Reel Weather: Hot fishing, sizzling products, and Wild Bill Wichrowski!

If you live above the Mason-Dixon line you're either enjoying some of the best fishing you've seen in years, or you're missing out on it! The current temperatures and moon phase is producing a feeding frenzy of both Large and Smallmouth bass. Temperatures have been moderate and slightly cooler at night. While the moon phase has fish targeting crawfish and feeding so heavily on them, you can actually see fish regurgitate them when they're being reeled in or after they've been in your livewell. This is a great time to throw tubes, jigs, and soft plastic craws. You should use mixed colors like black and blue or Alabama Craw, to imitate the kind of transition that they've been going through since the full moon on the 13th. 

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Summertime Smallies!

For people from the North, smallmouth fishing is a way of life. Big Lakes with big waves, producing legendary bronzebacks. These fish routinely come completely out of the water while being reeled in, and often the fiercest action doesn't begin until they've seen the boat. If you haven't had the opportunity to experience this for yourself, I highly recommend it. There are many bodies of water offering exquisite smallmouth fishing: Erie, Ontario, Simcoe, Cayuga, Susquehanna River, Champlain, St. Claire, St. Lawrence River, Pickwick, Smith Mountain, are just a few of the many options anglers can choose from when seeking big smallmouth bass. While you won't find these fish to reach the size of their greener cousins, smallmouth pound-for-pound have a reputation for packing twice the punch. There's no denying that. One thing that isn't debatable is that some of those lakes produce very nautical conditions that can be very dangerous. Weather Underground has wave conditions for those big lakes, and you should check them before going and heed the advice that's posted there when bad weather is predicted.

When the summer heats up, the bigger smallmouth move deep. Now deep is of course a relative term, and varies from lake to lake. Typically though, you'll be fishing in water that's over 25 feet, with techniques like drop shot, carolina rigging, tubes, cranking, etc. My two favorite presentations in this time of year are...

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Don't let cold fronts chill your bite!

We normally think of summer as hot, humid, and the cold fronts can be a thing of relief that we welcome. For bass anglers, these drops in temperature can be really demoralizing. When temps that have been hovering in the 90s suddenly drop over night to the 80s and below, this can have a dramatic impact on the bass in your home lake. This can be a really frustrating time, because it normally has meant a really intense feeding period leading up to this change. 

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Dog Days of Summer

Since I began writing this blog I've started to get emails from people asking me what I would do in certain climates or weather conditions, and asking if there are presentations other than the ones I've suggested that are also an option to someone who might not feel that what I've suggested is something that they're really comfortable doing. So with that in mind, this week I'm going to address a question that I received last week, and I'm going to have several of my friends offer their opinions as well.

To begin with, the hottest days of the year can be brutal for fishing. Sometimes it feels like there are two suns in the sky when you're faced with glaring reflections off the water. For many people, largemouth and smallmouth both can seem to just disappear this time of year, leaving you feeling burned by the sun and the fish. As I've said before, I don't like fishing docks. So I'm going to focus on other transitional areas and what I use to target them.

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