RC Smallies

I took my birthday fishing trip on Chaumont Bay this year. Lori lets me go where ever I want on my birthday and since I hadn’t been on Chaumont Bay for a little over a month I decided to go there. This is the time of year that the better smallies start showing up, but the real fall migration is still a few weeks away.

When I launched at 10:30 I was surprised to find the water as warm as it was. Usually around September is when the temperatures start falling off, but today the water was a steady 73 degrees so I wasn’t sure how many groups of smallies I’d find in the shallows.

I’d hit a fish here and a fish there, but just one or two and then nothing for another 200-250 yards so I kept looking. I knew if I did find them there’d probably be a bunch of them together and they were. It took me until 1:30 to find them and when I did they were in 5-8 feet around chuck rock hard bottom with isolated clumps of coontail mixed in and anywhere you found a patch of the coontail the smallies were holding at the base of it on the shady side.

The smallies were real spooky and they’d move around the clumps and then settle down and hold on the shady side. Usually when this happens you can pick them off pretty good with a tube or drop shot, but I’d get one and then the other three or four with it wouldn’t touch the drop baits.

I decided to back off the concentration of fish and show them a Lucky Craft RC1.5 in Copper/Chartreuse Shad and they started whacking it.

I stayed on them until 5 p.m. and I was catching them real good. My smallest fish went 3.00 lb. even and the biggest one went 3.10 lb. When they stopped hitting the RC 1.5 I’d go back through the area with a Carolina rigged 7 inch green pumpkin power worm and I’d get a couple more fish. I ended up gut hooking one so bad on the power worm that I had to take it home and fillet it, but other than that I caught and released 19 SMB. All of them were over 3 lbs and I lost just one nice one that I estimate would have hit 4.5 lbs. with no trouble.

The one in my right hand is the one I had to fillet, the boat drifted in the sun and the picture washed out some, but you get the general idea… it was just book end fish all afternoon

My best five for the day weighed 15.38 lbs. nothing earth shattering, but certainly respectable nonetheless.

If these smallies are in the bay this thick in shallow water right now, I can’t wait to see what happens when the water drops into the high 60s… it ought to be a whackfest.

Below is the color chart for the RC crankbait series: