I had a great trip on Friday with Greg from Knoxville followed by another equally great trip with Greg from Farragut today. He has been a very loyal customer over the past couple of years and I have had some of my best days on the water with him. Some of that has to do with the fact that he puts his time in pursuing river smallies and he has been rewarded for his persistence. The weather forecast was almost perfect with light winds, partly cloudy skies, and temperatures in the mid-seventies. I was a little concerned that the fishing might be slow because we had a bit of a front come through and the wind was blowing lightly out of the north. But those concerns quickly disappeared as we eased up to one of our favorite spots on the French Broad River and were greeted with smallie after smallie blowing thread fin shad out of the water. Depending on the year you can get a pretty good run of pre-spawn threadfin shad moving up the French Broad and the smallies are eagerly waiting to pounce on them as they pass by. As luck would have it we were in the right place at the right time as wolf packs of smallies would harass the passing schools of threadfins making it easy to find and cast to them. Greg was with me last spring in this spot when the same spectacle was going on. That day he caught a couple of big smallies weighing 5 lb.3 oz and 4 lb.15 oz. and lost another fish that jumped and threw the hook that looked like it was bigger than the other two. As you can imagine it was off to the races with his first cast and Greg never looked back as he managed to land thirty-six smallies on this trip. The majority of the fish were in that fifteen to seventeen inch range. What was unusual with that many fish being caught is that he only landed one fish that was between eighteen and twenty inches. It was pushing twenty at 19 ¾. Mr. Five Pounder was at it again when he hooked what was obviously a big fish and as he slowly worked it to the boat I looked down and was surprised to see that the fish was a lot bigger than I initially thought. I told him that it looked like it was around twenty-three inches long and was over five pounds. As he gently worked it towards the boat and into the landing net I hoped my prediction would come true. This beautiful smallmouth measured twenty-two inches on the nose and tipped the scales at 5 lbs. 1 oz. It was a very broad fish from the dorsal fin to the belly, but it was not very thick from side to side. I made the assumption that it was a post spawn female and I wondered how much she would have weighed several weeks earlier before the spawn. The picture of this fish is included in this report. This was not the only fish over twenty inches that Greg managed to catch today. He caught another twenty incher that weighed 3 lb. 15 oz. and a 20 ½ that weighed 3 lb. 11 oz. Three fish over twenty and thirty-six smallies in total. Not a bad day on the river at all!
River Smallie Adventures Fishing Report May 6, 2018
