As we pulled up to the sunken island on Regina Bay at Sioux Narrows, memories from eleven years previous came rushing back. I was with friend Darrin Bohonis and he had invited me down with him from Winnipeg to fish springtime smallmouth bass. Now Darrin is an awesome angler, and he had won a tournament on this body of the fall previous so when he decided to start on this spot it was no surprise. Still, when I started to laugh he had no idea what was so funny. I explained to Darrin that it was here in 2001 that I filmed a “Complete Angler” show with friend Chris Bell for fall smallmouth. In three hours that October we had caught and released a number of jumbo smallmouth using a jigging spoon called the “Rattlin Snakie”. We had fished the east side of this big sunken island finding the fish relating to a sharp drop off .
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| Yours truly and Chris Bell |
Wow, while things change, some still stay the same. Of course the fish had not moved from this popular winter home but the way we caught them sure had. While we used a aggressive lift and drop with a jigging spoon that fall, this time around we caught all our bass dead sticking a Berkley four inch power minnow on a 3/8 ounce jig. Darrin said the key was let the jig go to the bottom, then reel up half a turn and hold the bait steady. Sure enough, he had the first five bass doing exactly that. The rest of the day pretty much evened out on the fish catching but I found it ironic that the approach to catching this fish should be so dramatically different.
While we were fishing in the springtime, the pattern was pretty much the same, bass holding in fairly tight schools along the breakline in twenty feet of water.
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| Darrin with a couple beauties! |
It was amazing how accurate this scanning really was. We caught bass on everyone of those key fishing holding structures. On the first area we caught more than two dozen smallmouth and has the day progressed it continued to be fun battling early spring smallmouth.
To visit Darrin’s website logon to http://www.bohonisenterprisesinc.ca/
