolate or coffee. 

My go-to stove for hiking back into the river or on most canoe trips is one of those little pocket rocket stoves that screw onto the top of a small isobutane canister, a backpacking stove. The heat is adjustable they take up no space and they're just plain handy. And besides most of my really involved meal on the river are cooked on the coals from a fire. 

I'm a big fan of foil packets. Dice up some potatoes, some Polish sausage, onions and cabbage, add a few pats of butter and cook on the coals for an absolute feast. Or bake fish in them or deer steak or any of a dozen other variations. 

And of course there's always cooking with a green stick. And it's not just for hot dogs. Wrap your stick with biscuit dough rolled out into a rope. Or unwind cinnamon rolls that come pre-made and ready in those little cardboard tubes like biscuits do and twist them around the stick. These are an absolute treat not only do you get the normal goodness of a hot cinnamon roll but also the flavor from the fire smoked into it. 

And last but certainly not least if you are car camping or canoe camping or something like that where you can handle the weight it might be worth hauling along a dutch oven. 
I've made everything in the dutch oven from whole chickens to biscuits to cobbler for dessert. With a bit of thought you can cook pretty much anything in the dutch oven. Just let the fire burn down the coals place a couple coals under the dutch oven and pile several more on the lid. 

I often will canoe down this big stretch of river a mile or so to camp along this wonderful stretch of riffles in the islands where the slow water ends. If I get there and first build a fire a dutch oven with green beans and potatoes and diced up Polish sausage slowly cooking all day make for a wonderful evening. 

I hate fishing below the big dams on rivers like the Ohio, the Tennessee the Clinch, etc. Yeah I do it all the time. Well, let me rephrase that, I love fishing below the dams I just hate dealing with all the people. 

I am a loner liable, to step backwards into bushes and set on a log until a kayaker has passed completely out of sight on the small streams I fish most often. But people are unavoidable below the big dams. I just hate fishing with other people. But below big dams I've caught my personal best striper, spotted bass, catfish, carp, walleye, saugeye, I've been spooled by giant sturgeon and caught paddlefish as long as I am tall.

But there are a couple pieces of equipment that can help make it a little bit more bearable. First and foremost is a good headlamp. Fishing after dark below a big dam is productive anyways, fishing after dark below a big dam is especially so and helps avoid some of the crowds. 

Another piece of equipment is a good pair of insulated coveralls. Those big walleye and saugeye like the cold anyway and the colder it gets the less people there are. Combine the two and fish after dark in winter and more than likely you will have the place completely to yourself. 
And a couple of the big dams on the Ohio River I fish more often a half mile to a mile downstream of the dam itself. The first big point sticking out into the river where the first concrete rubble is often as good as the dam itself without any of the crowd. And those big mile long rock bars you sometimes find below big dams, well they are often haunted at night in summer by stripers or big smallmouth hunting in the shallows.
And of course sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and join the crowd. If everyone is catching stripers even I can put up fishing with a bunch of people I have no tips on doing that though I just suck at it. 

I try to fish and haunt stretches of water and woods that don't have a lot of people. But you do occasionally run into a few people and some of those you might in the course of a year or two run into a lot. 

That was the case with the kids. Three boys and two girls in their late teens. At the time their section of river was about the best fishing around and I'd run into them once or twice a week at least. Me, I'd be smallmouth fishing while they were catfishermen. And very good ones, one boy would seine bait and everyone, girls and boys would wade the riffles and pools throwing minnows. They would usually build a stone corral in the edge of the river and fill it up with 5 to 10 pound channels by days end. Then they would take each one out, hold it up for a photo and let it go.

But the days they fished weren't really what made them memorable. Every day seemed an adventure, swimming one day, building a huge bonfire the next, shooting a riffle in inner tubes the next. Or just standing on one foot on a rock in the middle of the river with both both arms and their leg stuck out balancing, acting goofy, trying not to fall in. The kind of things kids used to do when summer seems endless and there was so much and so little to do all at the same time. They literally spent their summer the way kids would have forty years ago. The way it seems only kids do in movies nowadays.

