Selectivity And Them Ol' Brown Fish

In-Fisherman Field Editor Gordon Pyzer, a smallmouth tournament angler and former fishery biologist for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, agrees. "I've learned more about smallmouths in the last 20 months than in the last 40 years," Pyzer said. " It all starts to jell after half a century, I guess, but here's an example: Five years ago I won a fall tournament on Lake of the Woods and somebody beat me to my number one spot, so I flipped over to number two and it was 9:30 before they pulled off. I said to my partner, 'We'll rest it 15 minutes and try it,' but, of course, another boat pulled up on it and spent an hour there. Now it's 11:30 and my number-one spot had been fished all morning. Still, I insisted we try it. In 5 casts we put 20 pounds in the boat and eventually culled through 5 limits of smallmouths. We were fishing behind very good anglers and had to wonder, what did they miss? Smallmouths so often come just fast enough or good enough that we think we've got it pegged, but there's always a better way to catch them.

"This was proven to me this past year in another tournament on Lake of the Woods," Pyzer continues. "We picked up 1 or 2 fish on that same spot, then left and went to another spot. We could still see 'number one' -- a boat pulled up on it as soon as we left and took 50 to 70 smallmouths right behind us. It seems, sometimes, no matter how much you fine-tune, there's always a better way or some detail you didn't pay attention to. Sometimes it's speed, Sometimes it's color. Sometimes the addition or subtraction of metal flake is all it takes to make a huge difference. I'm not sure if it's conditioning or what, but more and more, those little details are making huge differences.

"Did those bass 'just turn on' as our boat left? I don't think so. I think one of the key principles of smallmouth angling is that bass are products of our presentation. If the sun is shining and the sky is clear, the conventional thing to do is go small and think it's going to be a tough bite. But invariably somebody heads out there with a bigger, more aggressive bait, fishes it fast and tears 'em up. Sometimes, just by thinking 'tough bite,' we actually create one. We're victims of our own assumptions.

"Guido Hibdon told me, last time he was up here, that he asked tournament officials, 'What works?' They told him, 'Crankbaits'. He said, 'As soon as I heard that, I knew we could smack 'em on tubes', and he did. He and Dion fished tubes very aggressively and came in second in a field of over 200 boats. Half the time they were following other anglers using tubes. But Guido said that when you found the trigger and worked the tube right, the brown water on the top of the shoals turned black with smallmouths. Nothing bit on the drop. The key was how they worked the tube."

Dion explains that the exotic rusty craws that now dominate Lake of the Woods are very aggressive swimmers. "They often cruise along a foot or two off bottom," he says. "Rusty craws are so aggressive we could actually catch them by just laying a tube on bottom for a few seconds. Imitating not only the color but the swimming action was the key to catching smallmouths in that tournament."

Which all sounds supremely logical, but the Hibdons would be the first to caution that it's rarely so simple anymore. Smallmouths seem to increasingly force us to find the right "things" (color, size, speed, and many other factors) through a process of elimination that has no basis in human logic. Those who succeed in this elusive, existential enterprise are able to tap into the oxymoronic realm of smallmouth logic. Yet, smallmouths are sometimes predictable. Chew on that for a second. And be afraid. Be very afraid.