I took my own advice in 2017 and did some serious traveling, which included seeking out new bronzeback adventures. During August, Lyn and I headed west across the rolling Dakota prairies and into the trout country of the mountain West. But nary a trout was caught. Instead, my angling goal was Western smallmouth in various […]
Your New Year’s resolution for 2018 should be to fish more. I’ll tell you why, and also how to make this happen. First of all, why. That’s easy, fishing is good for you. It’s much healthier physically than many other pastimes. This is especially true for river smallmouth fishing, which requires plenty of physical effort […]
March: Trout Fishing- While Minnesota’s smallmouth fishing remained closed I took advantage of the mild early spring weather to do some trout fishing. Drifting tiny size 16 nymphs is certainly different than working bigger flies for hefty smallies, but on a 4-wt even the 10 and 12 inch browns still put up a good tussle. […]
BOOK EXCERPT—- Hawaii– sun, sand beaches, sea breezes, snorkeling, palm trees and tourists everywhere, right? For that reason it was never high on my list of “must see” places… until I discovered Hawaiian jungle smallmouth. However, it isn’t just mainlanders who have never heard of this odd fishery; few on the islands have either. Hardly […]
BOOK EXCERPT– This wasn’t good. I was coughing and spitting water, and I could see blood—mine– below the surface… Grabbing my 7-foot medium-action spin stick and a few lures in a small tackle bag, I headed back down the shoreline for half a mile to where I had noticed the most rock. It was late […]
North America’s largest bodies of water, the Great Lakes are difficult to imagine if you haven’t seen them. Like freshwater oceans, they encompass tens of millions of acres with far distant shorelines invisible to the eye. For smallie fans used to little meandering rivers, you might think a body of water like Lake Michigan sounds […]
Great Fishing! This probably seems like a no-brainer. But it’s true. A lot of places beyond your home waters offer truly high quality angling, with plenty of big fish and/or high numbers of smallmouth. Some may say they don’t care about fish sizes, but it’s the rare fella who doesn’t get awfully excited when they […]
There are smallmouth bass in 48 states, with just Alaska and Florida the only holdouts. You can even find ’em in unlikely places like Nevada, Texas, even Hawaii … Sure, plenty of guys know that states like Pennsylvania, Virginia and Tennessee have so many bronzeback streams it’s hard to count them all. But a lot […]
I’ll bet you didn’t know there were smallies in Africa. I didn’t either until two brothers from South Africa started writing to me saying they were also hard-core smallmouth fans. They invited me over to fish with them, and over the next 18 months kept sending me South African photos of big smallies and beautiful […]
