How I’ll fish Lake Oahe

This week the Bassmaster Elite Series heads to uncharted territory for us. We are in Pierre, S.D., on Lake Oahe. My spell-check certainly didn’t recognize the name, and I didn’t either when they announced we were fishing here. No one I knew had heard of it either because there has never been a Bassmaster event held here. It’s pretty cool that the first one will be such an important event like this. It’s always fun to go somewhere like this where nobody has any prior experience and where everybody starts with a clean slate.

Lake Oahe is 370,000 acres, and it’s known for being a great walleye and pike fishery. Hopefully after this week everyone will know it is an awesome smallmouth destination as well. The scenery here is beautiful and about as different as you can get from what I’m used to in Tennessee. One of my goals is to someday own a small farm back home of about 100 acres or so. These people have 100 acres in their front yard, and some of these ranches are 40,000-50,000 acres.

The smallmouth in Lake Oahe are mostly all post-spawn from what I’ve seen, but I think there will be fish caught from both shallow and deep water this week. There are lots of long points and deep flats that make good smallmouth habitat, but there is also plenty of good shallow cover as well. It’s all about finding what you’re comfortable with and getting dialed in.

For me I’m pretty much committed to the shallow deal. When we go to smallmouth fisheries I like to be able to visually see the targets and bottom composition that the fish are relating to. A lot of guys use their graphs out deeper to do the same thing, but my comfort zone is shallow so that’s where I’ll be this week.

As far as baits I expect to see all the normal smallmouth baits come into play this week. Drop shots, tubes, topwater, jerkbaits, we should see them all catch fish. One bait that’s been a big producer for me the past couple years on smallmouth especially is the Ned rig. I use a Mustad Grip Pin Ned jig head with a new bait designed especially for this technique called the Ned Zone from X Zone one lures.

The rod I built for this technique is an MHX-NEPS-81MLXF. It is 6-foot, 9-inch medium-light power with 10-pound braid and 6- to 8-pound fluorocarbon leader. I hope to put it to the test this week because I know it will pass on big brown fish.

It sure would be nice to catch a bunch of big smallmouth this week and create some fond memories of this place and its big lake, big bass and big ranches. Maybe I can even get a step or two closer to having my own Tennessee-sized ranch one day! Y’all stay tuned.