Smallmouth bass (Micropterus dolomieu) are a common, but often overlooked nonnative game fish, voracious and strong, that has found a home in California and across the West in both still and moving waters. William A. Dill and Almo J. Cordone, in their History and Status of Introduced Fishes, 1871–1996, concluded that smallmouths arrived from their native East Coast waters in 1872 and were initially stocked in Alameda Creek and the Napa River, then slightly later in Crystal Springs Reservoir in San Mateo County, part of San Francisco’s water-supply system and an impoundment where many anglers have wistfully wished that they could fish without being run out by the watershed police. This species subsequently was stocked in many waters, in part due to praises of its gameness by Dr. James A. Henshall in his classic Book of the Black Bass (1881), which includes several chapters under the heading “Angling and Fly-Fishing,” and again in More about the Black Bass (1889).
Dill and Cordone also found that the largemouth bass, Micropterus salmoides, arrived in California in 1884, but there is some doubt about the accuracy of reports from fish-and-game departments regarding the origin of fish plants. Often fish or egg shipments, transported from the East and Midwest via the new transcontinental railroad, were inaccurately reported, with several species consolidated in the same shipment.
Natural Proliferation
Stocking was not the only way in which smallmouth populations proliferated, however. Nature itself welcomed and distributed the species. In the Central Valley and the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, before extensive levee building and island tract reclamation, rivers flowed undisturbed, their courses usually much wider than today’s diked and channelized ditches, and providing the complex habitat that smallmouths prefer. Imagine an unaltered Delta without levees and filled with herds of grazing animals such as elk, deer, antelope, grizzly bears, and abundant otters and beavers. (Laura Cunningham’s A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California will take you back to that fascinating time.) Historical reports from as far back as the era of the Spanish expeditions in the 1570s and as recent as the establishment of Sacramento as the state capital describe flooding that filled much of the Central Valley in high-precipitation winters and during spring run-off. Diaries tell of a 40-mile-wide lake. There is a report of steamboats following much of the Interstate 5 route up to Sacramento, sometimes arriving with fence wire in their paddle wheels. In times of high water, they could travel as far north as Red Bluff. The entire drainage system, from north to south, with the Coast Range on one side and the Sierra on the other, was one of the richest ecosystems in the world. The smallmouths did well there. In waters such as the Sacramento, Feather, Mokelumne, and Cosumnes Rivers, there were prolonged releases of large volumes of cooler water throughout the year coming from precipitation that fell on the watershed of the western Sierra slope. At one point, there was a commercial fishery for smallmouth bass, and we can easily speculate that fresh bass were on the menus of Sacramento and San Francisco restaurants. Smallmouths still thrive in branches of the Sacramento such as Miner Slough, Steamboat Slough, Sutter Slough, and others.
More recently, another smallmouth stronghold was created in the west-slope Sierra reservoirs that dammed the American, Bear, Mokelumne, Stanislaus, Calaveras, Merced, and Tuolumne Rivers. The first wave of irrigation impoundments on these rivers were followed by the construction of larger dams and impoundments, including New Melones, New Hogan, New Don Pedro, and New Exchequer (Lake McClure) Reservoirs.
Somehow, smallmouths took hold in these waters. These provide good smallmouth habitat and are often overlooked by fly fishers as sport fisheries, requiring due diligence to find access and locate these fish. Southern Sierra rivers such as the San Joaquin, Kings, and Kaweah also contain smallmouth populations.
Smallmouth Epiphanies
I’ve experienced a number of fishing epiphanies in my angling career, each one launching me in another exciting direction. An early epiphany came on the upper reaches of Comanche Reservoir on the Mokelumne, where cooler water comes out of the base of Pardee Reservoir upstream, known in its own right for large smallmouths. I was fishing beyond prime morning hours and was looking for shade combined with structure that would be a target for a small frog-colored bass bug.
Such a place appeared as I worked up the south side of the inlet arm. I bounced my popper off a sloping rock face and let it sit longer than my patience usually allows.
