need help from bitz & 1850 ashbay

[brownfish]

can't locate the smallies. been here a week and only catching a few small fish. any help would be appreciated.

[1850 ashbay]

Was up last weekend. Leeches seemed to be the ticket for the bigger smallies. Find some bigger boulders close to some weeds and work it really slow in 6 - 10 ft. Everytime we tried deeper all we caught were 5 - 6 inchers and tons of them. Man, there's a good year class coming up. Overall the smallies were slower than normal for us, but we had such good walleye fishing we didn't really try that hard for smallmouths.

[bitz]

Hey BF, we had just the opposite results (kind of) it was hot (about 87 most days and sunny with no significant wind) so we kind of were lazy and didn't usually start fishing until about 9 a.m. We had best luck using glass shad rap rs, those seem to get down deeper where we had a bunch of 13 to 16 inchers. over the 7 days, we released over 250 fish. Robin caught 2 17+ a couple of 16+ and lots of others in the 14-15 inch range. late in the day (we usually quite from about 1-2 until about 6) we had a lot of luck using rattlin raps in about 6ft (best colors all week seemed to be orange(dark) blue and green, bright colors didn't seem to produce much. we picked up a bunch of nice sm on the first point of the west side of the ash narrows going south from steam boat rock. and several eaters off of the rock on the east side of ash narrow (across from the point above) I also picked up a 17+ in the first cut between ash narrows and ash bay (gets to about 2 ft all the way across and that seemed where we picked up several) and I lost an "upper lipper" right at the net that might have gone 18+ (should still be there)

Also picked up a bunch of 13-15 inchers on the 2 bays at the south east end of ash bay (just to the right of the cut i mentioned above)

We also did real well on the 4 islands/rocks just south of Palmer Island (south east island of the 4 has a table I made from 2 rocks on the east side for shore lunches) and a u shaped bay on the south of the table if that helps and just west of the north end of sears bay. look at the good map and you will see the u shaped bay.

try under any shade or dock in the evening you can find, that also was lots of 12-13 inchers

hope this helps

Bitz