St John River Smallmouth Bass

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While Ang and his grandson Nik are in BC shooting, which I’m anticipating to be a spectacular episode, here’s a little blog post about our last adventure, clear across the country on the St John River in New Brunswick on the hunt for Smallmouth Bass!

 

Ang and I, along with the camera team, hauled the big Princecraft from our GTA home base to the town of Woodstock. There, we met up with Jeff Wilson, a local bass fanatic and from what I’ve heard a pretty good stick as well. Jeff is our main intel source… he has a cottage on the river and does know it well.

The Smallies here can be fished legally very early in the season, so it gives us southern Ontario boys a nice pre-fish if you will, before our long-awaited bass season opens at home.

We essentially searched for pre-spawn fish, as they would be the most aggressive and we wouldn’t be disturbing the spawners (usually locked onto beds and very visible).

 

 

 

 

A variety of baits worked the first day, but Jerkbaits seemed to get the nod for numbers. A spinnerbait did pretty well, but I believe the fish were hitting the blades on a lot of retrieves… bumps is what we call them.

Day two was totally different though. A weather system came through and the jerkbait bite went for a $#!^. Not to fear though, the almighty 4” Yamamoto Senko came to the rescue… as it seemingly always does. By wacky rigging a weightless light colored Senko and slow dropping it, we could coax some of the storms affected Smallmouth to partake in a battle.

 


Should be a great episode and many thanks to our East Coast friends.

Fish'n Canada

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