Summer Smallmouth Fishing
Summer smallmouth fishing can be tough. Ken Maurer gives us a great viewpoint on where all the smallmouth bass have gone for the summer.
Fishing in the mainstem on the Susquehanna has received a lot of attention because fish size is awesome but there are small mumbers of young bass which doesn’t bode well for the future of smallmouth bass fishing in the Susquehanna River.
There is a lot of speculation about why these canges have occurred and I think that it is likely that environmental contamination is heavily involved. This is probably a combination of agricultural run off and the run off from use of pharmaceuticals and these drugs passing into the environement.
With water temperatures climbing into the 80s in recent weeks, some days it seems as if the smallmouth bass in our river have disappeared. Bass fishing now can be an exceedingly difficult task. This is the same river where you could catch 20 or more …
We love the fact that the smallmouth found in the main stem of the Susquehanna are big and beautiful. However they are showing stress from pollution as well. We need to make sure that we can enjoy it for years to come. When we fish the Delaware in the summer, those little 10″ smallies drive you crazy because they are so wild and if you caught them on a top water with trebles, it is suicide trying to get them off the hook but at least we know there is a healthy population of young smallies out there.