I'd be fishing and look up to see them strung out across the river wading a riffle upstream. One kid with a cooler on his shoulder, another with sacks of provisions, maybe a couple with armloads of firewood. The girls in bikini tops and jean shorts, the boys shirtless and everyone tanned golden brown and beautiful. I didn't talk much to the kids, we kind of just gave each other our own space, but when I did they were polite and friendly, and respectful to an old man, again like kids of forty years ago.

For three years I saw them like this, sometimes just a glimpse way up the river of them but it seemed like they were just part of the place, as I guess I must have seemed to them. But you could almost feel time was running out even if they couldn't. The boys were getting tall, looking like men and the girls were, well growing up and I made sure not to look too long at them in their bikini tops.

Everyone was well past driving age and it seemed any minute their lives would start and they would be off to the Army, having kids and paying rent. But they seemed determined to hang on for one last glorious summer and if anything were on the river even more. I never saw them paired off like boyfriend and girlfriends but more like Huck Finn or the sandlot kids, a gang of kids with absolutely nothing else they would rather do. I envied them a lot, this endless summer.

Then the next year summer came. It got warm, fish were biting, the water perfect swimming weather, and they were gone. A huge section of what was always wild and empty river really felt empty now. It actually took me most of the year to stop expecting to see them.

Then the next year two of the boys came back, fished a few times and even towards the end of the year brought one of the girls. I couldn't help but think how it must have different for them, with jobs, maybe kids and responsibilities waiting for them back home.

But like with everything the only constant is change. Even the river changes, it's no longer the best spot on the river though still a good one. I don't go there a couple times a week like I used to but I still go there often enough. And last fall there was the boy seining bait, a man really. And a girl was standing knee deep fishing a minnow in a pool. I normally groan and go the other way when I run into someone on the river but it made my heart glad to see them. I'd missed them, or at least missed the idea of them and endless summer.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

I have found there are actually hundreds if not thousands of native American sites that are not well-known. Sites that aren't on some trail map or marked by signage in a park. When researching my book on the Little Miami, I discovered that many are listed and described in old records in places like county historical societies. They're just not mentioned today. If it is not in a county or state park there isn't much currently available on the internet. 

This is one of those places mentioned and described in a few books at the turn of the last century then largely forgotten. I often get sidetracked while fishing the river and wander up side creeks looking for fossils, arrowheads, and generally just poking around. It's one of the main reasons I know I'd make a lousy competitive fisherman. Well I wandered up this creek finding the occasional fossil and what I thought might be a nutting stone. A nutting stone is a stone that has shallow depressions worked into the face of it that are perfect for an Indian to place a walnut into and bust open with another rock. I'm sure busting walnuts open was a big deal, after all nuts are full of calories and fats, precious things to a hunter gatherer society.

I wandered up a tiny draw off of the creek and emerged onto the flat overlooking the river. There was the earthworks, a small circle maybe 30 feet in diameter surrounded by another circle maybe 60 or 70 feet across. Both were only a couple feet tall and both have mature trees growing on them and I mean mature trees. One big white oak was dying of old age so what's that, four or five hundred years at least.

I visited the earthworks a couple more times that year and told my friend Banty about it. Banty gets her nickname from her resemblance to a bantam chicken, tiny and round. Banty is pure Appalachian hillbilly, born and raised in Eastern Kentucky on the Tennessee border, my kind of people. I don't get a lot of people in this world, the vast majority actually, but hillbilly I understand. After all both of my parents family trees are rooted deeply in Appalachia.

Well a month or so passed and Banty messaged me. She had told Granny about my find and Granny wanted me to take her to the mounds. Granny, I ask? What Granny is, it seems, is what I've heard referred to as a granny witch, a hill woman versed in healing, natural cures, and a few unnatural ones. Granny would give me $100 to take her. Okay, I'm in, more out of curiosity than for the money though. So we make plans for me to meet Granny at a carryout close to the river the following weekend. 

The morning of I'm sitting in the parking lot of the carryout and an F-150 with Tennessee plates pulls up next to me. Okay that's not a granny, it's a pretty lady about 30ish in a Allman Brothers t-shirt and jeans and a ponytail. She walks over to the truck and introduces herself. I grab my daypack and hop in her truck. The bed of the truck is covered in cut walking sticks. You know the kind where a vine is growing up a small sapling and the bark of the young tree ends up growing around the vine creating a spiral pattern up the trunk. 

