Steve Kennedy has employed an airbrush and a 7-inch glide bait to help him locate smallmouth bass in the St. Lawrence River. Once they reveal themselves, he follows up with a couple of different smaller lures to catch them.
And for the second day in a row, Kennedy is catching ’em. BASSTrakk indicates he’s got another 20-pounds-plus bag today, which has him unofficially in second place. Kennedy was third on Day 1 with 23-7.
“I spent a lot of practice time painting baits,” said Kennedy, who is an accomplished lure painter. “I’m throwing a big glide bait, mainly as a search bait. I spent most of my practice throwing it and hunting for individual big fish. I’m able to go back and catch them either with a smaller swimbait or I’ve got a little followup bait I’m not going to talk about. It’s something I made too. It’s not something you can buy in a store.”
Kennedy is painting the hard plastic glide baits in yellow perch colors.
“It’s something I figured out last year,” he said. “I raised one last year that was over eight (pounds), but I couldn’t catch it. There are some monsters here, and they’re so hard to catch.”
Smallmouth and largemouth bass are appropriately named.
“Even those six-pounders don’t have a big mouth,” Kennedy noted about St. Lawrence River smallies. “It’s not like a big largemouth that can come up there and inhale that (glide bait).”
Finding those big smallmouths with the search bait is half the battle for Kennedy. And it’s a plan that’s working so far for him.
“More than likely, I’m going to run out of fish,” he said. “That’s just the nature of what I’m doing. It’s shallow individual fish. It’s not like there are a whole school of them there.”