After having 2 not so great days on the water this weekend, Caro and I decided to head back to lake St-Francis to catch some nice smallmouths and to find a few new spots for my tournament next weekend. We drove all the way the area where we were going to fish instead of taking the boat for the ride.. We had a lot of West winds and the forecast was calling for rain but we were lucky enough to stay dry all day. We started shallow with jerkbaits, cranbaits, tubes and gobies and couldn't convince them to bite. We saw a few very good fish that I marked on the GPS.. i'm not sure if we spooked them but they just wouldn't bite and the strong current made it very hard to control the boat.
I decided to try another shallow area with the jerkbait and I caught a very good 3lbs+ smallmouth. Caro also caught a few smaller fish with the tube. I had a few follow on the jerkbait so I decided to try a crankbait with a slower retrieve. The next 5 fish were decent size and they were hitting that crankbait very hard!!! I missed a fish that would've been easily over 4lbs on a shallow rock pile... The shallow bite slowed down a bit so I figured we would try to fish deeper water. We caught 1 or 2 fish on almost every drift and some of them were good ones in the 3lbs range. One of the fish I caught today was not the biggest fish but it was definitely that fattest fish I have ever caught. They are feeding heavily now and it shows!
We had to cut our day short with the storm approaching... It was too bad because we had a good bite going and I had a few more areas I wanted to try. We stopped for pictures and i'm pretty confident we had around 16-18lbs again. No big fish today but I know this area will produce some big fish for me soon! I have a good feeling for our tournament next weekend.