I get in the truck's passenger side and there's a box turtle shell in the footwell and a couple wild turkey feathers are stuffed under the sun visor, bluegrass music plays. Granny smiles and laughs easily, has freckles and eyes as dark as Kentucky coal. I decided I'm pretty glad I agreed to come along. I do the turn here, go left, park here, till we arrive at a pull off where a creek dumps into the river. 

Granny pulls a pair of rubber boots and a canvas knapsack out from behind the seat. We set off up the creek. Granny seemed in no hurry. Like me or any other big kid, Granny poked along up the creek looking at rocks. We talked easily about natural history and the land. She found several more fossils than I did, three or four staghorn corals, some busted flint and a skull of a small animal. We start up the small draw climbing towards the top. Looking at wild ginger and admiring a jack-in-the-pulpit, I point out a small ginseng plant.

Finally we top out and arrive at the earthworks. Granny stops short and looks a while. Then she points at a fallen log and says softly you wait here and I'll get you when I'm done. I sat listening to the birds in the trees and the sound of the wind. I don't normally like to sit and do nothing, except in the woods, I can do that for hours and I soon lost track of time. 

After a while I glanced over my shoulder and Granny had started a small fire in the center of the innermost earthen ring. She was on her knees doing something with small objects scattered on a cloth spread out on the earth. From where I sat I couldn't tell what they were. I turned back around and listened to a crow calling on the other side of the river. 

Sometime later I felt a touch on my shoulder and there was Granny. She smiled softly, "I'm ready to go". Granny was quiet on the walk out though she didn't seem upset, just calm. I didn't ask any questions on the drive back to my car and when we pulled up Granny smiled and asked if I would occasionally take her back. I nodded yes as Granny pressed a folded up hundred dollar bill and a small stone carving of a bear into my hand. For some reason I remember the bluegrass song Stone Walls by Three Tall Pines was playing in her truck, the first time I'd ever heard it. And then she left. And that is my story of my first meeting with the granny witch.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

I just spent a week in Glacier National Park with my wife. We walked trails, boated on a clear beautiful lake, saw wildflowers blooming among the remnants of forest fires, watched mountain goats navigate a sheer cliff. And the whole time waded thru hordes of people, waited in lines to get in the park, lines for the shuttle buses, I even had to wait for people coming the other way on a trail hugging a cliff. It was beautiful wilderness, all of it, if you could frame your photograph to exclude all the people.

You know where I really experience Wild-ness? When I walk the tracks out of town for 10 minutes then slide down the embankment to my little creek. Here the miracles of nature abound, ants tending a flock of aphids, a fawn hidden under a patch of ferns, a snake skin shed among twisted sycamore roots, a long-eared sunfish more colorful than any mountain sunset.

I love creeks. I spend an inordinate amount of time around them. Fishing the larger ones, scouting the surrounding hillsides for ginseng or goldenseal or mushrooms. Checking out the creeks rock bars for fossils, the list goes on and on.

And what have I learned from creeks? One shocking fact is it no one goes anywhere around them anymore. And I mean nobody. I will lace up the boots, throw a peanut butter sandwich and a bottle of water in my day pack and spend the entire day exploring one and never see another person.

Right there, just over your fence, down at the end of the field, just over the hill, lies another country, your local creek. The average person is more likely to go to some tropical island in here and they are not alone I never see anyone.
But I do see things. Small everyday miracles, crayfish crawling along the bottom, a kingfisher diving for a minnow, a crimson autumn leaf floating on clear water.

And yes I've been bitten by bugs. I have gotten sweaty. I have been called out in storms and soaked to the skin and froze. You know why? Because I was alive and doing something dammit. You don't have any of that happen to you while you are watching TV because you're not doing anything. My theory is that you are not really alive watching Dancing with The Kardashians.

Instead you have just set aside time you don't want to live bringing you that much closer to death. " Well she lived to be 80." No, there was an 80 year period between her death and her birth but she lived hardly any at all...
Mel Brooks oddly enough has one of the best quotes I've ever heard on the subject:
"Look I don't want that wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at least think noisy and colorfully or you're not alive."
In other words, go fishing dammit.

