How do I fish for great lake smallies in the summer?

[wisconsinbassman]

Hey everyone, 

Ive never done any summer fishing for smallies on the great lakes.  Only in the spring, just wondering how I would fish for them this time of the year.  Where they're located, what they bite.  Any info would be awesome

Thanks guys.

[TnRiver46]

I saw a video of a guy catching them in Lake Michigan in 1-2 feet of water recently. He was sight fishing with a pop R !

[tkunk]

It depends on which lake.

 

On Lake Michigan, wind-blown structure is usually good. Fish are often shallow when it's windy. In summer, I probably catch 95+% of my fish drop shotting. Spinnerbaits and jerkbaits are good when it's very windy.

 

There's a lot of water, so the best place to start is the local tackle shop.

[Hower08]

Find weeds find fish. Look for rock piles with your electronics. Often times a rock pile will only hold 1 to 3 fish but they're typically big. Tubes cranks dropshot will get them .larger pieces of structure such as shipwrecks rock flats or weeds will hold bigger numbers of fish but the size is typically not as good. Small buzzbaits will crush feeding smallies in early morning hours 

[MickD]

On 7/28/2020 at 4:31 PM, TnRiver46 said:

I saw a video of a guy catching them in Lake Michigan in 1-2 feet of water recently. He was sight fishing with a pop R !

Not likely at this time of the year.  I expect it might be an old video.

 

I've never found them in mid-summer in Sag Bay.   I don't fish Lake MI.  St Clair, go deep, find weeds or rocks and fish out from them 20-30 yards.  If you get one, keep working the area.  If you find one, there will be others nearby.  Save your days off for Sept/Oct.

[RoLo]

 

During summertime in the Great Lakes, there seems to be 2 separate populations of smallmouth.

Most will be in the 20-40 ft deep zone, but a smaller faction may be in knee-deep water (1-3 ft).

 

Roger

[TnRiver46]

45 minutes ago, MickD said:

Not likely at this time of the year.  I expect it might be an old video.

 

I've never found them in mid-summer in Sag Bay.   I don't fish Lake MI.  St Clair, go deep, find weeds or rocks and fish out from them 20-30 yards.  If you get one, keep working the area.  If you find one, there will be others nearby.  Save your days off for Sept/Oct.

It was filmed at the same time the BPT was on sturgeon bay, which I think was late July . I want to say the catching was going on around beaver island 

 

 

[RoLo]

 

About 5 years ago, my wife & I spent a week in September at Sturgeon Bay, WI for smallmouth bass.

It was during a tournament, and before we arrived at Robinson's Cottages (Do avoid that place),

we heard on the radio that some pro anglers came in with empty wells. That made it pretty clear

that we were in for tough sledding. Our first night in town, we met Mark Menendez and Bernie Schultz

at Woldts restaurant. Mark reaffirmed the tough conditions, and said that the only bass action

he was able to find was in shallow water, and he placed his hand at knee height.

It seems that a certain subset of smallmouth always cling to shallow water. 

 

Roger 

 

[TnRiver46]

Here’s the continuation of the first video I linked 

[tkunk]

On 8/4/2020 at 8:16 PM, MickD said:

Not likely at this time of the year.  I expect it might be an old video.

 

I've never found them in mid-summer in Sag Bay.   I don't fish Lake MI.  St Clair, go deep, find weeds or rocks and fish out from them 20-30 yards.  If you get one, keep working the area.  If you find one, there will be others nearby.  Save your days off for Sept/Oct.

 

Seems like the different Great Lakes are very different.

 

I fish Lake Michigan. On a normal day, I'd start searching in 15-20 FOW this time of year, but wind changes things. When it's very windy, the fish can get very shallow in summer. I've had many 50+ fish days fishing wind-blown shorelines in less than 5 FOW. They'll always be on the windy side of something, and it's great when that "something" is shore.

 

There's nothing super difficult about it--They'll be where the bait is.

[MickD]

17 hours ago, portiabrat said:

 

Seems like the different Great Lakes are very different.

 

I fish Lake Michigan. On a normal day, I'd start searching in 15-20 FOW this time of year, but wind changes things. When it's very windy, the fish can get very shallow in summer. I've had many 50+ fish days fishing wind-blown shorelines in less than 5 FOW. They'll always be on the windy side of something, and it's great when that "something" is shore.

 

There's nothing super difficult about it--They'll be where the bait is.

Let's get together on Sag Bay mid summer and you can find them for me.  ?  I agree on the wind, but it's still tough to find them, at least for me and many others  who fish Sag Bay.

 

[tkunk]

2 hours ago, MickD said:

Let's get together on Sag Bay mid summer and you can find them for me.  ?  I agree on the wind, but it's still tough to find them, at least for me and many others  who fish Sag Bay.

 

Wind makes things much easier, but I definitely wouldn't say that it makes things easy. I really can't catch them at all when it's calm. On calm days, the guides around here drive around for hours at a time looking for marks, but I don't have the patience (or fuel money) for that.

[Mbirdsley]

Even in the summer They will come up shallow to feed.  However, that window gets shorter and shorter as summer progresses.  In June that window may run untill the 11am in August it may only be 8:30-9am or sooner. When they are shallow run a 14 ft leader of flouro carbon and drag a gp tube ( or other gobey looking Lure) 

 

now that I have a bigger boat.  My goal next year is to chase Lake Michigan smallies around the Pt. betsie/platte Bay Area on Lake Michigan and the charity island on the Saginaw bay.  
 

also don’t discount the drowned harbor mouths.  Before the gobeys got real bad as kids we could catch nice smallies on a worm and bobber off of the stub piers in Frankfort in August. Gobeys get to the worms first now 

[roadwarrior]

Read Q-Jay's posts and watch his videos. He has it goin' on!

