With the warm weather sticking around, I spent a few hours chasing river smallies today before they make their move to their deep wintering holes.
The plopper only earned 3 lazy swirls and I could tell they weren’t aggressively hitting it. I tried a tube for a while and lost a big fish on it when it buried itself up in the grass.
I kept throwing the tube for far too long, and I had covered a lot of ground for 0 fish.
Time to make something happen...
I finally unlocked the flood gates when I tied on a soft jerk bait and soon caught my first fish of the day on it.
I then found a wolf pack of tigers congregated in an area that contained about 30 fish from 10” to 18”, I know this because I think I caught every one of them!!
I love River or tidal fish because they live life on a treadmill so they all fight like crazy with jumps and a never give up attitude. There’s no quit in them.
Literally, almost every cast produced a hit or a fish for close to an hour. It was one of those magical times, when you just know you’re going to get smoked on almost every cast.
I also had 2 resident schoolie stripers on back to back casts which was cool to see.

With colder weather closing in on us, this may be my last river trip of year, but it was my best trip for quantity and quality.
On my walk out, I found a woman’s wallet in the river that was full of all of her credit cards and ids etc... she was from Massachusetts and I dropped it off at the police department in town.
Also got a flat in my truck on the way home, but I was still smiling ear to ear after the smalliefest I just had.
What a trip!!