I finally got out to do my first smallmouth bass fishing trip of the year. I headed out with my buddy Evan who owns High Country Angler. Evan also does Smallmouth Bass Fly Fishing Guide trips if you want to catch pigs, he knows just the places to go. I took my son on this trip, and he was pumped to go. A couple airline tickets and a rental car and anyone can take this trip. I geared him up with a spinning rod because he has yet to master long casts, so I figured this would work better for him and keep hooks out of my body parts from him trying to cast from the boat. We Got up about 8AM and ate breakfast and drank some much needed coffee before we hit the river. We stopped by the sandwich shop and grabbed some lunch before finally heading toward the boat ramp. Upon arriving at the boat ramp, we noticed the water looked good and the weather was nice and overcast. Perfect weather for smallie fly fishing. We rigged up and put the boat in and rowed across the river. We rigged up my son's rod and told him what to look for as far as structure in the river. It wasn't 10 minutes after putting in the boat, and my son landed a hog of a smallmouth....Check out the little video.

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I knew after seeing my son catch that smallmouth bass as the first fish of the day, and me already breaking off 2 big pigs....this was going to be a good day for smallmouth bass fishing. We drifted on down about a hundred yards to the first riffle, and I caught a good sized smallmouth bass on a woolly bugger. These smallmouth were the biggest I have ever caught. They fought like crazy and were tough to bring in some times, even on 2X tippet. The bites was good early on in the morning, and the bigger fish kind of slacked off around 1PM. So we hit the banks with poppers and caught a bunch of smaller smallmouth on poppers. We would hit holes that were really productive and see 2-3 fish chasing the caught fish trying to get the fly out of it's mouth and eat it. I would have my son throw right on top after hooking up to see if we could put 2 on at the same time.

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We floated from 10:30 till 6PM and put 43 fish in the boat between us. The fishing was on fire. Needless to say I will be back again soon. There is nothing like smallmouth bass fishing on the fly rod to get you adrenaline going on a good summer day.

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