Only had a short window of opportunity to fish this morning/afternoon but decided to make the run to Goodwin to see if I couldn't get in on some of the smallmouth action?! I launched at 10:45am and had to be off the water by 3pm to meet a contractor at my house. That meant I would need to pound it and find fish fairly quickly. I gave myself one hour to use finese tactics like shaky heads, grubs, and drop shots. I started in the N.W. corner of the ake and fished south, hitting all the rock piles and rocky points fishing out to about 10-12', tried several variations and colors, but no strikes. After just over an hour of that I decided to "go after" the aggressive fish instead, so I tied up two crawdad colored crankbaits, one that dives to about 8', and another that dives to 15'. I started out by keeping the boat in about 15' of water and casting to 5-8' of water using the deeper diving crankbait, that way it would bang and dart off of rocks during the retrieve. Then if nothing happened I would move in to about 10' of water and cast to about 3' or less and repeat the process.... This can be a great search technique, but don't use your expensive crankbaits cause it beats the tar out of them! It does not matter if you use a "true-running" crankbait because it's going to be deflecting off the bottom and rocks during the retrieve so go ahead and use the cheapo cranks, trust me, I have reeled in just the diving lip after a few hours of fishing like this before...and on that note, use 'floating' crankbaits, so if they do break, you can wait for the body to float to the surface and go retrieve it, that way no-one runs the risk of finding it with their bare feet!! Also, be prepared to check your line often and re-tie due to your line rubbing on rocks! I was using 12lb Trilene Flourocarbon on a baitcaster.

Finally, at about noon, I caught the 4lb smallie in the pic. She was in about 8 feet of water and smacked it as it deflected off of a rock. The second smallie came off a rock in about 3 feet of water and weighed 2.8lbs (crankbait in mouth pic). The third and final fish for the day a 2.4lb'er came in about 2' of water. I had three others follow out in 12', but they came at the bait too close to the boat, and turned off!

I was also using an attractant, it was Yum Crawfish, it's red in color, and smells great. Smallmouth are notorious for following baits, and I wanted something in addition to the erractic action to trigger the strike!

Water temps were running 55-59 degrees, all the fish came off of scattered rocks. I would guess that the larger fish were moving out to deeper water with the cold front coming? If I had more time I would have tied on a 22' deep diver and searched the 12-18 foot range out off the rocky points. It was chilly and starting to sprinkle when I left.

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