Many Elite pros spend the offseason trying to bag a trophy buck. In October, I transition from competitive fishing to casting for trophy bass.
When I lived in California, I set my sights on the enormous spotted bass in Bullards Bar Reservoir. They grow fat on landlocked kokanee salmon. A 6- to 10-inch kokanee is the equivalent of a protein bar to a bass.
I caught my biggest spotted bass at Bullards Bar in 2016. It weighed 10.80 pounds and set a new world record, which has since been broken.
When I moved to Idaho five years ago, I learned some of the lakes in this state also support kokanee salmon. No spotted bass call home this far north. But the smallmouth here find the kokanee just as toothsome and fattening as the spotted bass in Bullards Bar.
Idaho’s state record smallmouth is 9.72 pounds. I believe smallies that surpass 10 pounds also swim in this state. My goal is to catch one of them.
My first outing for a smallmouth in Idaho took place in 2022 with a buddy who often fished for smallmouth in Idaho. We ran bluffs, steep points and steep walls where he’d had some luck in the past. We went fishless for five hours.
I asked him if he had ever fished the long points that ran out into the lake. He had not. I told him I fished similar points for spotted bass in California.
The points that produced heavyweight spots for me were typically 50 feet deep and dropped into 75 to 100 feet of water. The kokanees swim the channels like a highway. Wherever a channel swings close to a point, the spots wait there to ambush them.
Most of the spotted bass suspended in the middle of the lake. They would pull up to a point, engulf a few kokanees, and they were done for the day. It was a timing thing. You needed luck to be there when the bass were feeding.
I explained to my buddy how I caught giant spotted on a 5-inch Yamamoto Senko rigged with a 1/16-ounce nail weight. I would make a long cast up over a point and let the bait drift slowly to the bottom.
If I didn’t get a bite on the fall, I’d shake the Senko two or three times on the bottom and reel in for another cast. Dragging the bait on the bottom was a waste of time. This was before LiveScope, so it made for a pretty boring day if you weren’t getting bites.
We soon found a long point on the Idaho reservoir similar to those I had fished for spotted bass in California. I rigged a 5-inch green pumpkin Yamamoto Senko with a 1/16-ounce nail weight and fished it the same way I had done for spotted bass.
It didn’t take long for me to hook my first Idaho smallmouth. We boated it after a lengthy battle and were blown away by how big it was. It weighed 9.03 pounds on an official scale.
I’ve caught some other oversized brown bass in Idaho since that day, but that enormous fish continues to be my biggest smallmouth.
One of the challenges with this pattern is finding the points that consistently hold the bass. Bullards Bar has countless long points. They look so similar you’d think any of them would have potential. But what I learned after fishing the lake for years is only certain points hold the big ones.
On Bullards Bar, I found only seven points that yielded trophy spotted bass. I would fish and re-fish those points all day. I might not get a bite the first two times I fish a point. On the third rotation, I might catch two or three big ones.
I suspect the same will be true of the smallmouth points in Idaho. I’m still narrowing it down to the most productive places to put in my time.
I’ve already caught largemouth and spotted bass over 10 pounds. If I can land a 10-pound smallmouth, I believe I will be the only bass angler in the world to have accomplished this 10-pound trifecta.
I’ll be after a 10-pound smallmouth in Idaho until freezing weather and snowy conditions push me off the water. That could happen sometime in late November.
