Fly Fishing Smallmouth Bass
- John Wielinga
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
Fly fishing for smallmouth bass is a rush and quite frankly, a ton of fun. Smallmouth are great hunters, they are willing to move and chase for a meal and when it’s time to eat they mean business. They’ll pick up a crayfish on bottom, crush a big subsurface streamer, blow up a top water and sip a bug like a trout, sometimes you can see all the above in one outing. The excitement doesn’t stop after the eat, they fight hard, spend some time airborne and dig in the current making for an exciting experience from start to finish.
The places these fish live and the program to catch them is a big part of what makes them so fun to target. All of my smallmouth fishing is done in the river these days and the variety of places these fish will live is awesome. Fast water and boulder fields, slack pools, log jams, bubbly seams, flats, holes, 5ft of water down to inches, you name it, there just might be a smallmouth there. Working through the program is fun, almost feels just as much like hunting as it does fishing. Picking apart every piece of water they “should” be in, keeping a good pace and more often than not, aiming to land your fly in every nook and cranny and as tight to the structure as possible.
We don’t have to over complicate anything for targeting smallmouth on the fly. 6-8wt rods a floating line, an intermediate and maybe a sink 3 depending on the water you are fishing. This may have to be adjusted for your water, you may lean towards 5-7wts if your average fish is smaller and you might want a faster line for deeper, faster rivers. However, the point is, you don’t need a huge arsenal of gear or flies to do this. A few things I consider when picking my set ups for the day is average size fish, how fast/deep the river is (how heavy of a sink tip) and how big of flies I am throwing.
When it comes to flies you can go as crazy as you want or as simple as you want. Gamechangers are the big rave right now, they are a ton of fun to fish, they’re really effective and fun to tie. However, if you are a tyer they are time consuming and still a bit pricey to tie, if you’re a buyer, they are expensive. That being said, most simple baitfish or swim flies will be effective and catch fish. Murdich minnows are great, clouser minnows, bangtails, etc. If it moves, has the right profile and is presented the right way, they will probably eat it.
Future articles will cover all of these topics more in depth as we dive deeper and deeper into fishing fly fishing for smallmouth bass. Grab your rod and get to fishing!
John Wielinga
Owner/Head Guide
269-277-9293