The stillness was broken by an explosive blowup on my bug, loud as a handclap. My fish hooked itself on the take and bored vertically, then diagonally in the water column across the submerged cliff face. It surged against a doubled rod and fought every inch of the way to the surface, auguring back into the depths several more times, then ran and came out of the water, shaking its head in an attempt to throw the popper. As I lifted my net, sunlight hit bronze-gold scales and illuminated glaring iridescent red eyes. This 16-inch fish would have towed two equally sized trout backward. I was stunned — and an instant believer in this wonderful game fish.
A few years later, during an exploration up 19-mile-long Lake Nacimiento, I experienced how good fishing for this species of bass can be in moving water, as well as in still waters. We were there for the spring white bass (Morone chrysops) spawn, a species and experience new to me, scheduled to meet with members of the San Jose Fly Casters near the inflow of the Nacimiento River, which runs east out of the Coast Range, originating not far from fabled Hearst Castle. Hampered by a dense fog and a delayed departure, we arrived late at the designated meeting place, where the whites were supposed to be gathering for spawning. My partner and I were expecting a social lineup of fly anglers casting Nacimiento shad flies, a silver-and-white minnowlike pattern. Instead, we found beached boats and anglers drinking coffee laced with shots of brandy. The hoped-for white bass hadn’t showed.
We exchanged fish talk and pleasantries, but my partner and I were eager to fish, so we continued up the arm into the lower river, which was swollen, but clear. It was a wet year. We beached the boat at the end of the navigable channel, threw out bow and stern anchors, rigged our rods, donned our waders, walked a few hundred yards upstream, and were immediately perplexed about how to fish this water. Would there be fish there? Though I never had seen a classic smallmouth stream, this looked like the pictures of such waters found in sporting magazines and fishing books.
Guessing, we started casting small streamers diagonally out into the current, mended line, and let them swing. There being no competition from fellow anglers, we then took a step downstream and repeated our casts, as one would do when working a steelhead run. We hadn’t gone far before I was fast into a strong fish that hit as the sinking line and fly came around and rose up the face of an underwater rock ledge. I had gambled and attached a small Thunder Creek streamer that I had tied over the winter. I passed a similar fly to my partner, and we had a splendid time, catching and releasing over 30 smallmouths between one and a half and three pounds, fish that made us question the power of mere trout. My guess was that a huge school of smallmouths had moved up the river, looking for white bass fry or drifting eggs. We kept our last two fish for dinner, shouldered our rods, and walked back to the boat.
We suspected that the boat had been searched when we found an expensive pair of high-powered spotting binoculars under the front deck and a few things out of place. The leather case was stamped with the logo of the California Department of Fish and Game. Later we found out from the game warden to whom they belonged that a distant cross-stream angler had turned us in, thinking we were overlimit for catching so many fish.
Most of the San Jose contingent had left, and we headed downlake in the upper lake’s five-mile-per-hour zone, watching our fish finder, hoping for bait schools or podded-up white bass. We found them mixed in with bait and picked up several, our first of this species on a fly rod, to add to our fish fry. A Fish and Game boat came out of a cove and passed us at high speed. I shoved the throttle forward on my Ranger center console and chased him several miles. We pulled alongside a very unhappy warden. He didn’t like being run down, and I had grossly exceeded the speed limit.
He lightened up, though, when I held up the expensive binoculars. He would have paid for the loss out of his pocket. One good turn deserved another, too: my partner had left his fishing license on our truck dashboard, and the transgression was forgotten when he found out we were working on a conservation project with Fish and Game in Sacramento. We drank to his generosity and discretion at our campfire and fish fry that evening. My smallmouth epiphany was repeated a few weeks later at Lake Berryessa. Our target was the west-shore islands and the inlet arm of Putah Creek. Fishing on the windy edge of an incoming weather front, we found that every bass in the lake was on the feed. Largemouths were well back into island coves off of clay banks, and smallmouths were up the Putah arm, holding over submerged gravel bars created by smaller seasonal tributaries that ran in laterally.
