Entry 85-3

Roger Stegall's 10 Tricks For Boating Big Smallmouths

Late Spring Through Early Summer

Editor's Note: Roger Stegall of Iuka, Mississippi, one of the nation's leading smallmouth bass guides, is Mr. Smallmouth on Pickwick Lake on the Alabama/Tennessee/Mississippi border. Stegall shows his clients when and where to catch the big ones. Smallmouth weighing over 5 pounds are common, 6- and 7-pound smallmouths are caught frequently, and every now and then you may catch an 8 pounder or better. Stegall has been smallmouth fishing for 20 years, and his personal best record is an 8-pounder. Each year Stegall and his clients will catch and release 150 smallmouth that weigh at least 5-pounds each. This week he'll give us the 10 secrets for catching monster-sized smallmouth.

Stegall: One of my favorite lures for this time of the year is the Zulu. The new version of the Zulu for 2004 is the ZTOO. The ZTOO is salt-impregnated and slow falling. I like the watermelon-color Zulu, but to make it more smallmouth-friendly, I dye the tip of the tail chartreuse with Spike It. We have a lot of yellow tail minnows in Pickwick Lake on the Tennessee River, where I primarily guide. By tipping that tail with the chartreuse Spike It, the ZTOO looks just like a yellowtail minnow.

Before we had the ZTOO I'd put a piece of shot lead on the line right in front of the hook, to make the bait fall really slowly. But the ZTOO allows me to fish without the shot lead. I fish the Zulu by tying a barrel swivel on my main line with a 6-inch leader the same size as my main line and then tying the hook going into the Zulu onto the leader. Rigging this way keeps your line from twisting.

Once I'm rigged, I'll cast the Zulu close to the bank or to visible targets like brush, stumps and logs. I'll let the bait fall to the bottom, give it a twitching action to make it jump off the bottom and then let it fall back to the bottom. Most of the time you'll never feel the strike. You'll see your line moving sideways. When you set the hook you may have a smallmouth as little as 1-pound or as large as 6 pounds. Most people prefer to fish a shad color, but I've found I catch more fish on a watermelon-colored ZTOO.

Unlike largemouth, many smallmouth remain in shallow water after they spawn. They don't seem to move back into the deep water like largemouth do. For this reason, my sixth tactic is to fish the brightest-colored Diamond Shad I can find -- bright orange or bright chartreuse—the water color isn’t really that important. Even if the water is really clear, the smallmouths will attack the bait. Smallmouth can't stand anglers fishing a bright-colored, fast-moving, rattling bait in shallow water and they just have to eat it.

When most other fishermen are fishing a lipless crankbait this time of year, they'll fish chrome- or shad-colored lipless crankbaits. That's why I use the bright-colored ones because the smallmouth aren't accustomed to seeing a bright color in the shallow water. I primarily like to fish this bait around gravel flats where the smallmouth like to spawn.




 

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