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Brandon Palaniuk talks about how he likes to fish boulders and search for smallmouth in clear water where he can see the fish wandering around. Smallmouth bass relate to boulders before during and after the spawn and even into the summer on northern lakes. Palaniuk fishes for and catches smallmouths on finesse tackle while looking for bedders and cruisers.
So what we’ve got here is pretty much a big spawning flat and these smallmouth are mixed all across the board. We’ve got pre-spawn, spawn, post spawn, and if you look here we’ve got rock and one thing smallmouth love is rock especially during the spawn. They’ve got to have a lot harder bottom to spawn on than a largemouth does. So any time you can find rock especially larger rock and I’m on a big pee gravel flat. That’s going to be a major attractor for smallmouth and especially big smallmouth. Because they like to get up against those bigger boulders and feel like they’re protected.
So all we’re doing here is taking a Berkley Havoc Bottom Hopper and a little 3/16 ounce Drop Shot Weight and pitching it around the sides of these boulders. It doesn’t take very long, you make that little pitch out there, shake it a couple times, and your line starts swimming off, and all you have to do is lean back into them. And I’m always looking as I’m cruising a long always keeping my eyes peeled, you know get ya a good pair of polarized sunglasses that way you can see down into the water and a lot of times you’ll be looking, you make that cast and you look up and you’ll see a 4 or 5 pounder sitting there. With these smallmouth up here they’ve been pretty easy to catch when you can see them.
Might have caught a glimpse of one right there, I can’t tell if that’s actually a fish or not. Not appearing to be, it’s a shadow from a rock. And we’re hooked up! Not very big, this is below average for this place. He’s probably only about a pound and a half. This lake is full of 3 and 3 ½ pounders it’s unreal. But it seems like when you catch them this size, there all this size so you usually need to just move. It seems like the bigger ones like to get on those big gravel flats that have little ditches running in them and they’ll travel, they’ll use those little ditches travel routes and that’s where you can really load up on the big ones.
