Has anyone ever got on a good smallmouth bite in the bay. Spring,summer or fall.
Does it have any resident fish that stay all yr. Just always wondered while driving over it
Has anyone ever got on a good smallmouth bite in the bay. Spring,summer or fall.
Does it have any resident fish that stay all yr. Just always wondered while driving over it
Best in the spring when main lake fish migrate in to spawn, but some fish stay in the Bay all year. The Bay has a really good largemouth population, as well.
"The man of system is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it…He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard.” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
I've fished the cedar point side of the tracks for largemouth but never tried the other side of the tracks. Do the smallmouth migrate to that side to or just mainly green fish?
Always some brown fish in the bay..like Jeff said spring is notably better when waves of spammers come in... lots of fish release at the city ramp.an ODNR study showed that most of the fish released took about a month to make there way back out to the lake. I want to say around 20% stayed in the bay .. this was done by inserting receivers into tournament released fish and marking ther navigation routes via transmitters that are strategically placed near passages and throughout the bay and mouth. Only one of the released fish went west torwards the trussel .. one of my best smallmouth days ever at the lake was in the bay in May. I actually just came off the lake and was looking for some spawning largemouth.. got on an area that was lights out with 4 plus smallies spawning..
I was shocked they were in 1’-2’ of some very dirty water. Unfortunately I’ve never had that bank produce like that since.. a few here and there during the spawn.. I still wonder if it was a wave off the main lake or resident fish.. I say this because these fish passed up a lot of good habit before pulling up if they came in from offshore..I still lean a little torwads them being resident fish because ther is good deep water access very close to where they were that never gets bass fished..
My sense, and I could be totally wrong about this, is that there are significantly fewer smallmouths living year-round in the Bay than there were 20-30 years ago, and just as many or more largemouths than there were then. I don’t live near the water, but am in the Bay several times a year, and it seems like the water, if anything, is dirtier there now, which might inhibit the smallmouth population. Likewise, there used to be tons of trophy smallmouths released in the Bay due to smallmouth-oriented tournaments, and such tournaments are much less prevalent now that the closed season extends late into June. All that said, there are easily enough smallmouths in the Bay throughout the year to make a very pleasant surprise catch. But throughout the hot summer, I wouldn’t spend much time in the Bay concentrating on smallmouths; just take them when they appear and be glad.
John Clark — Findlay, Ohio
Reply With Quote