BassBlaster

Hey – Cochran ‘Hates’ Smallie Fishing!

George didn't make it to the Classic catching smallies.... (CochranFishing.com photo)

Anyone Else?!

George Cochran doesn’t like fishing for smallies! In tournaments, anyway….

On the one hand, I can’t believe it – meaning who in their right mind wouldn’t like fishing for smallmouths?

On the other hand, after reading about it, I get where he’s coming from. Anyone else feel the same way George does?

Excerpts follow, on why George doesn’t like brown fish and what he does to try and overcome that dislike:

One type of fishing I dislike worse than anything else is when…I have to fish for smallmouth on those big northern lakes. Northern smallmouth move around a lot, but my style of fishing is to get into an area, learn it and fish for largemouth bass.

Most tournaments fished on those big, northern natural lakes and the Great Lakes will be won by smallmouth fishermen, and I hate fishing for smallmouth. When you fish for smallmouth up north, you’re fishing open water, and you have to drift around and use your trolling motor to continuously look for new places to fish around invisible structure.

Once you find and catch the smallmouth one day, you may return to that same spot the second day and learn the smallmouth have disappeared. Then you have to start searching for the bass again. Every day you fish for smallmouth, you usually have to relocate them and then see if you can make them bite.

These are the types of tournaments where I fish the worst. Most times I get frustrated because I’ll have a good practice and then go to the places where I’ve caught smallmouth during practice, and the smallmouth will have vanished.

With largemouth fishing, I can stay in one region and catch largemouth every day, because these places usually replenish themselves every day.

When I learned that I couldn’t beat the smallmouth, I decided to join them. I changed my mindset to realize that every day I smallmouth fished in a northern lake, I had to go on an Easter egg hunt to find the bass….

I love the “invisible” and “Easter egg” parts! Too funny.

What am I learning here?

1. If you like to fish fast and shallow, do it well and of course can find the basses, you’ll do pretty dang well over the years – as George and many other shallow-largemouth pros have.

2. After years, decades, of interviewing George and reading other interviews with George, I never knew that. Wonder what else I don’t know about these guys….

Btw, solid evidence of #1 will be in a piece we did that at some point will run on Bassmaster.com – using FishingGold! pattern stats to find out what the most productive techniques are for winning B.A.S.S. events. Will let you know when it runs….

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Chad Keogh

    July 29, 2011 at 1:57 pm

    It sounds like George is the equivalent of a largemouth and that’s why he likes them: stays in one spot and waits for the fish to come to him, just like largies like to sit in the cover and wait for dinner to come to them…

    I too like the “invisible structure” comment. I think someone needs to help George turn on his side-imaging.

  2. BryanT

    July 30, 2011 at 9:48 am

    Everything he says is pretty true for lakes. The smallies around here definitely do not get married to anything. I still fish for them while fun fishing, but on guide trips I have to have a LM on back up.

    One thing with smallies is they do generally return to the same area, but they’re feedings aren’t normal like a LM (morning and evening). On L Mich and Erie, I’ve gone to offshore areas and fill the boat by 6am and the next day it can be slick calm and sunny and get most of my bites from 12-1 pm. They are a strange fish that definitely do not read the same books we do.

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