Schooling/Suspended Smallmouth

[everythingthatswims]

I recently had a humbling couple of days on South Holston Lake, and I want to hear some of the ways you guys target fish behaving how the ones I found were.

 

South Holston is an extremely deep lake, the  boat is rarely in less than 30 FOW when you are fishing any bank (IF you are fishing a bank). It has a lot of limestone influence, so it looks really clear but probably isn't much more than 6' vis, it's just blue. The lake has gizzard shad, threadfin shad, and alewives. The smallmouth we were targeting were eating threadfin shad in the 2-3" range.

 

The fish would be scattered in very large areas in the 50-150' range, I don't think depth was a concern to them. You could see the smallmouth chasing the shad on the surface. Typically it would be one fish (sometimes 2-3, but very seldomly), that would surface, blow up 2-4 times, and vanish. They were chasing individual shad, sometimes in groups of 10-15 (the shad), but once they got one, they went back down. Occasionally you could get one to eat a walking bait if you could get it to the fish in time, which typically didn't happen because of how spread out they were. We could see the fish on the graph suspended in the 20-35 foot range, and there were LOTS of them. We tried dropping drop shots to them, and the fish showed interest, but wouldn't bite the baits, they would just look at them for a while. I fished a deep diving crankbait that I know got in front of them, but to no avail. I fished a spybait, and I ended up catching one fish on that, but that was all. Tried a swimbait on a jighead, nada. Jerkbait (both deep and normal depth) nada. We tried several areas of the lake, and it was pretty much all the same.

 

Normally I would chalk this up to the fish being too keyed in on specific forage meaning they were basically uncatchable, but the problem was, we caught several 18-20" smallmouth while trying to target the brown and rainbow trout in the lake. They were hitting kastmaster spoons trolled behind 1 and 2 ounce weights.

 

Any advice or at least some sympathy? I really don't like it when I find the fish but can't catch them, and this was most definitely the case here!

[lo n slo]

jigging spoon?

[A-Jay]

Check this out ~

A-Jay

 

[everythingthatswims]

3 hours ago, A-Jay said:

Check this out ~

A-Jay

 

Oh jeez it's that dadgum damiki rig

 

I should be back in the fall and winter when that thing is intended to be used on east TN reservoirs and will certainly give it a shot then.

[Bluebasser86]

When they suspend and feed on bait fish at Ozark lakes like Table Rock, a 4 or 5 inch grub on a jighead is often the deal. Cast it, count it down, reel slow. Don't shake it, pop it, pause it, just reel it slowly. Super boring and super effective. 

[Neil McCauley]

Wait...so you ended up catching fish anyway?

 

SMB are around that depth a lot on my lake and deep diving crankbaits and deep work.. Rapala DT20 has been best for me. You might need to longline or troll to keep a crankbaot at 25-30 fow. 

[TnRiver46]

I was about to say what Neil just said, I know some guys that troll crankbaits to get them on soho. No surprise that they hit the spoons you trolled, I can't count the number of times I have struggled to even catch a dink and started catching lots of good ones when trolling. It gets the baits way deeper and they stay deep. And they are moving so fast the fish can't hardly stand it. Another option for suspended bass is dead sticking but it's painfully slow tactic. But they will eat it 

[VolFan]

I would say spoon or blade bait. Also the venerable float-n-fly was made for those conditions. The grub on jiggled at the correct depth is great too, but really hard to keep at 30' for much of a cast. Did you find any lakers?

[Turkey sandwich]

I don't fish many lakes quite like that, but when I do, and run into those kinds of conditions (They seem to happen a lot in lakes where alewives are primary forage, and the surface activity can be VERY misleading), the grub or swimbait can be a lifesaver.  I do not own one, but this would also be a situation where if I did (and it's legal), I'd have an umbrella rig tied up. 

 

After the first day of those conditions, I'd also likely have a flask of whisky. 

[38 Super Fan]

I've seen that kind of situation on Norris many times. Unless they're actually blowing up on top, I don't mess with those fish. Like you, I've tried a variety of things to get those suspended fish, but rarely does anything work. Very interesting that you caught some while trolling spoons though, I've always considered those fish to be nearly uncatchable.

[Further North]

Dupont sinkers?

[East10eC]

I was reading somewhere that bass will often stun the baitfish against the surface and then eat them as they fall stunned down through the water column.  

 

SoHo is a notorious nighttime lake in the summer months.

 

I wonder how a fluttering spoon might work?

I've read about "strolling" a grub in this situation

 

I live within 30 minutes of SoHo and hope to get up there in the next few days. Do you mind sharing what portion of the lake you were finding these conditions? I might try picking up where you left off.

[HookRz]

Most of the Big Lake Erie Smallie seem to disapear in summer. Some hangon deeper structure but the easy 100 fish days  with lots of 4-6 pounders come to an end. 

 

But walleye trolling you can suddenly have multiple hook ups of big Smallmouth...always big ones...suspended 45' 65' deep ove 85' to 100'+. 

 

Is is there a traditional bass method that would catch them better or at all? I doubt it. It seems like small pods of fish spread over hundreds of square miles of water.