Are Smallmouth Better than Trout?

A Trout Angler Seeks Small Jaw Redemption

Imagine you’re forced, gun-to-your-head, absolutely must choose one—trout or smallmouth, which would you pick?

This is, of course, a stupid question. It’s not really a question at all—more like a thought experiment, or a flimsy writing device to get your attention. If actually faced with this hypothetical Sophie’s Choice, most fly anglers would pick trout with little more than an eye twitch. Up until very recently, I would have been one of those anglers, but I’m reconsidering.

While taxonomically different as housecats and muskrats, trout and smallmouth are experientially related, especially when you’re standing at the bow of a driftboat, scanning a willow-studded riverbank. They both live in clean water flanked by sturdy foliage—what I call beta blocker landscapes. They’re both dietarily malleable. Baitfish, insects, crustaceans, worms, and other small critters are all on the menu. They both enthusiastically rise to meet a meal floating, skittering, or twitching on the surface, depending on their mood. They fill important niches in their endemic ecosystems and wreak havoc in watersheds where they're introduced. When hooked, they both tear line, taco rods, and put on Blue Angels caliber aerial displays.

My brain held all of this information, conceptually, long before my good buddy Joe Cermele and I spent a couple days fishing with Tim Landwehr of Tight Lines Fly Shop in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The tannic waters of the Badger State felt as familiar and comforting as the hug I got from Joe after a couple years without seeing each other. I spent childhood summers around these parts, learned to fish on lakes fed by tamarack swamps and subterranean springs. I’ll never forget the day my father landed an honest-to-God four-pound smallie—I must have been about 12—the weight of the sagging net in my hands, the joy on his face, the jealousy I tried to conceal. I never came close to matching that fish.

But that was a lifetime ago. I moved on to longer rods and sleeker species, made a home in Montana and a living guiding for and writing about trout. I can probably count on both hands the number of days I’ve spent smallmouth fishing as a grown-ass man. So, when Joe suggested that we meet in Wisconsin to cast dry flies to giant river smallmouth, it felt like an opportunity to transcend time, a chance to meet up with my inner child, hand him a fly rod and say, “let’s get redemption.”

When you imagine a day of smallmouth fishing, what comes to mind? Casting and stripping streamers on sink tips? Chugging poppers at last light? Those were my assumptions, and they were wrong. Tim, I should mention, wrote the book on fly fishing for smallmouth. On the rivers he guides, smallies move up shallow to feed in the heat of the day, patrolling rocky shoals and banks. Will they eat streamers? Sure, but Tim visibly cringed when I tied on a Murdich Minnow. “The big fish like topwater,” he told me, “and so do I.”

Tim’s summer approach resembles hopper fishing on Western rivers. From his 16-foot, low-profile Hyde, we threw reach casts on downstream angles with big dragon and damselfly patterns. Tim’s a fan of Boogle Bug poppers but doesn’t endorse popping them. “Just bend the legs,” he says, a familiar presentation to anyone who’s twitched terrestrials for August trout.

The eats were surprisingly trout-like, too. No vengeful attacks or surface tension detonations. Sometimes a smudged gill plate would appear. Most of the time, however, the bug would simply vanish. One minute it would be floating languidly and then, as if performing close-up magic, an unseen small jaw would simply make it disappear. As with trout, there seemed to be an inverse correlation: the bigger the fish, the smaller the eat. Though river smallmouth mature slowly, they also live twice as long as trout, 15-17 years vs. 7-9. 

Fishing for river smallies is also deliciously visual: You plop that bug against the shoreline, over a rock bar, or alongside a woodpile, and will a shadow to materialize. Sometimes, they give themselves away, rising to a natural or pushing bait in the shallows. My most memorable eat of the trip came after we saw a push of water just below little dock against a willow bank. I tried to tuck a cast between the dock and where we’d seen the fluid motion, but missed, dropping the fly about a foot downstream from where the fish had shown itself.

“Ahhh, behind him,” I exhaled, lamenting my failure, knowing that Joe waited in the stern not-so-secretly hoping to pick my pocket with a perfectly placed cast and pitch me a smiling barb, “Oh, you didn’t want that one?”

“I think she heard it,” Tim said. By the time my brain converted his language into consolation, a V-wake appeared in the shallows tracking the bright yellow fly. The fish charged, then paused, taking its time, inspecting. I bent the legs, just like Tim coached, and the popper disappeared like a flushed roach. Cheering ensued, the anchor fell, and after minutes that stretched like silly putty, my first four-pound smallmouth hit the net.

Though these particular river bronzebacks eat like trout, they fight different—Bass-Fu, a unique discipline. They don’t waste energy on long, chaotic runs, but systematically dive for cover, bum-rushing log jams and rock piles, saving their strength for the endgame. Once a trout comes within a couple rod length of the boat, the jig is mostly up. With smallmouth, that’s when the real battle begins. They do not go gentle into that good net, but rage, rage against the dying of the fight.

These fish also offer guilt-free fishing in the height of summer. Unlike trout, smallmouth thrive when water temperatures creep over 70 degrees. Stepping over the gunwale at the end of the first day my brain yelled, “This water is too warm!” Years of trout fishing instilled in me a reflexive aversion to warm water. Warm rivers kill trout; they do not, however, bother smallmouth. Up to a point, anyway, elevated water temperatures just ramp up their metabolisms and corresponding prey drives.

The bite slowed on the second day but started and ended memorably. Joe landed a 19.5 incher (his biggest fly caught smallmouth) first thing in the morning, still within sight of the ramp—a scarred scrapper with frayed fins and a healing gash on her flank. The eight-ish hours passed with laughter bouncing from bow to stern and just enough eats to keep everyone focused. Just before we reached the takeout, my popper vanished. A few minutes later, I got to hold the fish I’d coveted for so long —a big, beautiful smallmouth just a tick under 20 inches and over five pounds. My father would have been delighted.

Lefty Kreh wrote, “My favorite of all freshwater river spaces is the smallmouth bass.” That’s a bold statement from an icon of our trout-centric sport who caught just about everything that swims. If smallmouth are good enough for Lefty, they’re damn sure good enough for you and me. At the end of our trip, I asked Joe Cemele why he thought smallmouth don't get nearly as much attention as trout:

For the two days I got to experience pinnacle smallmouth dry fly fishing, I didn’t think about trout, not once, but I doubt that would last forever. If I moved to northern Wisconsin, I’d miss trout fishing. We often covet what we don’t have.

Am I a convert? Are smallmouth better than trout? Like I said earlier, that's a stupid question. Besides, who really cares what I think? Some guy on the internet proclaiming trout superior to smallmouth or vice versa will change as many hearts and minds as a political party’s national convention. I don’t regret the many years and thousands of hours I’ve spent chasing trout. I do, however, lament the decades I spent not pursuing smallmouth.