I was just about to launch into a diatribe about how I can like an individual but people as a whole are jerks. It was then I had an epiphany. That's just not right, individuals ( taken as a whole? Does that make sense?) are A-holes.
Worried way too much about what is on TV that night, if their team is going to win, what the fat mom on Duck Dynasty is cooking for dinner.
I've always been a loner, now I'm well on my way to becoming a crusty old bastard.

It's funny but the one time I am a nice guy, when I like myself the most, is when I am by myself. Alone, poking around the river, I find more to think about than a stupid TV show.
I will stop, sit on a rock, and just watch the river for a spell. Something I'd never do if I was out fishing with someone else. It's funny but I'm more likely to catch a bigger fish by myself too. I'll try something different, experiment a bit.
Let's face it, a lot of big fish don't get caught because someone is only trying to catch just as many fish as the other guy.

The few guys I do go fishing with seem to feel that way also on some level. They're about as likely as me to wander off into the bushes for an hour or two looking at inky cap mushrooms or fallen leaves. But these same guys are just as likely to fish way too hard in driving rain or snow because their gut tells them to.
We sometimes end up back at the truck having fish the same stream for five or six hours having only spoken five or six words. But somehow "we went fishing together".

Another thing I'm taking to doing when fishing by myself is to carry a small sketch pad in my pack. Sometimes it lays there untouched. Sometimes it adds so much to my time spent outside. It forces me to slow down, notice things, look at things I might miss most of the time. What could be better training for a fisherman? For being a person? Who knows eventually if I draw enough I might not be such an A-hole myself.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

It's August as I write this and 
I've been noticing that a lot of folks have been struggling with their river fishing the last month or so because of the weather. We have been caught in an alternating cycle of hot weather broken by spells of intense storms. Like everyone else I'm a bit tired of the muddy water and rain but I have been plugging along catching some pretty nice smallmouth actually.

While it may not be as aesthetically pleasing fishing muddy water and uncomfortable fishing in the heat actually both can make the job of catching a big smallmouth easier. You see the whole key to catching a trophy smallmouth is finding one. They got that big by avoiding be caught. Pretty obvious statement I guess but more important than most stream fishermen realise. I'll repeat, They got that big by avoiding be caught. So when the river is perfect for fishing, low and clear, comfortable to wade or float, well in another captain obvious statement, that's when the vast majority of fishing pressure happens.

Most people fish when the weather and water conditions are the nicest. It takes a decade at least for a stream smallmouth to approach trophy size. He has to avoid being harvested for a decade. I feel most do it in one of two ways, they either reside in the least fished stretches of river or the employ feeding strategies in heavily fished waters that differ from most smallmouth and are thus less vulnerable to fishing. In fact one of my favorite places is very heavily fished and is fished at least once a day every day during fishing season. But there is a lot of food and a couple unique feeding stations I've never seen anyone else fish those.

But let's say it's a blazing hot ninety degree day. Horrible fishing conditions right? Well extremely uncomfortable conditions but in truth great not horrible conditions! Great conditions??? Maybe the heat has gotten to me you are thinking. Nope I feel the two best times to stream smallmouth fish are late fall when they concentrate close to their wintering holes and right in the middle of summer on the very hottest days.

You remember a minute ago I said the whole key to catching a trophy smallmouth is finding one. Well when it's blazing hot I know where a big smallmouth is going to be. In my rivers and streams he is going to find a little pocket of calm water he can hold in right smack dab in the middle of the fastest water in his section of river. It doesn't have to be big, twenty inches long by four or five inches across is all he needs. I feel confident in stating that ninety percent of the fishermen never fish these spots.

They might even think they do, throwing around the edges of swift riffles and hitting the obvious eddies next to fast water. But they never really dissect the very fastest water, the stuff you can't even stand up in without being swept away. Most of the time they don't have the tools with them for the job either. Waist deep raging water will wash away a car much less a 1/8 ounce jighead or a squarebill crankbait.

