Smallie season is officially here!

We have been waiting for it all spring. Tying new streamers to add to the meat boxes. Spinning deer hair and cutting up foam for poppers. Hanging the waders up for the summer. Yeah...its smallmouth season in the Ozarks! The fishing is really starting to get hot on some of our rivers and creeks. JoeyC and The Professor have already been getting out the past couple of months to check out how our rivers and creeks have changed from this springs floods. They are catching a few fish too...

The last few weeks, the fishing has really started to take off. The fish went through their pre-spawn, spawn, and are finishing up their post-spawn stages right now on most of our rivers. When these fish turn on, it can get absolutely silly good if you can hit it just right. They are eating streamers like there is no tomorrow right now but the topwater bite shouldn't be too far away. JoeyC has already stuck a few fish on a mouse pattern (yes, you read that right) on a couple of the smaller tributary creeks where the fish are in full post-spawn. We just can't freaking wait...

JoeyC has been getting out on our local smallie waters more than any of us. He lives just over a half hour from some primo water. He has been able to get on the red hot evening bite several times over the past few weeks. He has been doing very well, catching some really nice smallmouth. Oddly enough, big trout streamers have been his go-to bug. No clousers. No buggers. Just pure and simple meat! Don't believe me? Look at these...

We also had our 1st smallmouth float of the season a couple of weeks ago (we are slacking, I know) on a tributary of one of our favorite smallie rivers. With the recent rain events happening on a consistent basis about once a week, the smaller creeks have been keeping some higher flows to allow for floating. The sweetest part of our float was that the creek we were on had never been floated before in a drift boat as far as we knew. First decent baby! Its typically a canoe/kayak kinda creek. I will say that we floated it on about 350cfs and its safe to say that's probably as low as you would wanna float it in a drift boat. It was kinda skinny in some spots, making casting pretty difficult and a couple of the "rapids" woulda been too shallow in another few days due to large boulders and bed rock bottom. Anyways, we took our chances and floated the 3.5 miles to the confluence without any major issues. We were prepared though, we packed along a chainsaw and plenty of rope just in case we needed to get creative with the portage.

The float was awesome and we didn't have any issues at all. The fishing was fair, just fair. The fish on this creek were spawning and they didn't have much interest in chasing our streamers. We saw a ton of nice fish on beds, doing their thing. We were able to stick some decent fish though and got to fish the lower section of the river after we dumped in at the confluence. Some really nice water down there too, it should be good in a couple of weeks. It was good and its only going to get better from here...

Yes, smallmouth are bad ass...