Pacemaker Fishing Forum

Been fishing the Potomac lately in hopes of a decent smallmouth bite varying from Whites Ferry down to Seneca Breaks. However, with the fish just recently off the spawn and whatever other excuses I can come up with, the fishing has been very poor. I've been fishing that area for 20 something years and thought I knew what I was doing. We are only managing a few fish per trip lately. We're not even getting into the smaller fish around 8 or 10 inches which should be from the 2007 brood stock from the record smallie spawn. We may have caught a couple of those fish but what we have found is one or two nice fish a trip around 13-16 inches and that's that during the prime time evening hours. Top water has not done much of anything lately. Small spinner baits, senkos and BPS salty tender tubes have done the damage. Weird that NOTHING has hit top water. Well, the smaller guys may have tried but missed but the larger fish are ignoring it. With one exception, we had a decent largemouth bite on buzz baits well inside a tributary one day but the smallies just are not looking up just yet.



So this section has been catch and release fishing on Large and smallmouth bass for over ten years now and it's not producing much. Is anyone else having a slow time? Last year was decent but slower than the year before. 2008 was very good during midsummer so I thought things were turning around.

We'll see.  Last night thousands of sulphurs or tan colored Mayflies were hatching pretty well but not a whole lot was coming up to them.  The lights around the Ferry were almost clogged with a storm of insects which was pretty cool.  I may have seen a single white miller but wouldn’t expect many millers until July.  The shallows had good numbers of one inch long bait fish and good numbers of fry, I hope they were smallmouth.

Plus tried for muskie some of the time throwing large top water baits mimicking ducks, geese, anything out of the ordinary.  Just one muskie strike and I could die a happy man.  More on them later.  This full moon I have a multi day trip planned where muskie are a little more common.  We'll see what happens.