My home lake in South-Eastern Kentucky usually turns out some really good bags of early spring smallmouth. Usually takes low 20lbs to money in early spring tournaments. This year the water went from 40 deg. to 65 deg. in roughly 4-5 weeks. I fish a lot of tournaments and the biggest weight I heard of this spring was 17lbs, but mostly 11-14 lbs or less. It seems like there was no pre-spawn bite, smallmouth seemed to move straight up and start to bed. This past weekend it took 20lbs to money for first time all spring, but these were all bed fish (mixed bag largies and smallies).

I was just wondering if anyone has experienced similar conditions on lakes they fish in the past, and if I could expect the post-spawn bite to be a little better this year as it seems fish didn't spend as much time feeding up before going on the bed this year? Another factor that may figure in but I'm not sure, is the fact that we had a pretty sizable shad die off this year just before it began to warm up. I understand that this happens every year on certain lakes, but there was a noticebly larger amount of dead shad floating this spring. Could this abundance of easy targets as the fish moved up, account for the very poor pre-spawn bite?

I think it was the shad kill. It's hard to fool

fish that are so well fed!

8-)

Thanks Road Warrior. People were starting to panic that something had happened to the smallmouth. Because no one was catching the size or numbers they were used to. Some thought that live bait fishermen had packed them out over the Winter, but I work at a dock on the lake and I knew that no one had hardly fished all Winter (too cold) this year. I thought that there had to be a natural reason for the lack of fish being caught just didn't know which one of the two scenerios was most likely the problem.