The Summer of Smallmouth

While summer doesn't officially end until September 22nd, I thought it'd be a good time to reflect on my 2016 open water season. As usual, I fished almost exclusively for bass, so that'll be my focus here.

Labour Day Smallmouth

The season began early this year with a trip to Lake St. Clair on the long weekend in May. We relied mostly on drop-shots, but also caught fish on small plastic swimbaits and spinnerbaits. After that trip, I had another opportunity to extend my season by fishing on Lake Ontario in June, where bass season opens a week earlier than it does in my neck of the woods. Weighted wacky-rigged senkos and crankbaits did the trick there for big smallmouth. A few decent largemouth were caught flipping soft plastics.

Now a tradition, I fished Lake Simcoe on the opener day with great success. Weightless wacky-rigged senkos caught most of the fish, but I also relied on my Lake St. Clair experience to get one on a spinnerbait. For my senko and drop-shot fishing, I was very happy with my new Shimano Hagane 2500 reel (pro tip: get a Canadian Tire money card and buy your gas there - in about a year you can get one of these reels with a significant discount). No more lost fish because of a poor drag system.

Don't forget who the man is #fishing #Muskoka #Huntsville #dropshot #senko #wacky #smallmouth #summerofsmallmouth
A photo posted by Greg (@fisherman_greg) on Sep 4, 2016 at 8:21am PDT

I really wanted to focus more on largemouth fishing this summer, since flipping and pitching really is the weakest part of my game, but I couldn't stop catching big smallmouth. I did spend some time focusing solely on using frogs - or in my case, the LiveTarget Field Mouse.

I shored up my frog fishing game by realizing I had a tendency to set the hook too early. Waiting that extra split second or second really upped my hook-up ratio, even though I didn't catch any giants this year on that technique. My best largemouth fishing of the year came on a camping trip to Vixen Lake, where I caught a few decent fish using Jackall Cover Craws.

In the past, the late summer period hasn't been too kind to me. But this year I managed to put together a few solid evenings, capped off on the Labour Day long weekend with a beautiful smallmouth caught on a drop-shot with a wacky-rigged senko. Thank you Mr. Yamamoto!

I still have a number of holes in my game: in particular, flipping, finding fish late in the summer, and putting together patterns. I'm still not totally comfortable relying on my electronics and fishing in deeper water. And this summer I caught a number of good fish on hook-sets that were less than ideal. But I'm not satisfied with being lucky. I want to be good. And then great.

If I take a step back, however, I can see how far I've come in the last four years. I caught fish this year using just about all of the major bass fishing techniques. All in all, I'm pretty happy with how the 2016 bass fishing season went. I hope to do some fall bass and pike fishing in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned for more posts!

Greg Cholkan is a lawyer and fisherman. He works in Muskoka with Barriston LLP and his practice focuses on real estate, wills and estates, and business matters. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.