In search of big river smallmouth on the Susquehanna River

My mother told me there would be days like this!

I set out with four other kayak anglers on Saturday, Novebember 30, 2010 to try our luck on the Susquehanna River. With my guiding over in October, I’ll now be out chasing trophy smallmouth bass most of the winter. I’ll try to keep you updated my exploits. Ok, I degress…back to the story at hand!

One of the primary goals of the day was to film some of my fall patterns for river smallmouth. One of my friends and expert kayak river angler is putting together a fall patterns DVD for river kayak fisherman. I’ll tell you more about that at a later time…back to the fishing!

Here’s my 20.5 inch river smallmouth bass that weighed in at 4.5 pounds.

We had a banner day on the river. The day started out VERY slow and we were struggling to put together a pattern. Piece by piece we fell into a very strong big fish pattern using spinnerbaits. That was great for me because spinnerbaits are one of my favorite lures for fall fishing. We caught a decent number of smallmouth on the day but here is a rundown of the biggest.

• 1 smallmouth at 20.5 inches and 4.5 pounds
• 4 smallmouth at 19 inches or just over
• 3 smallmouth at 17 inches or just over

Here's my 19 inch smallmouth bass also caught on the same spinnerbait/trailer combination.

I was lucky enough to catch the 20.5, a 19 incher, and one of the 17′s. Honestly, I would have been happy with the 20.5 on the day. You know your having a good day when you wave off the camera man because your ONLY hooked up with a 16 incher.

The water was cold at about mid to low 50′s so the presentation that worked best was a slow  retrieve with lots of bottom contact. I was using a Winco’s Specialty Smallmouth Spinnerbait 3/16 oz. with a blue hologram glimmer swimming grub.