Once it gets really hot I'm often fishing the lowest stream levels of the year with 1/2 ounce or 3/8 ounce jigheads! Because that's what it takes to find that little pocket of calm water behind that concrete block lying on the streambed in that bit of raging current. A heavy jighead and fished on a short line to lessen the effect of the current on the line. You can usually in most smallmouth streams be able to wade pretty close to fastest water if you are careful. The fastest water is often a sluice of fast water or a seam and while it may be raging it usually only covers a small area. The raging water will also let you wade much closer to the fish than you can anywhere else on the stream. I actually catch several fish right under the rod tip every summer and I'd be willing to bet they average right at "Fish Ohio" size.

What muddy water will do for you this time of year is cover your sins. You can use bigger baits, heavier baits, and wade even closer to the fish without spooking them. In other words fish that fast water even more effectively.

Don't view hot weather or muddy water as a setback but rather an opportunity. An opportunity to fish different locations and fish differently than you normally do.
In fact the key to any kind of stream fishing is not getting into the rut of going to your favorite stretch and fishing it the same way every time. I'd guess if you looked at my computers history over a years time one of the most visited sites would be here, Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service: Wilmington. That's the National Weather Services interactive map that lets you check the river levels all over the state. Many of the locations also not only show you the current level but predict fairly accurately the level over the coming week.

If you know the river, know the level, and know the weather going forward, over time you should be able to visualize what the river is going to look like that day and develop a feeling for "Well, I should be here today, it's going to fish well in these conditions." I don't have a "best spot". Instead I try and fish where my gut tells me is going to be the best spot for that day. I think that is far and away the most useful skill astream fiherman can possess. Sometimes it's the same spot I caught them the day before, sometimes it's miles away, sometimes it's not even the same stream. The key is knowing your river (or rivers) well enough to fish the right spot for the days conditions. Unfortunately unless someone just tells you their spots, nothing is going to replace time spent on the water, learning the water.

Once the spawn is over smallmouth bass in streams settle into a very limited home range and never leave it till time to head to their wintering holes. You cannot generalize and say the Muskingum is this or the Darby or Great Miami is that. This piece might be one way or that piece might be another. And in different levels and with different weather they will be different than that.

To know the river you are going to have to be on it when it's low, when it's high, when it's muddy and when it's clear. There are things, techniques and tackle and ideas about catching fish that can shorten your learning curve by years but the bad news (actually the good news) is nothing is going to take the place of time spent on the river. Don't look at different conditions than you are used to as obstacles but instead as opportunities to learn your river.


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## oldstinkyguy (Mar 28, 2010)

