Fish Like a GIRL

As I write this, our first big tournament of the year is in the books. Spring tournaments are always dicey. It can be hard to know what stage the fish are in, and that can also change pretty quickly. It also changes from place to place, lake or flowage. 

We were on Lake Mohawksin on Sunday, May 19. Chet and I had pre-fished the Wednesday before, just to eliminate some areas than any other reason. 

The interesting part about having a tournament up north here before the opening of smallmouth season is that smallmouth season is only open on river systems. Lake Mohawksin qualifies in that respect, but smallmouth season was not open on either the Somo or Tomahawk rivers. That meant, if guys wanted to fish in either of those, they could fish for largemouth, but not smallmouth. Also, they could not already have a smallmouth in the box and head up either river. I do not tend to fish either of those rivers anymore, and have not for years, so it did not affect what Chet and I were planning to do, but I know some guys did have to take it into consideration. 

During pre-fish, Chet and I checked out a couple of places we only fish early in the year. They gave us a little hope, but we knew they were not going to be our first stop. We decided to hit the first spot that we always hit, a spot I call “the money cast.” This is a place that I used to feel fairly confident that, if I were to put the Talons down and just make the exact same cast all day, I would come in with a decent limit. 

Most people know where we start, and we know where a lot of other people start — how exactly we are fishing it and what we are throwing are the keys no one else really knows, and that we do not know about the places they fish.

At any rate, shortly after we got to our first spot, I hooked into a smallmouth. The bite was sort of weird and mushy, but it did not take long for me to realize I was not pulling through a weed or stuck on a rock. It was a decent fish. I set the hook, and considered setting the hook again, knowing it was a smallmouth. 

A side note here, I was told years ago to always set the hook twice on a smallmouth on a swim jig. Since that time, I tend to set the hook twice on every smallmouth I do not feel like I have 100% hooked, or on those where I feel like my hook set was less than tough. Needless to say, I did not do that this time. I thought about it, but just as I was thinking about it, the fish came up and rolled. It had shoulders. It was a decent smallmouth. But, she went her way and my bait went mine. It can be hard to shrug off that kind of stuff, but I know you have to. You have to just get over it and move on. So I did.

I was rewarded a short time later with a fish over 16 inches, which made for a nice start to our limit. I was throwing a bait I have not thrown religiously for years. I think most bass anglers start out throwing a stick worm, whether it’s a three, four, or five inch. I think most of us started there. But as we learned other techniques and tried other baits, a lot of us moved away from the simple worm. The thing with stick worms is they will almost always catch fish. They are not a bait that guarantees big fish, but pretty much anyone can catch fish with a worm. I think the reason a lot of us move away from the worm is because of all the small fish a worm will catch. We eventually find baits that will usually catch big fish, and we opt for five good bites during a day over numbers. 

However, after what I found while we were pre-fishing, I felt like starting with a stick worm was not the worst idea. We would run through this spot more than once, and I would opt for my “big fish bait” the second time through, I decided.

The second fish was a decent size for that body of water, but it was pretty skinny. 

Honestly, most of the fish Chet and I caught seemed to be post-spawn.

I know some people said they were around fish on beds, but the ones we were around seemed to be post-spawn and already eating again. Even where we prefished, we saw beds, but there was nothing on any of them. That could be because they were not locked on and we spooked them by getting close enough to see the beds. 

I am a strong proponent of the thought that if you can see the fish, they can see you, especially in shallow water.

Of the fish I caught that day, almost every single one came on a five-inch stick worm. 

A company called Reaction Innovations came up with the name for the color, and many of their color names might not be for “mixed company” as my grandma might have said, so suffice it to say it is a laminate bait that is black with blue flake on one side and green pumpkin pepper on the other side. 

Of course, I was using my own baits, but in the same color. I have found it to work well at both Mohawksin and Nokomis, and it produced quickly during pre-fish, so I stayed with it during the tournament.

Chet tends to fish faster, reaction types of baits. That works well, I feel, because those baits, if they do not catch the fish themselves, show me where to throw in a slower bait. That is often how we get a lot of our bites. 

In the end, we wound up taking a top ten.

Brothers Matt and Dan Hirman of Stevens Point took top honors for the fifth year in a row with 15.27 pounds, netting them over $1,200. The father and son team of Clair and Raffe Hulce took second with 14.95 pounds. 

If we could have gotten a kicker and upgraded one of our fish by a couple of pounds, we would have cashed a check. Hopefully that is not the story of our year, like it was last year, but it’s still fun to be out on the water challenging ourselves to make better decisions throughout each tournament and to get to hang out and talk with everyone at the weigh-ins, even if you did not get the result you wanted. As we are all fond of saying — on to the next one.

Beckie Gaskill may be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].