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It's like shooting fish in a barrel

State-of-art electronics ensure healthy haul of smallmouth bass

By: Don Lamont / Complete Angler

Posted: 05/5/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

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Darrin Bohonis landing a Lake of the Woods smallmouth bass this spring.

As we anticipate the open-water fishing season in the southern half of Manitoba anglers can only guess what awaits.

For sure, the water will be low, meaning some tougher conditions for boaters who might see rocks on their favourite lakes they never knew existed.

The good news is that in low-water years, fish will congregate in tighter schools and will be easier to find.

It will also mean ideal conditions for catching catfish on the Red and Assiniboine rivers with reduced current flow.

In fact, the catfishing below Lockport should be downright crazy! Don't forget to buy your 2012 Manitoba Angling licence before you head out next weekend, though.

Last week, I had a chance to head out with friend Darrin Bohonis to fish springtime smallmouth bass on Regina Bay at Sioux Narrows, Ont.

Now, Darrin is an awesome angler and he had won a tournament on this body of water the previous fall, so when he asked me to come along, I was very excited.

It was a beautiful spring day as we floated his new boat at the public launch. Quickly, we headed out into the bay to a sunken island that I had fished once before, some 14 years ago while filming a segment of the Complete Angler television show with friend Chris Bell.

As it turns out, the smallmouth still used this reef to winter, congregating in large schools to feed during the long Canadian winter.

Back in 2001, Chris Bell and I were fishing in a boat that had pretty basic electronics, a run-of-the-mill Liquid Crystal with an old-style "flasher" unit on the front bow. While fishing with Darrin, we had nothing but the best in electronics, no less than four top-of-the-line Humminbird units with all the latest technology.

On the back two units, one had the Navionics chip for Lake of the Woods, the other the Lake Master chip with all the hydrographic contours outlined in brilliant colours. What blew me away on the Lake Master program was the ability to highlight a depth range that we wanted to fish. Darrin had plugged in the 18-to-22-foot range this particular day, and every time this depth showed on the contour map, it was a bright green.

Now when he pulled up to a spot, he would call up the side-scanning feature on his left unit. He would then slowly troll with the big motor just off the edge of a structure, checking to see how many fish he could mark on the side scanner.

When he saw distinct stubby white dots that indicated bass, he would see how many fish he marked ,and if there was enough, he would throw out a mark buoy. At least that hasn't changed!

We caught bass on every one of those key fishing holding structures. On the first area, we caught more than two dozen smallmouth, and as the day progressed, it continued to be fun battling early-spring smallmouth.

While things change, some still stay the same. Of course, the fish had not moved from this popular winter home, but the way we caught them sure had.

While we used a aggressive lift and drop with a jigging spoon that fall, this time around, we caught all our bass dead sticking a Berkley four-inch power minnow on a 3/8-ounce jig.

Darrin said the key was to let the jig go to the bottom, then reel up half a turn and hold the bait steady. Sure enough, he had the first five bass doing exactly that. The rest of the day pretty much evened out on the fish-catching, but I found it ironic that the approach to catching this fish should be so dramatically different.

While we were fishing in the springtime, the pattern was pretty much the same, bass holding in fairly tight schools along the break line in six metres of water.

To visit Darrin's website, log on to www.bohonisenterprisesinc.ca .

dlamont@mymts.net

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 5, 2012 C12

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