Next week’s Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year Championship in Escanaba, Mich., on upper Lake Michigan is sure to be a smallmouth fishing slugfest. Over the past several years, the Great Lakes have all sprung to life and are pumping out huge five-fish stringers of smallies. Just last week at the Bass Pro Shops Bassmaster Northern Open presented by Allstate on lakes St. Clair and Erie there were numerous bags of smallmouth weighed in the 20- to 25-pound range. In very few parts of the country will you ever see that, but it’s become common on the Great Lakes.
This is another new venue for me but from all I have read and heard, the main reason for the awesome fishing up there these days is forage. The smallmouth’s favorite food — the goby — is flourishing. Sure they probably feed on yellow perch and crawfish from time to time, but gobies make up most of the diet for the big smallies in the North Country. Smallmouth can’t eat enough of them, and the goby makes the bass fat.
One of the best lures to represent the goby is a tube. Throwing a tube for Great Lakes smallies is certainly no secret. It is very effective, and many tournaments are won on this tactic every year. A tube is very versatile and can be fished from a foot of water all the way out to 50 feet by just varying the weight of the jig head that you rig it on. You can also fish it many different ways depending on the mood of the bass on any given day. For instance one day they may want the bait just dragging across the bottom, and the next day they may want you to hop it up quickly and let it fall back to the bottom to trigger a strike.
My favorite tube for smallmouth is a Bass Pro Shops 3 1/2-inch Tournament Series tube. As far as colors go, I usually use some form of green pumpkin or maybe a smoke color. I will go with the smoke color if the water is super clear or I think the fish are feeding primarily on shad.
I rig my tubes on a Strike King tube jig head that features a Mustad hook. I vary my jig head size from 3/16- to 1/2-ounce, depending on depth of the water and the mood of the fish. I use 10-pound-test Vicious braid for my main line with a 6-foot leader of 10-pound Vicious Pro Elite Fluorocarbon.
I fish the tube on spinning gear and use an MHX-HM-DS822 rod. It’s a 6-foot, 10-inch blank with a good parabolic action that really loads up and casts the tube well. I actually built a couple of new spinning rods following our last event to make sure I was ready for Michigan. You can build custom rods too with supplies from Mud Hole Custom Tackle.
