I was fishing St-Francis again with Caro and Marc-André and we were out to get the big ones today! We almost had no wind but whatever wind we had was from the NE so we still had a bit of a chop on the water. Water temps were still in the high 60's in most areas we fished. We started off on a shallow rocky shoal where I had caught decent fish in the past but no one was home so we quickly opted for another area. I didn't take long before I hooked a decent 4lbs smallmouth but this spot was only a one fish spot. We were to leave for deeper water tube dragging and drop shot fishing when I decided to try the same pattern in different areas and it was the right decision. Shortly after my 4lbs, Caro hooked a 4.5lbs smallie in less then 3 ft of water in the same conditions as the first one. I made sure to mark that spot on my GPS since those spots are hard to find and whenever you do find them, you usually end up spooking the fish.
We looked for similiar areas and managed to hook another 3lbs smallmouth but the hook ups were hard to come by so we decided to try an another area nearby. We drifted a bit and caught some 2.5lbs+ smallies in 10-30ft of water but we wanted more big fish to go with our 2 nice smallies! We really wanted to break the 20lbs mark and we knew the day was perfect for it to happen.
While drifting Caro noticed a nice lilypad patch and she wanted to try it so I handed her my frog rod and she started firing! It didn't take 2 seconds before she had a nice largemouth attack the frog. Needless to say we all got our flipping rods and frog rods out and tried going for largemouth for a few hours. At one point I noticed a big wave behind my frog and I knew something big was following it... BAM! A 5lbs largemouth just came out and annihilated the frog!! Thank god for this new stiff rod and 50lbs braided line because this fish could've easily gotten away. We fished for largemouth a little more and missed a few on the frog but we decided to relocate in order to find some deep water smallies. With another fish in the 4lbs range we would've probably been able to break the 20lbs barrier! When we got to the spot, we started catching 2-2.5lbs smallies and although they were a lot of fun to catch they weren't the size we were hoping for... With SO MANY wasps in this area it was getting simply ridiculous and we decided to call it a day. We took pictures and weighed all our fish for a total of 18.5lbs. Not a bad day at all afterall!
