It was a Super Sunday for me indeed, but that had little to do with the Football game that evening.  Bill and I got up early, got to the walking path as the sun was still below the horizon.  When we arrived to the area, it was breezy and about 21 degrees.  Luckily I was all bundled up with Akinetix hat and gear, makes a big difference when you are fishing in January and you are dressed for the weather.  We were the first ones there this time and agreed to stay close so that we could get good pictures if we caught larger fish.

Bill & I were both giddy and anxious to get our rods unwrapped and make that first cast, my first pitch I had a solid tap and missed the fish, threw back in got thumped again and reared back only to break my line.  After getting a new black & blue 1/2oz Tru-Tungsten jig tied up, it was on, Bill and I were hooking fish at a steady pace.  We were getting bit on nearly every cast when we started.  It only took us about 30 minutes for each of us to get to double digit bass landed.  We even had several doubles.

This was an early 4lb double, my fish is in my right hand, Bill’s in the other

I then walked over to a shallower weed flat and started working that area, I got some bites and some fish, but my 1/2oz jig was constantly fouling with slimy grass, so I tried swimming the jig.   I caught a few fish doing that, but that heavy jig was not ideal for swimming it in that shallow water.  I returned with a 6″ Baby bass BassTrix swimbait to that grassy area and immediately started hooking up on some nice bass; very cool!  After about 6 bass and a few missed fish, they finally ripped my paddle tail off, so back to a 3/8oz Fall Craw jig that I could both swim and work on the bottom.

One of the nicer bass duped by a 6″ BassTrix Paddle Tail

Catching fish on the jig was very fun, but then my mind started to wonder…..  could I catch them on my 7″ Bluegill Tru-Life swimbait????  So I convinced myself to tie it on, in the deeper area where we started, I could get bass to follow on most casts, but they would not commit to hitting it.  I then walked down to the shallow grass area where it was more wind swept and on my 2nd cast, my rod loaded up with a nice bass.  I then caught 3 bass on my next 5 casts with the big swimbait.  How awesome to be on a hot swimbait bite on the last day of January where most anglers are ice fishing in this area???

One of several bass on my Tru-Tungsten Tru-Life bluegill

I went on to catch 38 bass in total, with many 3-4lb class fish, Bill tallied 44 all in about 4 hours.  So if you do the math, that is a bass every 6 minutes for each of us or 3 minutes combined.  It was so fast and intense, I hardly noticed how bad I gashed my finger until I got looking at the photos, no pain, no gain.  I could go into a ton more details, but I got lots of pictures, they explain best!!

 
Nice bass, with a face full of Blk/Blue TT Jig!

 
Bill got a great shot of me early on fishing that weed flat as the sun rose

  
Bill’s biggest fish, he caught several, but its my blog!                        Another solid Jig fish for me

Rich
RichLindgren.com 
Rich’s Bassin’ Forum
Bass Fishing Tackle Blog

The past two winters, I have been doing my best to beat Cabin Fever by casting to open water smallmouth on the Mississippi River.  Don’t get me wrong, its a great time and beats the heck out of ice fishing or sitting at home watching “World’s Greatest Fishing Show” (No offense Z); but there are times when I want to fish for big green bass, with big lures and big sticks.  The river smallies are all about 8lbs test and 1/8oz tube jigs with spinning gear.  There is a part of me that is only satisfied with 1/2oz jigs, 7′ Heavy Baitcasting gear and thunderous bone jarring hooksets, you know what I mean????

So this past Saturday morning I headed up to northern Minnesota to meet my buddy Bill to fish a warm water discharge that is know to have opportunity for both numbers & quality largemouth even in the dead of winter.  I got a late start from home, so it was nearly 1pm before we wet a line and the area was crawling with anglers fishing for bass, panfish and whatever was biting.  Bill did catch a nice chunky largemouth on his first cast, but over all the bites were far and few between.  I broke off on two jig bites due to old line, I told myself to respool before the trip, but I did not

I started downsizing my offerings and settled on a Green Pumpkin Baby Brush Hog texas rigged with a 3/16oz Tru-Tungsten worm weight, very quickly after that switch I boated a few 12-13″ largemouth.

