Sunday Moring Trifecta

I hit the river yesterday morning at about 7:00am.  It was already 85 degrees and humid.  The water was warm, over 80 degrees.  The flow was about 60 CFS, low and clear conditions.  I decided to explore and fish a new stretch of water between two places where I’ve fished a lot.  I found some decent water separated by long stretches of fishless water that was real skinny and had no structure.  I finally got to a nice pool and pulled a couple of smallmouth and even a few largemouth from.  In the next pool down, I got a good tug and found an acrobatic smallmouth on the end of my line.  It was a good sized fish.   I kept working downstream and hooked a real beast of a fish a good 18 incher, maybe bigger.  Then, from the same spot I must have pulled 10 or more rock bass on successive casts.  I kept going back to this spot until I came up empty.  I came to a large bend pool and worked a brush pile at the bend.  I caught a 12 inch fish.  As I was stripping the small bass in, a huge smallmouth chased it down and almost ate the fish I had caught.  It was a holy sh!t moment.  I’ve seen that kind of thing before, but it always amazes me.  I immediately put on a big streamer and went back to see if the big fish was still juiced up and would hit the streamer.  No luck there, he wasn’t fooled.  I walked down stream and started working the flats of a huge pool down from the bend.  I spooked a carp and caught another good sized smallmouth.  The last big bass I caught came working a crayfish across the bottom of the big pool.  I got the fly within a few feet of the rod tip and stopped to untangle the fly line.  When I went to pick up for another cast there was a small tug at first.  I set the hook and the fight was on.  At first I thought it was a carp because of how hard the fish pulled.  I got the fish on the reel and finally worked it to the surface to find that it was another huge bass!  Three huge bass in one morning and several other good sized fish, it was a great morning.  I headed out at 11:00 for brunch one very happy angler.