Fly Fishing Insider Podcast
Big river smallmouth hold in deeper, longer runs with current moving through, plenty of cover and baitfish present - not in slow frog water, which belongs to largemouth and spotted bass. What makes them eat is what the fly does when it stops: a fly that hovers at neutral buoyancy and kicks on the pause converts followers into takes.
Ryan Walker is a longtime southwest Missouri guide, a former Alaska salmon and steelhead guide, and the founder of the Ozarks Smallmouth Alliance, a grassroots river conservation and education group.
Also on Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
How long does it take to grow a 12-inch Ozark smallmouth?
Twelve inches is legal keeper size on Missouri streams, and an Ozark smallmouth takes four to six years to get there. The fish that matter most - what the Ozarks Smallmouth Alliance calls old growth fish - start at sixteen inches, and a twenty-inch smallmouth in these streams is a thirteen to sixteen year old animal. The conservation argument follows directly from that arithmetic: four fifteen-inch fish on a stringer represent close to thirty years of accumulated growth taken out of the stream at once, and it does not come back quickly.
Why do Ozark smallmouth grow so slowly?
Ozark streams are not the forage-rich systems that northern smallmouth live in, with lakes full of gobies and heavy schools of baitfish. The menu here is shiners, stone rollers, crawfish and hellgrammites, in clear water over hard substrate. It is a hard-scrabble living, and the slow growth rate that results is the whole reason a released sixteen-inch fish is worth more to the fishery than a kept one.
Where do big river smallmouth hold?
Big river smallmouth want three things in the same place: escape, food and cover. That means the deeper, longer runs with good current rolling through them, plenty of cover and baitfish present - the quintessential good fish hole. What it does not mean is frog water, the long slow pools with almost no current, which is largemouth and spotted bass territory. Ozark streams are freestone and rocky, so rock is the primary structure and wood is secondary for most of the year, the reverse of the wood-dominated smallmouth rivers further north.
How do you read a plunge pool for smallmouth?
Smallmouth stack a pool in the same order trout do, which means a trout angler's water-reading skills transfer directly. The smaller fish sit up in the swift water and the rapid entering the plunge pool, and as you work down into the deeper water the bigger fish hold the prime lies. There is one counterintuitive exception worth knowing: in genuinely fast water the biggest fish almost always reaches the fly first, because there is no time to inspect it, while in slack water where a fish has all the time it wants, the big one frequently is not the one that commits.
Why does what a streamer does on the pause matter more than the strip?
Every articulated fly wiggles more or less the same way while it is being stripped; what separates a fly that converts followers from one that does not is its behavior when it stops. The fly needs to hover at close to neutral buoyancy, hold its attitude in the water, and kick as the materials flare on the stop and again when the strip resumes. A fly that starts sinking nose-down the moment it pauses is the classic way to lose a smallmouth that was already committed and then changed its mind. Diving deer-hair-head patterns are built to do exactly this - stop on a dime and kick the tail around as they do.
How do you fish a streamer around a log for smallmouth?
The mistake most anglers make around wood is stripping the fly straight back, which drags it downstream past the log. Instead, cast, let the fly sit a moment, throw a large upstream mend to swing the fly's nose upstream, hold the rod in that position and pull the rod back so the fly tracks up along the log rather than away from it. On submerged wood in three or four feet of water, bring the fly over the log, stop it just as it clears, hold the pause, then rip-strip it off. If the fish will not move on a perpendicular retrieve, back off and change your angle rather than crowding the structure.
When do crawfish patterns work, and what color should they be?
Crawfish are prime forage in spring and fall for two reasons: crawfish breed in both seasons, which puts males and females out in the open skittering over rocks, and they molt, which leaves them soft and vulnerable. Molting also changes their color - an Ozark crawfish that is normally brown and black turns lighter and more translucent, more of a purple-and-brown or peanut-butter-and-jelly cast. Fish pale, peachy and near-white crawfish patterns around the molt, and olives, oranges, browns and darker shades through summer and early fall. In winter crawfish matter less, though a couple of degrees of warming will bring them out and smallmouth will still hunt them.
How should you tie a crawfish fly for smallmouth?
Tie crawfish flies big, with short pinchers. Short pinchers foul the hook less, and studies on bass feeding show that crawfish missing a pincher or carrying stunted ones get eaten more readily than full-clawed ones, so anatomical accuracy in the claws is the least important part of the pattern. Weight the rear so the fly stands up head-high on the bottom, then skitter it through the rocks. If you are not losing crawfish flies, you are not fishing them in the right place.
Do big smallmouth eat crawfish or baitfish?
Crawfish patterns produce numbers of fish, hands down. But the bigger smallmouth come on big baitfish patterns, and that holds true across a full season of fishing crawfish year-round. Big fish want big meals, so a high-profile articulated baitfish fly is the trophy tool, particularly late spring and early summer when sunfish are spawning and marauding smallmouth nests, and again in late fall and winter when young-of-year bluegill, suckers and sunfish congregate around wood.
What line and approach do you use to work structure?
The working setup is an intermediate or hover line with a fly articulated at least once, and the approach starts above the target. Get to the top of the structure, staying as far off it as a comfortable casting distance allows so the fish are not pushed off the cover, swing the fly into the zone and strip it back out. Then work progressively deeper into the structure, treating every piece of cover as a clock face and fishing it from noon around to six. A missed fish teaches more than a hooked one, because you were watching everything you did at the moment it refused.
Key takeaways
- An Ozark smallmouth needs four to six years to reach the 12-inch keeper size, and a 20-inch fish is 13 to 16 years old.
- Look for big smallmouth in deeper, longer runs with current, cover and baitfish - not in slow frog water, which holds largemouth and spotted bass.
- Judge a streamer by what it does on the pause: it must hover near neutral buoyancy, hold its attitude and kick, not sink nose-down.
- Around wood, throw a big upstream mend to point the fly upstream, then pull the rod back so the fly tracks up along the log.
- Fish pale, peachy crawfish colors around the spring and fall molts, and olives, oranges and browns through summer and early fall.
- Tie crawfish flies big with short pinchers and weight in the rear so the fly stands head-up on the bottom.
- Crawfish patterns produce numbers; big articulated baitfish patterns produce the biggest smallmouth.
- Break every piece of structure into a clock face and fish it from noon around to six before moving on.
