I’m having smallmouth withdrawals – big time.
Most of my life, people have asked me the same question: How does a guy from Arkansas get so into smallmouth fishing? My answer is, “How much time do you have?” I could talk about that topic for an hour straight.
I fished all the time with my dad from the time I was four years old and could throw a baitcaster. He took me all over the place, most of the time in Arkansas and sometimes other places. When I was about 15, he took me to Lake St. Clair. Game over. I was obsessed.
I’m still obsessed with smallmouth, and especially Great Lakes smallmouth. Any smallmouth south of the Great Lakes is a knockoff. The name brand smallmouth are the ones in those big lakes up north. You can catch a 17-inch smallmouth on Pickwick or Wheeler, and it’s a 2 1/2-pounder. A 17-incher on Lake Ontario or Lake Michigan might be pushing 4 pounds. They’re meaner. They look different. They’re the real deal.
I could go on and on about northern smallmouth, and especially fishing on the Great Lakes. It’s the Caribbean-blue water and the boulders that have been there for thousands of years and the perfect weather – we don’t get better fishing weather anywhere all year than when we head up north in the summer. It’s the way they fight, their coloration, how they’re built. Everything. You can catch them in 5 feet of water or out in 40 off a single rock. And there’s a good chance that smallmouth you catch on the Great Lakes has never been touched by another human. That’s cool.
We’re going to Lake Erie for Stage 7, and I could not be more excited. Literally, I don’t think it’s possible. I haven’t gotten to catch a real smallmouth in nine months or more. Last year, before Stage 7 at Saginaw Bay, I stayed up there and went to Sandusky to pre-pre-pre-fish for this tournament. I knew the 2026 schedule, so I knew we’d be up there at the same time of year. I spent five days fishing just for largemouth, because I wanted to eliminate possibilities. I wanted to know if largemouth could be a player this year. It was the same week in August that we’ll be there this year, and I know those Lake Erie largemouth are going to be in the same areas.
Now that I’ve spent that time fishing for largemouth around Sandusky, I can dedicate my entire two days of practice at Stage 7 fishing for smallmouth. I got the largemouth out of my system. I’m not going to be tempted now to eat into my smallmouth time to see what the largemouth fishing will be like.
Obviously, I want to try to win this tournament. I want to cash a check. But the Fishing Clash Angler of the Year race probably isn’t within reach, and I don’t have to worry about not making REDCREST next year. I don’t think I even have to catch a bass to make REDCREST, so I’m going out there to have an absolute blast.
The past several years on the Bass Pro Tour, I’ve finished really strong with some Top 10s, and most of those tournaments were on smallmouth waters up north. There’s a reason for that. Multiple reasons, actually. For one, they’re spinning rod tournaments. Don’t get me wrong – my favorite way to fish is with a casting setup: frogging, flipping, ChatterBait, swim jig, whatever. But that doesn’t always play as well on the BPT. It’s a numbers game, and I’m better at catching numbers with a spinning rod and ‘Scope. But to tell the truth, if I’m not catching a smallmouth, I couldn’t care less about catching bass on a spinning rod. It’s just part of the game. I have to cash checks.
But the main reason I tend to fish well at the end of the season is where we’re fishing. I have such a passion for smallmouth, and any time I get to fish for them up north, that’s my happy place. I know I’m going to get a lot of bites. It keeps me positive. Everything going through my head is positive. I hate tournaments where you only get six to 10 bites a day. I don’t care if they’re 12-pounders or 2-pounders; if I’m only getting a handful of bites in a day, I can’t stand it. A bad day (a full day of fun-fishing from dawn to dusk) on the Great Lakes is 30 fish. A normal day is 60 to 100. And a small one is 3 pounds. You can’t beat that. That’s a blast.
I have some buddies who come up north with me every single summer to catch smallmouth. We hit Traverse City and Big Bay de Noc and just have a crazy good time. We get an Airbnb and just fish for five days or a week or whatever. We’re going to do that again after Stage 7 and before the start of the Team Series. I’d love to go up earlier and spend more time fishing for smallmouth, but my kids are getting older and I want to spend more time with them. I’m past the time when I feel like I have to grind like that, and 40-something days is way too long to be away from home chasing brown fish.
But I’ll be thinking about those brown fish. I always am. In the winter, I have Sturgeon Bay and Traverse City on my weather app year-round. Sometimes in the winter, I’ll pull it up and see it’s negative-nine and think, “I wonder what those suckers are doing right now? I miss them.”
It’s been way too long to have smallmouth withdrawals. It’s time to scratch the itch.