Some of the best midlake structure often has a rubble bottom with few weeds or wood on it. Crankbaits won't snag unduly in these situations, and banging a deep-diving crank off the rocks is an excellent way to cover water and attract fish. Plugs with combinations of orange, gold and brown are pretty consistent, but under some conditions, fish preference leans toward chartreuse or silver. Other times, changing the lure's action or sound significantly improves your strike ratio. Some crankbaits have a wide, slow wobble, while others produce tighter, faster action. Be willing to try both types. The same goes with rattle and non-rattle baits. In lower visibility conditions, plugs with rattles often yield more strikes. However, where bass have been repeatedly exposed to "rattlers," quiet lures are usually better.

Whatever you use, work the top of the point/hump/reef first, then progress into deeper water. If your first choice of lures meets with only limited interest, be willing to experiment. At times that means switching to much slower presentation. Especially during cold fronts, tube-jigging an area might be the only way to really score. Slowly fishing almost any type of jig will produce a few fish, but a scented tube jig worked super-slow is best of all. After the lure hits bottom, let it sit motionless for at least six seconds. Then slowly move it just a foot or two and let it sit again.

MILK RUNS & WOLF PACKS
Perhaps the most consistent way to score with summer smallies is by establishing a "milk run." It takes some time to develop, but when you work up a good run it can pay off for years. The idea is simply fishing a series of locations at regular times during the day. It's one of my most valuable guiding techniques.

It goes like this. From previous experience you know a certain spot fishes best at a certain time of the day, while another location is better at a different time. So you start the day fishing the top of a point early in the morning. You exhaust that spot in about 45 minutes. You move on to another proven hotspot -- maybe to a slightly deeper reef -- then to another spot and another, until finally by midafternoon you hit your deep-water honeyhole. By having five or six or more proven locations to fish on any given day, you're very likely to find some -- perhaps many -- willing mouths.

One reason some locations are red hot at one time and stone cold a little later is because the smallies form "wolf packs" in that lake. In some extremely infertile Northern lakes, forage is always low, so smallmouths adapt by hunting as a group of three to about a dozen fish. This helps smallmouths capture more of the lake's limited forage, because a fleeing baitfish may escape one or two of the pack, but not all of them. These roaming wolf packs often travel the same circuit offshore or along a shoreline. So if you figure out what time of the day a small pack or large school of smallmouths is likely to be at a given location, it can be a bonanza. Keep careful records of both where and when you catch fish. Over several trips you can often discover a pattern that will pay off in future fishing.

Smallmouth habits can vary greatly from lake to lake, and where the fish will be at different times of the day and season is always changing. So figuring out where they are at any given time requires constant investigation. This is just one of the reasons I find smallmouth fishing so fascinating and enjoyable. I hope you do, too.