Recently I had an angler in my smallmouth bass school from Ohio who said he really would like to catch a very large smallmouth bass. The section of the river we were fishing was 200 feet wide with several cuts 8 feet deep and 30 feet wide running down the river.
This reminded me of a section of the Madison River in Montana where Charlie Brooks took me to teach me the “Brooks Method” of fishing large nymphs for large trout. I showed my student the “Brooks Method” and 15 minutes later, he hooked a very large bass on a Murray’s Heavy Black Hellgrammite size 4. He fought the bass for over a half hour when the drag on his reel stuck and he lost him. However, over the next several hours by using the Brooks Method he did catch many bass.
Ray Hurley, my Yellowstone River guide for 17 years, encouraged me to use fast sinking head fly line in order to fish my streamers deeply on the large pools on the Yellowstone River for the large trout. I do this often on the large Western Trout Rivers and find it very effective and easy to master. This same technique is very effective on Smallmouth Rivers and the students in my schools master it quickly. If the river is less than 4 feet deep we use floating lines and go to the fast sinking heads only for deeper fast rivers. Smallmouth streamers such as Murray’s Magnum Darter, Magnum Hog Sucker and Magnum Blue Gill are very productive with this method.
Fishing large Dave’s Hoppers along the bank below Quake Lake is one of the most dependable late summer tactics on the Madison River. This is also an exciting tactic on smallmouth rivers when fishing close to the banks beside pasture fields and hay fields with a gentle kicking action. The James River and the North Fork of the Shenandoah River are both very productive when fishing Dave’s Hopper size 8 and size 10. I’ve even developed a very large high-floating Murray’s Bass Hopper size 8 that is very popular with our bass customers.
So you can see there are many tactics and flies that overlap between Western Trout Fishing and smallmouth bass fishing in rivers.