Friday we decided to head north to a small lake in Haliburton that has been good to me in the past. Scott and I launched late morning and found fish almost immediately. The smallies seemed to be adjacent to deep drops and grouped up fairly tightly. When we caught one, we would also catch a few more within a couple casts. If the action slowed down we would leave but revisit later in the day and the smallies would be back, and in a few instance they were bigger on the second pass. Tubes and drop shots were not nearly as successful as jerk baits and spoons.

When fishing with a jerk bait if you don’t get a bite you can often see a few smallies following the bait up to the boat. Sometimes if the light was not optimal or the fish were too deep I was unable to see them with my eyes but I could see them on the fish finder. Numerous times I would pull my bait out of the water to make another cast and I could watch on my sonar a fish sink down beneath the boat. By the end of the day Scott figured out how to catch these fish. He tied on a jigging spoon and immediately dropped down to them. I think he landed six in the last hour with this technique; very cool.

Make sure you bundle up our there, and pick your days accordingly. If it wasn’t for the bright sun we would have had a hard time fishing all day. Funny though, as soon as you started catching a few fish the numb feeling in your fingers and toes is soon forgotten ;-)