Sunday Float-Lots Of Nice Smallies

[C&R]

Floated with a friend from 4- till dark sun. Actually the lightning ran us off the river, and did not get to fish the last mile. "Numbers" is the word. Seriously caught somewhere around 70-80 with biggest being 16 3/4". Lots from 12" - 14" All on a tube. did not seem to matter what the color was. Once, we anchored up in one productive spot and caught min. of 20 smallies with the best being 15". Never, ever had that happen before in such tight area. All fish are still swimming with sore lips waiting for my grandson to grow up and try his hand at catching his share. Get n the creeks cuz the water is great.

Forgot to reduce my resolution on my pics. Sorry, no pics to prove my story.

[joeD]

4-9pm. 5 hours. 300 minutes. 70 fish. A fish every 4.5 minutes for 5 hours straight. Without fail. Math is relentless like that.

You apparently had a great day. Congratulations.

[Al Agnew]

Hey Joe, it's certainly doable. I've done that well by myself a few times, while he was fishing with another person, so using your math, it would mean a fish per person every 9 minutes. A little more math...takes maybe 10 seconds to bring in a 10 incher, with another 10 seconds to unhook and release it on a tube unless it's hooked deeply. Probably no more than a minute to bring in a 16 incher even if using ultralight. If you're in the kind of place where you can catch 20 out of one spot, you could probably do it in 20 minutes or less, which gives you plenty of time to float through the riffle and down to the next good spot while keeping to your overall 9 minutes per fish per person average.

I've found that people actually underestimate the number of fish they catch when they are really catching a lot of fish.

I had a few days in my life when I caught over 200 bass in 10-12 hours of floating...say 20 per hour, or a bass every three minutes. On days like that, you often catch bass on consecutive casts, and catch several out of every pool and run. Or to put it another way, maybe 20 bass per mile of stream floated the way I fish, which somehow sounds more likely than a bass every three minutes.

[Guest]

Its funny, because you might go 2 miles in a couple hours with 10 fish.

Then you hit 30 bass in one spot in less than an hour.

All it takes is one more spot with 30.

If you sprinkled 10 in between, 70 is easily achievable in a 4 mile float.

I've done it many times on the Sugar.

[joeD]

1. Unless you are on the Gasconade or Big Piney or the Buffalo and are paddling through long, slow, dead holes.

2. What about changing lures?

3. What about going around obstructions and getting out in low water situations?

4. What about taking a piss or a dump?

5. What about eating or drinking something?

6. What about getting your lure caught in a tree or an underwater snag?

7. What about not catching fish for a few minutes?

8. What about ...

9. What about, do you actually count 12..26..34..48..50..63..77..?

10. Honestly, does anybody count after 10?

[ollie]

JoeD, I normally don't count after a dozen. The other day when Buzz and I went fishing we were guessing on about how many we caught. There was definitely a margin of error included! Trophy has it about right from my experience floating around here. You find some then you might go aways before you find some more with a few sprinkled in here and there for good measure.

[Guest]

1. Unless you are on the Gasconade or Big Piney or the Buffalo and are paddling through long, slow, dead holes.

2. What about changing lures?

3. What about going around obstructions and getting out in low water situations?

4. What about taking a piss or a dump?

5. What about eating or drinking something?

6. What about getting your lure caught in a tree or an underwater snag?

7. What about not catching fish for a few minutes?

8. What about ...

9. What about, do you actually count 12..26..34..48..50..63..77..?

10. Honestly, does anybody count after 10?

I do a little bit of all that.

The 70 is usually split between 2 people.

One person will catch 2/3 of the fish while the other changes lures too often.

[Quillback]

Yep I count fish, I keep a log of every fishing trip, numbers of fish and what I caught them on are a part of what I record.

[hoglaw]

Hell, we do overnight floats and spend 16 hours on the water. My fiancee gets pissed if she's NOT catching one every 4.5 minutes. Extrapolate that to every 9 minutes per person since two are floating. If we didn't catch one every 9 minutes, she might not go again.

Every single one of us who fishes for ozark smallmouth knows good and well you get on one chute or one spot and catch a dozen in ten minutes and then figure it's fished out. Well, by Joe's math, that dozen bought you an hour and change and you spent ten minutes doing it. In the other 50 minutes, I can drink a beer, take a leak, take a #2...hell, take a #3, and still have plenty of time to change lures, paddle through unproductive water, make a sandwich, and get on another chute. She fishes one particular lure, and they wear out. For me, after two or three fish. For her, I tell her they're good until four or five. And on our last trip, she went through three packages of ten and into the fourth and only broke one or two off. So at a bare minimum, that's 30 fish. Realistically, it's more like 190-150 at a rate of 3-5 fish per bait. I know she had a few more in numbers than me, but not many. I estimated us at a little over 200 fish for the trip (with 16 hours on the water). 960 minutes/200 fish = a fish for the boat ~every five minutes, or one per person every ten. Oddly enough, it's the same catch rate as C&R and his buddy.

We did a trip last summer where we went through four packages of frogs (20 frogs) in about an hour and a half. After the first package, I said we needed to start keeping the ones that had a hook torn through the top so we could put them on upside down if we kept catching them like that. By the next hour and a half (we fished from happy hour to dark), we had gone back through all of our injured reserve frogs fishing them upside down and biting the heads off to get some purchase for the hook bend. No doubt we were over 40 that evening in three hours. 180 minutes, 40 (bare minimum) fish = a fish...wait for it....every 4.5 minutes!

I definitely understand your reluctance to buy into big numbers. I'm sure plenty of folks have a tendency to estimate and round up. Maybe they got on a hot streak in one or two holes and felt like they slayed them for the whole trip. I have been on trips since you started your crusade against big numbers reports deliberately intending to count how many fish I/we caught, and I always stop counting in the first hour around 15 fish for the boat. I guess my bottom line is if you fish creeks in rivers in the ozarks, I don't understand how you can be surprised at a report of 70 fish in an evening between two folks fishing. Maybe 35 would have sounded more reasonable. But you forgot that whole multiply by two thing...

Math is relentless like that.

[hoglaw]

And once we get into June-August, if you're on a good stretch of smallmouth river that isn't beat up, isn't running high and muddy, and you aren't sharing it with a bunch of other boats, I think you should fully expect to catch a fish every one or two minutes of real actual fishing. I have never once in my life floated a good stretch of river once fish started doing their summer pattern thing and struck out or had a bad day numbers wise. There just isn't anything to catching numbers of river smallmouth. It's about the easiest thing in the world next to dunking crickets for bluegill. If you're fishing with something they'll eat, and you're in a good river, you're going to catch fish all day long rain or shine. Sure, catching big fish is a different matter, and if you want 18" plus fish, conditions really make a difference. But I've never once had a bad day numbers-wise on productive water in the summer.