Hi Folks, spent the last two guiding full days for smallmouth bass. Mixed it up guiding out of my motorboat then rive fly fishing today. Still really dry but as I write this we do have some rain hitting the roof. The lake surface temperature was 73 degrees and the river temperature was 70 degrees today. Water is low everywhere including lakes and ponds. Yesterday was a great day to be in a boat with no wind and partial cloud cover. The larger smallmouth have been holding in deeper water. We located them in 12' to 15' of water plus. The bigger fish were off long deep rock points and off sharp drop offs from the shoreline. We could not get the fish to eat off the top so we resorted to finesse fishing with some rubber. A 5" crawfish colored Senko and a 5" Watermelon Red Magic Senko worked very well. It was interesting that a lot of the fish hooked swam at the boat after getting airborne. Really had to reel to keep the pressure on and the rod bent. We landed 15 bass and missed or last as many. Pretty nice that we had the entire lake to ourselves for most of the morning. Today I wore out some boot leather wading for smallmouth. A large number of #8-#10 golden stone fly nymph shucks on rocks. A fair number of #14 egg laying caddis this morning that were dipping their bodies into the water to drop their eggs. Saw a few fall fish eat the bugs off the surface. We did not have a lot of luck with surface presentations though we did catch a decent bass on a #8 foam mouse fly, and another one on a #8 yellow bodied frog popper. Most of our damage was done with a #8 olive crystal flash bugger, a #6 olive bunny bugger, and a #8 Girdle bug under an indicator. We caught most of our bass in slower sections of pools while we landed some giant Fall fish in the heavy riffles. Lots and lots of crawfish and juvenile fish milling about in the shallows. We worked for fish today as the wind really blew from the east. However, we still managed to catch over 15 fish between 2 fly anglers. Hopefully we get some much needed rain as the front passing through will give us some nice cool nights to bring down water temperatures. Off to small stream fly fish in the morning. Remember to clean your gear and keep the non-native species at home. Have Fun, Willy
