Back in Missouri, first smallmouth fishing in more than 4 months...

[Al Agnew]

Regarding 100 bass days...I've had quite  few of them and a handful of 200 plus bass days.  I think it might be partly because of the way I fish, fishing fast with lots of casts.  On  typical summertime 10 hour float trip, probably about 6 hours of that is actual fishing time and not running riffles, paddling through dead pools, stopping for lunch, etc.  If you fish slow and on the bottom, it might take you 30-60 seconds to fish out a cast.   So in your six hours of fishing, you might make 60-120 casts an hour.  Let's call it 100 casts an hour.  Which means to catch 100 bass, you have to catch a bass every 6 casts.  But fishing the stuff I fish, I probably make at least twice that many casts, meaning that if I caught 100, I'd be catching a fish about every 12 casts.  Now if I get into a good pool with a bunch of fish, I can catch at least a bass every other cast for a bit, which means that when I come to less productive water, I might make 25-30 casts without a fish.  I counted a few times on really good topwater days, where you get a lot of strikes but have a rather poor hook-up ratio, that I got a strike or at least a swipe from a bass about every 3 or 4 casts most of the day.  When I fished the John Day River in Oregon in 2019, I don't think there was more than 50 casts all day long every day that I didn't get at least a strike (too bad nearly all those smallmouth were under 13 inches).

The other thing is that I don't use ultralight tackle, so when I hook a little one, it only takes a few seconds to get it in...usually takes longer to unhook it than to reel it in.

Do I get bored on days like that?  Nope.  Like some of the other guys, my goal is to catch a big one or two, so I keep fishing.  But I also just love to SEE a smallmouth (or even a largemouth or spot) strike a lure, especially a topwater lure.  That's the biggest reward of summertime fishing for me, and I never get tired of it.

I agree with Seth that you seldom if ever have 100 bass days on heavily pressured waters.  The last 100 bass day I had on the middle Meramec was probably 15 years ago. 

As for the size range of those 100 bass...back in the days when I measured every fish to keep a record for an MDC study (yes, on a measuring board) on Big River, and collected scale samples, and even before that when I was a lot more meticulous about keeping records, I found that the usual ratio of dinks to "keepers"--12 inches or better--was that about 50% of the bass I caught were over 12 inches.  And for every inch, that percentage was cut in half.  So for an average size ratio on a hundred fish day, 50 of them would be over 12 inches, but only a handful of those were over 16 inches.

[tjm]

Over about 6 weeks of early summer I think  I talked to 30-40 kayakers that had just floated about 4 miles of the creek I fish and every single one of them had caught 50-60 bass. I haven't floated that stretch in years but as I recall it took about an hour the last time, so double that time for fishing instead of  just floating and you have the makings of a 200 bass day. More remarkable is that thirty minutes later another couple kayaks would show up and they had caught 50 some each. No one kept any though so I say no keepers outta all them fish.