Editor's Log
July 8, 2008
Electronic Greetings from Yamamoto Central!
“No, no, no…the answer has to be no. Gary if I don’t bear down right now I’ll be up all night trying to meet the magazine’s deadline with the printer. As you may recall, it was you that said there would be no more late issues.”
“What’s that you say Gary? Thirty smallmouth an hour, all on spinnerbaits? Okay, I give; just pull up out front. Oh, you’re already there. Okay, let me grab a few rods and a diet Coke and I’ll be right on out.”
The fact was that Yamamoto was experimenting with various methods in hopes of tricking the smallmouth that lurked in the Thousand Island area of Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence Seaway – he had a BASS tournament upcoming (it was back in the early 90’s) on that smallmouth-choked but windy piece of water and he needed an edge.
But I digress - the foregoing dialog is essentially a word-for-word transcript of a phone call I got from the boss – Yamamoto was famous for his ability to function as a bad influence on my magazine production schedules. That call came in about two in the afternoon and right about this time of year. The bass were post spawn at Lake Powell and the afternoon breezes were predictable in their habit of freshening around five or six o’clock in the afternoon.
For the benefit of those of you not professionally schooled in the intricacies of highly technical meteorological jargon, “freshening breeze” is a term often used to describe an afternoon freshet of anything from say 5-10 mph, to just barely sub-gale force. Sometimes at Powell we’d hide for a couple of hours behind one of the many 900-foot walls while we waited for the afternoon breeze to be through with freshening itself.
So up the Lake we went, full speed ahead, of course. Thirty miles later Gary pulled up about a hundred yards from a nondescript, featureless bank, threw down the trolling motor, grabbed a Mod 4 rod with a gaudy spinnerbait tied on, and then we sat, and then we sat some more. When I asked just when he expected the hot bite might kick off, and if maybe he thought we should make a cast he said, “Be patient, the breeze will be kicking off here in a few minutes.”
While we wait patiently for further developments with the breeze, freshening or not, I may as well mention a little about the brightly-colored spinnerbaits dangling from our rod tips. They were half-ounce Yamamoto baits, replete with Gamakatsu hooks and Sampo swivels, of course, dressed with twin willowleaf blades in the gaudy fluorescent chartreuse batteries-not-included, sunglasses recommended shade.
In lieu of a skirt there was threaded on each spinnerbait a five-inch single-tail Hula Grub in the gaudiest chartreuse, color #169. Man oh man, you talk about attention grabbers, these baits were akin to kicking the door down and rolling in a grenade to announce ones arrival at the party!
It wasn’t too long before a slight breeze began stirring and I began fidgeting, but Gary assured me there was no hurry and no need to commence our afternoon’s activities until the breeze kicked up in earnest. When the breeze cooperated, generating about a three or four-inch chop in the process, Gary sailed out a longish cast and began to yard on that reel handle in earnest. His half-ounce spinnerbait wasn’t quite waking across the surface, but it was darn close to it.
On cast number two Gary grunted in mid retrieve as he leaned back on the medium-heavy rod, burying the wickedly sharp Gamakatsu into a smallmouth jaw in the process. Since the spinnerbait was just barely subsurface to start with, the result of the hookset was predictable – the launch sequence was a short one and the brown-backed scrapper was a foot in the air in the blink of an eye. That fish was the start of an amazing bit of fishing, with a ballistic bronze bullet hooked up on every other cast or so for right at two hours – amazing!
The area we were fishing was a huge offshore expanse of sandstone hillocks, whoop-de-dos if you will, all covered by 20 to 40-feet of crystal-clear water. It didn’t seem to matter which direction we cast; it was not a target oriented bite. All we had to do was saturate the area with long casts and then burn our retrieves back just below the choppy surface. Come to think of it I suppose that was the target, the surface.
It seemed that surface chop served to embolden the smallmouth as it hid their presence in the ultra clear water. They were going ballistic on the gaudy spinnerbaits in the truest sense of the word, rocketing straight up 20 or 30 feet to simply crush our speeding baits.
At other times and in the same area, or same type of area, but without the benefit of the wind-generated surface chop, the best I ever managed were a few stragglers, mostly on a grub worked just above bottom or a weighted, slim profile jerkbait, and always in a much more subdued color choice. But, in every case once the wind cranked up the smallmouth would fire up and go wide open. I found the same pattern to work just as reliably any time the smooth surface of clear water was broken up by wind, rain, and even a freak snowstorm in one instance.
So, when early summer afternoon breezes threaten to spoil your day out on the water, and of course, only when you can do so safely, break out your gaudiest spinnerbaits and hang on for what may prove to be some of the best fast-paced smallmouth action anywhere!
Good fishin’
Jerry Puckett