Presque Isle State Park Smallmouth

[Big_Spinner]

Hi,

I just got back from my annual trip to the St. Lawrence.

The round goby has inveded and the smallies have started gorging on them!!

One of the pictures is of a 17 inch smallie that weighed 4.25 pounds! A football.

I take my fly stuff up and play around with it while all my buddies are spinning. We spin fish with plastic "Mr. Twisters".

The fish love to take crafish imitations when they are in the shallows. I tie very simple deer hair crayfish.

Zonkers in chartreue, black, purple and white are great too.

I use a 6 wt. with a teeny 130 or 150 shooting line. I can get to 8-10 feet with no trouble and those are the flats we like to fish. You can get fish with this rig even in 12 - 15 feet of water, but the sink rate is a bit slow.

When the fish are really biting the fish will come up from quite deep.

Top water stuff works early in the am and at dark. If there are some nice back bays, you can also get some huge largemouths.

Be prepared to lose some flies to pike. I take the fly loss and do not use steel leaders. The water is quite clear and I think that heavy leaders make for fewer bass strikes. You can try some heavy shock tippet, if you really are losing too many flies. We did land a few pike up to 30 inches and they are fun.

Every year or so we hook a musky or two, none this year. We hooked one a few years ago that was probably 5 feet long. Did not land it, but it was fun.

The wonderful part of the St. Lawrence is you never know what you may have on the hend of the line.

The River eats boats and motors. There are so many shoals and hidden rocks. you need to really be careful.

I have not fished Presque, but heard it is awesome smallmouth water.

Good luck,

Jim