High cold water on West Branch of the Susquehanna

16 inch smallmouth bass caught on the Susquehanna's West Branch

High cold water and cooling air temperatures presented some major hurdles today on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. I had set my sites on a section of the river that seemed to be less effected by the rising water. I had been watching the river gauges for several days and predictions of very high water never materialized so I hit the road to do a single access trip on a stretch of the river with relatively mild flow. Mother nature still had a few tricks up her sleeve.

Water Conditions

Water levels had peaked about the time I arrived on the river and where starting to drop very slowly. Falling water typically means bass will be feeding less. My primary concern was the water temperature which had fallen from about 50 degrees earlier in the week to 46 degrees today. The water had a the nice post winter green tint to it. Visibility varied from 2-4  feet.

Weather

The sky’s were clear the entire time I fished (12:00 noon till 4:30 p.m.). There was definitely a cooling trend from previous days that had reached almost 60 degrees. When I arrived at noon the air temperature was still a balmy 38 degrees and never exceeded 46 degrees today. Winds didn’t play a big factor today. Winds shifted all day long but never exceeded 9 mph.

The Fishing

I spent the first two hours trying to put together a pattern. The only information about the area that I had came from Google Earth. I knew from my research that I wanted to focus on one particularly big island.,..scratch…make that a HUGE island. I started about mid island and worked my way down stream. This took about 2 hours. I did manage to entice one smallmouth bass to follow my tube. I didn’t catch the fish but it did tip me off as to what kind of presentation the smallmouth wanted today. Previously, I had tried dragging tubes and letting them sit. Neither presentation was working. The big fish followed my tube right up to the kayak as I was reeling in to make another cast. After that encounter, I started swimming the tube.  Shortly after my close encounter with the big fish, I connected with a chunky 13 inch smallmouth while swimming the tube with very brief pauses.

As I swung into the tail end of the island, my hunch paid off. The back side of the island had one of the biggest spawning areas I’ve seen in a long time. Of course, with all the cold water, there were no fish on in the spawning area yet  but this helped my develop a plan.

My goal was to locate a good spawning area and then look for current breaks close by where pre-spawn fish would be staging. This was fairly easy today. Only 50 yards from the spawning area was a series of bridge pilings. In two hours, I pulled several smallmouth off the pilings. I had thrown a number of baits earlier including suspending jerkbaits, crankbaits, and spinnerbaits with no luck. I stuck to swimming the tube with brief pauses. The fish sometimes hit on the pause and other times they would engulf  the tube while I was swimming it. My biggest smallmouth today was 16  inches. I also caught a “bonus” fish.  A nice 25 inch Pickerel nailed my tube on the swim! I’m guessing it was 25 because it maxed out my 22.5 inch golden rule with several inches to spare. It was a great day on the water.