Thread: Logan's Trophy Smallmouth

I've been fishing seemingly non-stop. I don't take the time to post like a should, but I have to share Logan's story from Saturday. We've had to work for our fish. It never seems to come easy these days, but if we do the work, it's paying off.

We started on catfish, and we were catching.... but it was far from being fast & furious. The action wasn't quite fast enough for 12-year-old Logan. His Dad told me Logan really wanted to catch a smallmouth, so we started hopscotching around, hanging shiners around the downtown (Chattanooga) bridge pilings. Logan was a bit short on skill or patience, but the effort should have been adequate had a brown fish been willing. Nothing.

We returned to catfishing, working our way up to the Dam. It was getting later in the evening and Todd (Logan's Dad) decided it was was worth drifting shiners again. On about our third drift he hooked up and boated about a 2.5 lb. smallmouth. Of course that got Logan fired up and he decided he wanted to try the same.

We made a couple of drifts with nothing and then I decided to just keep drifting, keeping a bait in the water, rather than running back & forth to what was SUPPOSED to be the Sweet Spot.

We drifted about 200 yards when Logan's rod bowed down. I saw the line coming up and instantly knew it was a smallmouth. But I was TOTALLY unprepared for what erupted from the water. The 22-inch beast cleared water 3 feet high! The battle was on. :

I use 6# test fluorocarbon on my smallmouth rods. Logan had already broken off a big catfish earlier on a cat rod, so I knew he didn't have much experience on how to handle big fish. I really thought there was slim chance we'd get this fish to net. But the battle raged on and all was going good, until the fish got to the back of the boat and Logan couldn't keep him from running under the transom.

The line hung up on one of my transom-mounted depth finder transducers. I thought all was lost. But I took the rod from Logan and opened the bail, letting line run free. I handed the rod to his Dad while I hung off the back of the boat and actually managed to grab the line and get it free from the transducer. I told his Dad to "Start reeling!"

Todd said, "He's still on!" and handed the rod back to Logan who finished the fight. (22 inches long, 14.25 girth, 5.5 lbs. If it had been a pre-spawn fish it would have made 6 lbs. easy)

And as I am prone to say, "Life is good and gettin' better every day!"

Awesome small mouth I'm still looking for that one