Fishing For Smallmouth Black Bass

Two of the best smallmouths I’ve ever caught came to big poppers. One was taken from an Ontario lake only a few acres in size, one evening when I dropped a yellow popping bug on the mirrored surface and popped it only once. While the tiny waves were just starting to roll out from it. I had a strike that tossed water all around and out came a big-headed, pot-bellied smallmouth that was ready for just about anything. It took me a long time to get him in.
He weighed 5 pounds, one of the biggest smallmouth black bass I’ve ever seen. When we got in to the dock, I looked down his throat, A broad tail was sticking out.
I took a pair of pliers and clamped down on that protruding tail and carefully pulled out the half decomposed carcass. It was seven inches long, what was left of a bullhead.
“They sure like big things to eat,” I thought. “And this shows that you can make them mad by working a big popper, too.”
The way he was packed he couldn’t have swallowed a no-see-um.”
A year later I was fishing with the same model bug, and for the same species, smallmouth black bass. I was at Port Deposit, Maryland, and we were fishing the Susquehanna River below the Conowingo Dam. We had been working the shoreline with poppers and getting enough fair sized fish to get a big bang out of it.
Then I put on an extra big popper and the minute it dropped, in close to the shore, it looked as if a landmine had exploded. Then, as my nerves jolted hack into their grooves and my eyes stopped spinning, I saw the shape of a great, bronze-backed fish emerging above the splashes of water, a long, wide, ferocious smallmouth, the biggest of all.
That was a fight, too, because he was as powerful as he looked, with the spunk of a great fighting species to back him up. But I finally brought him to net, He weighed 6.5 pounds, the largest smallmouth I’ve ever taken.
The greatest charm of fishing with poppers is that they bring the bass within sight of the angler as it hits. The popping bug lets him in on the whole works. He has the fun of manipulating the bug to coax the fish to it, then he gets a bang out of the strike, right there in plain view, and then the excitement of fighting the fish near the surface
But the bug must be worked right to produce results. A popping bug, especially a big one, without proper play, is as impotent as a sea cucumber.

Most novices at the popper game just throw the bug out and bring it back at once in a series of pops, maybe for five or six feet, and then pick it up and cast again. And usually they rip the line off the water so hard that they scare the scales off any nearby fish. Bringing it back so fast doesn’t give the fish time to get to it and the undue surface commotion discourages him from even trying. Most fish, on seeing a bug drop to the surface, swim away and then turn to see what’s happening. If they see the bug resting quietly there, or making only a slight dent in the surface, they’ll usually swim back to see what’s cooking, and that’s when the angler has his chance. And unfortunately, that ’s the time the novice chooses to rip the line off the water, and then the fish is suspicious for sure. In fact, he’s convinced that all is not as it should be.
But all angler who knows how to put a popping bug through its paces can make it talk the right language to make that bass come up and sock it, make him so mad he wants to grab it and smash it flat. So the popper should be rested quietly a moment, then popped gently, then brought back in a slow retrieve of interspersed pops and rests. If that doesn’t work, then try a faster retrieve. Make the bug act like a minnow skipping across the surface. Use small pops across the top. Use a big, hard pop now and then, one that really kicks up a commotion and makes a big fish think that there’s something he wants.