When most people think of topwater smallmouth takes, they envision something violent: A slashing blow and shot of whitewater spraying into the air. Hits like that get the blood pumping for sure, but I might argue that subtle, gentle smallmouth sips are even more heart-stopping. When you see the white chin of a 5-plus-pound bass rise in crystal-clear water and hover under a tiny fly before simply making it disappear, it’ll change what you thought you knew about how and what smallmouths eat.
I know because I am a changed man thanks to a visit a few years ago to flyfish with Tim Landwehr on the Menominee River in the Wisconsin North Woods. For two days we rowed down tranquil waters delicately casting flies that I thought would only appeal to smaller bass. I was wrong. Mile after mile, trophy smallmouths ghosted up in the shallow water to suck down our bugs. The lesson I got from Landwehr, it turns out, is applicable to smallmouths in moving water almost anywhere, but to cash in on this epic bite, you have to retrain your brain a bit. I recently had Landwehr on the Quick Strike Podcast to discuss key points for understanding why big smallies get bug drunk and how to catch them when they do.
Understand Smallmouth Feeding Behavior
According to Landwehr, one of the biggest reasons why anglers miss out on the subtle bug bite is because they’re conditioned to think of smallmouth as aggressive fish. They are, of course, but not always, and after a few early years of observing how larger bass often followed subsurface streamer patterns back to the boat but didn’t take the shot as consistently as smaller fish, Landwehr changed up his program.
“We started fishing more topwater patterns,” Landwehr says. “And what we started to notice was how slowly these giant fish would come up and watch the bug. They would sit under the bug. They would make a conscious decision like, ‘I’m going to eat it.’”
Landwehr dubbed these slow, focused risers “passive feeders,” meaning they’re not aggressively hunting a meal, but they are looking for food and if an easy target is presented to them, they’ll take the shot. The key is fishing topwater poppers and foam terrestrial patterns gently and slowly, like presenting a dry fly to trout (more on this shortly). For Landwehr it was eye-opening, because he realized he’d been leaving so many smallmouths on the table. Doing nothing but quickly working large, “meaty” flies or fishing poppers with a lot of noise and chugging appealed only to the tuned-up bass, but the bigger fish often preferred to daintily sip that lazy meal.
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Find the Prime Water
Photo by Joe Cermele
One of the most critical factors for success in the smallie-bug game is targeting the right kind of water within the stream or river. Though the bass can theoretically take a swipe at a drifting bug anywhere, Landwehr has spent years dialing in the high-percentage lanes that produce true tanks. And no, they’re not the deep holes, back eddies, and boulder fields you might expect.
“What I’m looking for is what I call ‘walking pace’ water,” says Landwehr. “If you’re fishing out of a boat, it’s that water that when you’re not rowing moves you along at about the same pace you’d walk on land. And, ideally, I want that water to be about thigh deep. I also pay a lot of attention to the bottom structure.”
Gravel or small-rock bottom is a no-go for Landwehr. He’s looking for mixed larger rocks, but not Volkswagen-sized slabs. Glassy, mixed-rock flats are what he calls “snack bars.” Big smallmouths are only going to be in them when they’re looking for a morsel, and an aggressive presentation doesn’t usually get the job done. Subsequently, the water Landwehr gravitates to is often passed up by many anglers because without understanding how big bass hunt for bugs, it’s easily perceived as water unlikely to be holding bass, let alone trophies.
Offer a Subtle Presentation
Give an angler a popper and their gut instinct is to make it pop. But a common mistake is not giving enough credence to the importance of sound—or a lack thereof. We’re inundated with flies and lures that rattle and click and buzz, but in clear rivers, a smallmouth that rises to a topwater can easily be spooked by making a loud pop at the wrong time.
“When your fly hits the water, that’s pop number one,” Landwehr says. “Just the sound of the initial touch down is enough to alert any fish close by that your fly is there. They can feel the fly, too, just from the landing. So, what happens is, a lot of times that fish will rise to the fly and if you pop it again while it’s underneath, it just freaks the fish out.”
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Landwehr bases what he does with a fly after splashdown on depth. His rule is the shallower the water, the smaller and more subtle the secondary pops; the deeper the water the louder he’ll make them. In either case, however, second or third pops are made cautiously. Most often, Landwehr will just twitch the line to barely make the rubber legs on his favorite patterns like the Boogle Bug and Mr. Wiggly vibrate in the water. This is usually enough to trigger vacuum cleaner takes.