“To make consistent catches, it’s best to find a huge ball of bait that remains in an area smallmouths favor. As long as the baitfish remain, smallies tend to stay put and become far more predictable. But when the weather changes and prey moves, the bass vanish. That’s why we love the fall season up north, when smallies bunch together in deep water and wait for bait to come to them. We suspect they don’t roam in fall because they’re trying to conserve energy and fatten up for winter. Southern anglers may not have that advantage.

“When smallies are targeting crayfish, they’re far more sedentary. At Lake of the Woods, we tracked bass daily and worried when a tag didn’t move at all. We figured the fish had died. We dove to collect the tag and found the bass healthy and gorging on craws. It simply had no reason to move.”

Tactics for Suspended Smallies

At the Table Rock Bassmaster Elite Series tournament last September, Jason Quinn, a touring pro from South Carolina, made a discovery. During practice, he found a hot dawn bite on shallow main-lake gravel points on the White River arm.

Due to a fog delay on Day One of the tournament, the bite was over when Quinn arrived. As he tried to find a straggler or two, he occasionally heard fish breaking behind him, out toward the end of the point where it broke to the river channel. As he fished his way out, he noted a Rat-L-Trap-sized shad floating on the water.

Below the shad were 50 feet of water and flooded trees that reached within 25 feet of the surface. Quinn finally tried a Rat-L-Trap method he uses back home at Lake Hartwell. He made long casts with a black-chrome 3/4-ounce Trap, counted to 10, and began a slow, steady retrieve. On his first cast, a big smallie engulfed the lure. Over the next three days, he located 10 similar areas where he could tempt smallmouth with his Trap, and his most productive fishing occurred after 11 a.m.

At each spot, Quinn hooked a smallmouth within his first four casts. Then he’d spend about 30 minutes fishing it from various angles: outside in, inside out, diagonally, and parallel. He also found that all strikes occurred on a slow, steady retrieve. And the action was best when the sun shone brightly.

In three days of tournament fishing with his Trap pattern, Quinn hooked 18 smallies around 3 pounds each, as well as many below the 15-inch limit. To his dismay, however, all but 7 of the larger ones expelled the lure with headshakes and tail-walking, leaving him frustrated in 39th place, despite his check for $10,000. Though disappointed, he was pleased to have deciphered a way to locate and trigger Table Rock’s suspended smallmouth bass.

Mitch Looper is a savvy smallmouth angler from Arkansas who often fishes Lake Tenkiller in Oklahoma, a highland reservoir about 130 miles southwest of Table Rock. “I don’t fish for suspended smallmouths unless I spot schools of shad on sonar,” he says. “And I’ve had little success with anything but soft plastics when fishing for them.