 

 

https://www.bassresource.com/bass-fishing-forums/profile/13860-a-jay/

 

 

[RichF]

Lake Ontario may be a little different.  In the middle of summer, I would say the vast majority of smallies go deep (20-50ft).  You can always find fish shallow, but you won't find the numbers or size.  Finding summertime smallies in Ontario (or any great lake) is incredibly daunting, but once you find them, they're almost always easy to catch.  Graph around the obvious stuff like big islands, points, or main lake shoals.  Look for the stuff everyone tells you to looks for:  bottom composition transitions, steep drop offs, rock piles, etc.  The most important thing I've learned over the years is this...if you fish an area you think looks good but you don't get bit...move on.  If there is a school of them in the area, they will almost always bite, if you get a bait near them.  As for baits, all the typical smallmouth stuff will work when you find fish: tubes, drop shot, neds, small swimbaits.

[J Francho]

Find bait, find fish.  

[TnRiver46]

5 hours ago, J Francho said:

Find bait, find fish.  

This is why I want to fish the Great Lakes! On TN river, there are piles of shad super thick literally everywhere. I mean gobs and gobs in every creek arm and all over the main channel. So finding the bait is as easy as pointing out the lake on a map. Sometimes I try fishing where there’s not shad everywhere to see if I can get my lure in front of fish that aren’t stuffed to the gills. It works on occasion but it’s hard to find a spot without bait. I would love to try Lake Erie , but I have an 18.5 foot flat bottom aluminum boat so it’s kind of a pipe dream haha. I have ridden a ferry on it and almost soiled my linens. 
 

 

[RichF]

2 hours ago, TnRiver46 said:

This is why I want to fish the Great Lakes! On TN river, there are piles of shad super thick literally everywhere. I mean gobs and gobs in every creek arm and all over the main channel. So finding the bait is as easy as pointing out the lake on a map. Sometimes I try fishing where there’s not shad everywhere to see if I can get my lure in front of fish that aren’t stuffed to the gills. It works on occasion but it’s hard to find a spot without bait. I would love to try Lake Erie , but I have an 18.5 foot flat bottom aluminum boat so it’s kind of a pipe dream haha. I have ridden a ferry on it and almost soiled my linens. 
 

 

I think the dynamic with the gobies is kinda the same now.  There are gobies EVERYWHERE on Ontario and the St. Lawrence, like literally everywhere.  The bass are definitely not everywhere the gobies are.

[Mbirdsley]

5 hours ago, TnRiver46 said:

This is why I want to fish the Great Lakes! On TN river, there are piles of shad super thick literally everywhere. I mean gobs and gobs in every creek arm and all over the main channel. So finding the bait is as easy as pointing out the lake on a map. Sometimes I try fishing where there’s not shad everywhere to see if I can get my lure in front of fish that aren’t stuffed to the gills. It works on occasion but it’s hard to find a spot without bait. I would love to try Lake Erie , but I have an 18.5 foot flat bottom aluminum boat so it’s kind of a pipe dream haha. I have ridden a ferry on it and almost soiled my linens. 
 

 

You would be good to go on the Saginaw bay with that rig.  Just pick a good day.  I dunno about running the charities in a flat bottom boat but, the smallies are close enough in May and June where you wouldn’t have to run that far out 

[Captain Phil]

The only smallmouth fishing I have ever done has been in Lake Erie.  A few summers in a row, two friends and I rented a house for a week on Pelee Island. We towed a bass boat to Windsor Canada and took the ferry.  We fished in ten to thirty feet of water.  We used 1/2 oz. lead jigs inside of tube baits. We carried boxes of these jigs. I was told the fish were feeding gobys, an invasive species in these lakes.  Our best colors were dark green and brown.   We drifted while bouncing the tube jigs on the bottom.

 

The smallmouth bass around this island average 2-3 pounds each.  We caught 10-20 fish a day up to six pounds.  We also caught some big walleye.   If you want to catch big smallmouth bass in the summer, give it a try.

[J Francho]

Dragging tubes was THE way in the 90s.  It still works, but you'll be dealing with some snot algae, which is why many have abandoned it for a drop shot.  Back then, I'd troll deep diving walleye cranks.  Catch a few on a spot, stop and drop tubes over the side to further dissect the school, if that's what you found.  These days, it's a lot of map work, scanning for bait, trial and error.

[gim]

I am not extremely familiar personally with fishing the Great Lakes for brown bass but from what I can gather, most of the water seems to be either clear or very clear.  If that is the case, fish generally move deeper and they become spookier and eventually tougher to catch based on angling pressure.  Not saying its impossible to catch one in shallow water but during the summer when the water is warmer and there's more boats and the sun is out longer I would generally target deeper structure and make long casts.

[J Francho]

Erie and Ontario are only really clear in spring.  You can see around 30' then.  After that, it's around 4-10' of visibility.  It's actually gotten better since the zebra mussels took over.  It really depends on location.  Some places have more run off, and that means green water.  Fish are deep anyway.

[Jermination]

16 hours ago, TnRiver46 said:

This is why I want to fish the Great Lakes! On TN river, there are piles of shad super thick literally everywhere. I mean gobs and gobs in every creek arm and all over the main channel. So finding the bait is as easy as pointing out the lake on a map. Sometimes I try fishing where there’s not shad everywhere to see if I can get my lure in front of fish that aren’t stuffed to the gills. It works on occasion but it’s hard to find a spot without bait. I would love to try Lake Erie , but I have an 18.5 foot flat bottom aluminum boat so it’s kind of a pipe dream haha. I have ridden a ferry on it and almost soiled my linens. 
 

 

you aint lying! go out after dark and shine a spot light anywhere around you and bait explodes. ive been catching most of my good ones flipping a jig in grass trying to find fish posted up ambushing