Videos from a couple of smallmouth trips

[pdxfisher]

April 25th was a bit of a strange day on the Willamette out of 10th street. The water looked great but I had a hard time finding fish at first. I finally found fish chasing bait on mid-river humps when the wind suddenly picked up and that bite died. The wind was pretty brisk from that point on and I felt like I was back on square one.

 

 I finally made my way up a slough and found a slew of fish From that point on it was really fun day. I ended up with 38 smallmouth but a lot of them were dinks (as is common on the Willamette). Still a fun day on light tackle. The lure that turned the tide in the slough was a weightless, wacky-rigged 3" Senko. (Video at bottom)

 

On May 2nd I hit the Willamette river out of Newberg with a couple of friends. The bite was pretty slow all day long. Occasional flurries, mostly dinks with a couple of decent fish thrown in. After 10 1/2 hours on the water I was almost ready to quit. 

 

A smart man would have quit at that point. Both my friends had already called it a day. Instead I went full Galaxy Quest, "Never give up, never surrender"

 

I finally stumbled on a spot that must have had thousands of bass and pikieminnow on it. I was getting bit on almost every cast. Occasionally I would make a couple of casts without a bite and that would feel really wrong and weird. I lost a fair number of fish and I am sure I did not tally every fish on my clicker but I ended up with at least 34 smallmouth and 10 pikieminnows. My camera died part way through the action but I have some of the incredible action recorded. They were still biting like crazy when I left. I was on the water for 12 hours, but some days you just have to outlast them

 

Killer bait at the end was a 3" swimbait in kind of a grayish-pink color (smolt-like). I think anything would have worked but that is what I had in my hand.