We had a banner day, catching and releasing many fish, the prize being a brace of four-pound smallies that doubled and stressed 8-weight fly rods almost to the breaking point. My fishing partner was new to fly-rod bass fishing. At the take-out dock at Spanish Flat, I almost choked when he said, “They seem fairly easy to catch.” I managed to blurt out, “It won’t be this easy next time, maybe never.” What was the magic fly? For largemouths, I tie a simple creation that is nothing more than a clump of four-inch-long black saddle hackles extending from the hook bend on a short-shank 1/0 chrome saltwater hook, with tightly palmered grizzly schlappen extending from the bend to the hook eye. For smallmouths, I tie the same tail feathers with red and white schlappen. The pattern still works today, years later. Chartreuse-and-white Clouser Minnows in several lengths do, too.
Smallie Lies and Flies
Smallmouths prefer gravel, fractured rock, boulders, and submerged tree-stump forests such as are found at Lake Almanor and in similar habitat in the higher-altitude trout lakes such as Prosser, Stampede, and Antelope Reservoirs. In my local lake, Scotts Flat, I target submerged brush and trees in spring’s high water as well as the gravel, fractured rocks, and tree stump fields in May. At Almanor, the tree-stump fields can hang up flies on almost every cast. Try a popper/dropper with a small minnow pattern to enable you to pull your offering between stumps without hanging up. Another option is to balance a leech or minnow pattern under an indicator — wave action provides animation and lessens the negative effect of bright daylight. In the Delta, smallmouths prefer steeper riprap bank slopes. Good flies are the weighted white-and-silver Sister Kate and fire-orange-and-olive Victoria’s Secret, as well as weighted crawdad patterns.
Though not omnivorous, smallmouths eat a wide variety of protein foods with gusto. Favorites are the increasingly widespread pond smelt, threadfin shad, and crayfish. Don’t overlook their love of the large Hexagenia nymphs and of minnows of any species. In rivers with runs of anadromous fish, smallmouths gorge and grow to trophy size on salmon and steelhead smolts. They are opportunistic, voracious fish that prefer structure, but will feed on boulder-filled flats and even in open water on forage fish such as pond smelt and threadfin shad if conditions are favorable.
Many anglers are unfamiliar with the phenomenon of carpenter ant and cinnamon termite swarms on mid-elevation and high-elevation waters. This is seen in mid-elevation lakes such as Scotts Flat in April and May and most commonly seen in the Truckee area in June and again in September and October, as well as in similar mountain areas. A glut of downed, swamped insects will bring the smallmouths up to feed on the surface, often with rainbow trout and brown trout mixed into the feeding orgy, if you are lucky enough to find it. The phenomenon is unpredictable, so in the mountains, always carry a few ant or termite patterns. (See “Ants and Termites” in this column of the March/April 2016 issue of California Fly Fisher). A favorite pattern for cinnamon termites is the late Jim Cramer’s clear-winged tan caddis pattern, size 12 and 14. Trout can be very selective when these bugs are available, but smallmouth less so.
At higher elevations such as Almanor, Stampede, Prosser, and Antelope Reservoirs, later in the season, the fish can be on the termites or carpenter ants (See “Can Fish Think?” in this column of the September/October 2016 issue of California Fly Fisher). A bulbous size 10 black-bodied carpenter ant imitation works. Often I find that a black Sneaky Pete slider, size 8 or 10 with white rubber legs is the ticket.
Smallmouth Waters
I have either visited the following waters with smallmouth potential or plan to visit them in the future: Lake Siskiyou (ant falls in June), Lake Almanor (pond smelt and Hexagenia mayflies), Lake Britton, Trinity Lake (big fish), South Fork Reservoir in Nevada, Ruby Lake in Nevada, Lake Berryessa, Pardee Reservoir, Lake Nacimiento, San Antonio Reservoir, Lake Cachuma, Stampede, Prosser, Antelope, Camanche, Round Valley, and Scotts Flat (ants and pond smelt) Reservoirs, Rollins Lake (pond smelt), Englebright Lake, Lake Clementine, Folsom Lake, and the Umpqua River, the John Day River, the Merced River, the Russian River, and Cache Creek, which is supplied by cool water coming from Indian Valley Reservoir. This bass factory suffered immeasurably during the drought. Hopefully this year’s high water will result in a rebound.
Dedicate some angling time to chasing smallmouths. A smallmouth of 12 to 16 inches or larger on a 5-weight or 6-weight rod will bring an angling epiphany to you, too.
