We left Rainy Lake Houseboats dock at 7:30 AM with the Art Kammer group with Brule Narrows as our chosen mooring site. Guides on this trip were Joey Dougherty, Jon Balaski and Bill Dougherty.
The forecast was for westerly winds with a mixture of thunderstorms and rain. We were not out for long when we had to sit on shore while a lightning storm moved through the area we were fishing. Winds were actually quite calm. Winds stayed out of the south for most of the day.
Smallmouth were locating within two feet of the shoreline using a mixture of rock and weeds. A mayfly hatch had started and bass were periodically rising and sipping them off of the surface. We were casting Shenandoah Chuggars made by Murray’s Fly Shop in Maryland. The best colors were the white gray scale and green chartreuse scaled versions #4 size. The guide boats worked slowly down different shorelines trying to stay on hatching bugs.
Day two saw the three boats separate and all fished completely different areas on the lake. Wind conditions were good but switched to four different directions during the day. We were supposed to get large amounts of rain but did not see any until after 5:00 PM. Jon’s boat had bass coming up to the fly but not taking. They boated ten bass and decided to move across a bay to the next area to fish. The guys were casting to keep their lines abreast of the boat while Jon moved with the electric. Ed ‘s fly landed in the cabbage bed and a huge pike tried to hit the fly.
Art and David fished with Joey in an area that had some flowing water, very scenic and had awesome smallmouth fishing. They used poppers and fished primarily rock walls with scattered flat weeds and cabbage. The bass ran nice size 17-19 inches. (Joe’s pics to be added, he’s up guiding)
Bill, Peter and Bill fished a large shallow water bay with different leads heading towards deeper basin in the lake. We started on a long point working towards the end; the last 50 yards and the inside of the point were loaded up with bass. Pete and Bill landed a bunch and a few bass had poor eyesight missing the fly.
We worked over two similar looking points and caught only a few missing none. There was a cut leading to the open lake that had a few in it but nothing like the first spot. We moved to the bottom of a close by bay on the main lake. There was a sand beach in the bottom of the bay and we caught a couple of bass on the sand almost like bonefish in the Bahamas’. The sand transitioned to rock and rock walls. Mayflies were hatching out from the walls in 4 feet of water. We caught smallies for two straight hours fishing almost 300 yds. of shoreline.
Wednesday started with a steady rain that lasted almost three hours. Winds were from the east. We started on a cove that has beds during spawning time and feeding areas also. We fished the bay catching just five bass but one was a dandy male 18 ½” long, he was all rubbed up on his sides from fanning the nest he was sitting on. The wind died and I opted to move to another area in the bay.
Guiding always produces challenges and Wednesday was looking like one of those days. We propped the back portion of a narrow bay that had been very good seven days before. We caught a couple little ones but no numbers or size. I noticed with the trolling motor off we were being pushed by current at a rate of 0.4 mph. Was the current affecting smallie location? As we worked down the shoreline towards the end of the point current dropped to 0.2 mph and a shelf extended under the water with a four foot depth. Smallies were all around the are and three were quickly hit Bill’s home made fly. We moved around the point down the shore to a longer wall with similar shelf rock, many more bass hit both Bill’s and Peter’s flies. We worked the area over good continuing to find bass on the same type of structures and the rain quit! By the end of our day Peter and Bill boated 25 bass. We had to be back to the Chairman II by 4:00 PM. We moved to one last area to finish up. One more shelf area, both Bill and Peter caught bass on their last cast.