Many years ago I hit on one of my most productive smallmouth tactics by accident. I was fishing the tail of a pool on the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. For some reason I decided to blot most of the water out of my Shenk’s White Stream and dress it well with dry fly cream. The action was great and I caught many large smallmouths. This fishing was good all summer so I decided to develop a special floating minnow.
The Murray’s Floating Chub and Dace Minnow turned out to be even more productive than the dressed Shenk’s Streamer.
The last several hours of the day, many large bass move into the tails of the pools. The bass feed on minnows that live here in water that is 1 to 3 feet deep. Apparently they prefer to feed very aggressively in the low light level.
This is very exciting smallmouth fly fishing. Often you can see the wake of the fish coming from 6-8 feet away to take the floating minnow.
How To Fish the Floating Minnow
My favorite way to use this technique is to wade into the river immediately downstream of the lower lip of the pool. From here I fan my casts upstream and up and across stream to cover all of the lower part of the pool I can reach. I retrieve my Floating Minnow with a slow line hand strip-pause-strip action that moves it slightly faster than the current. I wade all the way across the river fishing all of the tail of the pool. Next I wade ten to twenty feet further up into the pool and continue this slow Floating Minnow technique. When I get so far upstream that the river is too deep to wade I move over to the shallow water close to the bank and continue fishing upstream.
This technique helps me catch more large bass quicker than any method I use.
You must be logged in to post a comment.