Shot a picture of this little guy, at the time, was not sure if I was going to catch any more…

About 4pm, most anglers had really cleared out, except for Bill and on other guy.  I told Bill, that if I drive 4 hours, we would fish still we freeze or cannot see, it was the latter.  With the reduced pressure and light penetration, the bite seemed to slowly pick up.  It was still a tough bite, as I had to keep using the brush hog and Bill used a small finesse jig.   Also, I had to basically dead stick the bait and shake vigorously on the slack line to get my force bead to click against my sinker.  One thing was, the water was very clear and with my JKruz sunglasses, I often could see bass cruising through some sand spots along the first break.  So on many of the fish, I would pitch my bait into the sand spot and shake it.  The shaking would quickly attract sunfish, once the sunfish started pecking, bass would often come check to see what was up……   And often after 30-60 seconds of shaking, a bass would pick up my bait, I would have not caught half the bass I did that evening with out quality polarized sunglasses.

This was my big fish of the day, right around 3lbs

We did manage right around 30 fish in that last two hours, with the biggest right around 3lbs.  As we walked back to the vehicle, I convinced Bill we would wake up by 6am and be there at first light to give it another try.  Seeing the bass we did not catch and the length of travel drove me to give it another shot on the morning of the Super Bowl Sunday.  Check back soon to read the rest of the story….

Rich
RichLindgren.com 
Rich’s Bassin’ Forum
Bass Fishing Tackle Blog

Well up here in Minnesota, we finally got out of a week, where we never reached above zero degrees Fahrenheit, had a day or two of weather that hovered around 30 degrees, so I took that as a cue to get some fishing done!!  My club member Dave Cindrich joined me for the day.  Early on, it was pretty cold, as it was about 20 degrees when we started fishing.  It was nice to have my new Akinetix beanie to keep my head nice & warm

You can see the rocks and the very clear water in this picture
The first spot we stopped at for about 15 minutes, not a single bite, so we quickly moved on.  The next area, was slow to get going but we did pluck 10 smallmouth from the area and had a couple more on.  I got one close to 4lbs and another over 3lbs there right before we left.  The first four fish came on tubes, 2 on a stupid tube rig and the other two on a rattling tube jig.  The next 6 came on a Fork Craw rigged on a shakey head (Picasso Shakedown & Buckeye Spot Remover heads).  We spent about 2 hours catching those 10 fish.

You know its cold when the fish have snow on their fins!!!
We then went scouting and spent about 45 minutes checking out some new areas without any luck.  Lastly we headed to a different stretch that had proven fruitful in the past.  It did not take long for both of us to hook up on fish in the next area.  Dave and I had at least one double here.  I caught most of these fish on a coffee tube with a regular 1/8oz tube jig, but the bigger fish came on a Watermelon Red Flake Chompers grub on a Chompers head.  The fish seemed to be biting closer to the bank here and occasionally we would see them swim by our feet.  I caught two more in this area that were between 3 & 4lbs.

Notice this one has a face full of Chompers Grub
All in all, I ended up with 21 or 22 smallies and probably 4 or 5 more that I had on for a bit.  Dave caught somewhere around 10 fish, and hooked into a couple big carp as well.  My best 5, would have probably weighed, right around 17lbs.  For guys that really do not care to drill holes to fish in the winter, this was a great outing!

Below I got some pictures of the baits and rigging methods used

(Top to Bottom) – Fork Craw on Shakedown, Chompers Grub, Coffee Tube

Check John Haynes’ & Josh Douglas’ blogs for their entries on there smallmouth trips as well.
This just proves what dedicated fanatic anglers will do to wet a line in unfrozen waters in the dead of winter!!

Rich
RichLindgren.com 
Rich’s Bassin’ Forum
Bass Fishing Tackle Blog