It's asked and asked at every show I give seminars at. I'm not sure that I've ever given a complete answer so I'm going to try and do so here. What's the question? Well the question is what is a good lure selection for river fishing.
So here is what I would take if I were heading out cross country just hitting random rivers and creeks. It leans heavily towards smallmouth fishing because that's what I do the most but there's a bit of striper and hybrid striper stuff in there too.
First off, anyone who knows me knows I'm going to pick a grub. It is simply the most effective lure for smallmouth bass over the widest range of conditions. And scaled up or down in size it's just as effective for everything from pan fish to hybrids to pike to white bass.
There there have been plenty of trips where I've waded all day with nothing but a ziplock baggie full of grubs and some jig heads in my pocket. And honestly never felt like I needed anything else. There is no other lure I would ever do that with. You can throw one on the appropriate sized head in the swiftest current imaginable. Or conversely you can rig up with an ultralight jig head and finesse a wintertime smallmouth. In fact it is just plain hard to fish one wrong, chuck it out and wind it in, bounce it off the bottom, let it sweep down the current on a tight line, whatever, a grub will do it all.
In my dream trip box I'd mix it up with some paddle tails and some flat sided shad type baits like the curly shad. Again they catch just about everything that swims and allow you to give the fish a different look.
Next is another no-brainer, some minnow plugs. A mix of floating and suspending models. The list of brands is endless some famous ones are Rapala, Yozuri , Smithwick Rogue and Rebel minnow but there are hundreds.
Floating models make excellent topwaters as well as crankbaits. Twitch them under the water or reel a foot or so and then stop and let them float back to the top to struggle like an injured minnow. And the suspending minnow plugs are classic saugeye, walleye and sauger baits in rivers the country over.
And put a couple Zara Spooks in that box as well. Especially if you think you might run into hybrid stripers or true stripers. There isn't much more exciting than stripers or hybrids busting bait fish on top and having a spook to throw in there among them. Often one will hit a bait and knock it several feet in the air and then hammer it again as soon as it lands.
I've also found that when I position myself directly upstream in current and walk a Spook back to me I can let it hang in place and just walk it back and forth in the same spot without reeling. There have been a few trips where this retrieve, or non-retrieve I guess, would trigger vicious strikes from smallmouth when nothing else would.
Then there is the proper top plug or chugger.
The most famous of these being the Pop-R. Another classic topwater bait and for good reason. It consistently catches smallmouth or hybrids in well, the funnest way you can, on top.
It is my opinion that if you are river fishing for smallmouth bass the most consistent lure for catching a trophy is a buzzbait. Not one of those little miniature ones sold as river lures either. Buy a proper full size one like what you would throw in a farm pond trying to catch a big largemouth. Once the water warms up big smallies seem to love the things. I swear your average size will be twice that of any other lure you throw. And if you want some real excitement and want to catch a PB smallmouth throw one after dark in summer for some true trophy action. 
A square billed crankbait it's just made for river fishing. The square bill bounces off of rocks and logs without hanging up like other crankbaits would. And this bouncing and ricocheting off rocks seems to be a trigger for drawing strikes. It is just a solid and effective lure in rivers, use one.
A weedless skirted jig will let you fish places you simply cannot with other lures. And will
let you fish ultra slow as well with that rubber skirt still moving in current as the lure just sits there.
The skirted jig is one lure I will scale down from the one I'd use to largemouth bass fish. Maybe not in weight depending on the current but definitely in size. Studies have proven that trophy smallmouth select for smaller crayfish but don't really give a hoot about minnow size. Well the skirted jig is nothing if not a crayfish imitation. Cut that skirt back and use a grub as a trailer and make it more compact. You may not catch more smallmouth but you will definitely catch bigger ones if you doctor your jig this way.
The smaller skirted jig is the reason the ned rig makes my honorable mention list instead of the main list by the way. I can fish the scaled down skirted jig motionless or just barely moving just like the ned rig and also swim it back as well. It just seems a tiny bit more versatile to me.
The fluke or other soft plastic jerk bait makes it in our all-around box. Rigged on a weightless hook it makes an amazing smallie lure. And a big one hooked on a big one or two ounce jig head is standard for anyone chasing stripers below the big TVA dams, which is something I dearly love to do.
And then we come to the last but certainly not the least of my recommendations for your river box, the willow leaf spinnerbait. Why a willow leaf? Well a Colorado blade, either a single or a tandem, will cause a spinnerbait to roll in current. A willow leaf will not roll in current.
I usually throw a 1/4 oz spinnerbait in the river. I guess I would be more likely to go up in weight rather than down to be honest. More in line with a buzzbait and nothing at all like a skirted jig. I feel a full size spinnerbait is better than a small one.
I think a spinnerbait is right at the top of the list for fishing right at dawn or dusk when a big fish is liable to be up in the shallows cruising for its next meal. I have complete confidence when in midsummer throwing a spinnerbait right up on the bank and bringing it back thru shallow water that it is going to be nailed by a big trophy sooner or later.
And there you have it, the lure selection that works for me. Anymore and it won't fit comfortably in a few plastic boxes in my backpack, any less and it begins to feel incomplete. Of course there are a lot of other worthy lures out there. I guess if pressed I'd add as honorable mentions a ned rig, hair jig, inline spinner, tube, chatterbait and whopper plopper.
And of course sometimes you throw stuff just because you want to. I've been known to throw a crazy crawler and a jitterbug for this reason. And actually have done well enough on both that I'm sure to do it again.
I guess like the lawyers do at the end of commercials I will throw in a disclaimer. Your water is unique, fish are individuals, you are an individual, and confidence in any bait is key. These are just my recommendations, if you want to add to the list and throw something else please do it, it's your fishing


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