F
inding and catching hefty small-
mouths on the Great Lakes is one
of the more challenging tasks in
bass fishing. The reward, however, is
like no other, as smallmouths grow
large and mean on the big waters of
the region.
The challenge is unique. By defini-
tion, the Great Lakes are huge, and the
bass often live miles from shore scat-
tered over vast offshore flats. Though
tempting smallies into biting isn’t that
hard – catching them doesn’t require a
perfect skip with a jig or an ideal lineup
with a crankbait – doing it with any
degree of efficiency can be difficult.
While many Great Lakes anglers
employ drift socks, GPS-enabled
trolling motors like Minn Kota’s Ultrex
or Power-Pole Drift Paddles to cover
water at a slow-and-steady pace, Chris
Johnston, the 2016 FLW Tour Rookie of
the Year, takes the opposite approach:
The Canadian pro powers up his main
motor and searches out dozens of indi-
vidual targets in a day.
“It’s very similar to Kentucky Lake,” he
says of his Great Lakes smallmouth
strategy. “If you aren’t marking them on
the graph there’s no point in fishing. The
nice thing about the Great Lakes is that
there aren’t a lot of junk fish. If you mark
a fish it’s usually a bass.”
It’s a run-and-gun strategy that’s
more akin to a Southern summertime
bass tournament, but Johnston’s results,
including five top-10 finishes in the Costa
FLW Series Northern Division AOY stand-
ings, suggest that his system works.
Chris Johnston finds more big-water smallies by running and gunning on the big motor, wasting little
time between presentations.
is going against the current or a weath-
er change, they will suspend more
between rock piles.
“As soon as you see a fish you put a
waypoint down and actually idle right
over it. As soon as you see that fish
again you can drop your bait down by
the transom. Nine times out of 10
you’re going to catch that fish.”
Johnston doesn’t bother moving to
the front deck and dropping the trolling
motor if he doesn’t have to. He gets the
bait – usually a drop-shot – in the water
quickly, and aggressive smallmouths
usually reward him with a bite.
When he’s mostly scanning for new
rock piles, Johnston typically idles at 2 to
3 mph, and he speeds up to 5 to 6 mph
when he’s checking up on old waypoints
or quickly using sonar to hunt fish away
from the rocks.
“If you are drifting around, you aren’t
covering enough water,” he adds. “And if
you were going around on your trolling
motor, you wouldn’t see enough water,
and half the fish you catch anyway are
ones you see and drop down on.”
Challenges
Driving around and catching every
fish you see sounds easy enough, but
that’s not all there is to it. Knowing how
the fish tend to behave in less-than-
ideal situations will improve your odds.
Johnston has built up hundreds of way-
points marking rock piles on his graphs
over the years, and while they are his
primary targets, they aren’t the be-all,
end-all for big-water fishing.
Johnston says that when there’s a
rapid weather change or if the wind is
going against the current the bass will
often leave the bottom, but they won’t
go far from the rock piles.
“On a lot of these areas the fish live
on the rock piles, so they stay in the
vicinity of them when they suspend,” he
says. “They are harder to catch, but they
are usually around. Smallmouths [in the
Great Lakes] are relating to gobies so
much now. I think they aren’t moving
near as much as they used to. You can
almost tell when you catch a minnow-
chasing smallmouth from time to time.
The ones eating the gobies are so fat it’s
ridiculous. You wonder how they can
even swim.”
Even when the smallmouths loosen
up from the cover, Johnston says they
can still be caught with his idle-and-
drop method mos