EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK By Billy and Bobby Murray

For the last 35 years, we’ve been bass fishing professionally, but some of our fondest memories are the smallmouth trips we’ve taken up into the St. Lawrence Seaway out of Alexandria Bay, New York.  

Fishing there is totally different from our southern reservoirs like Toledo Bend and Sam Rayburn, where we have a lot of heavy timber and brush. Up in Alexandria Bay the water is extremely clear and all you have to worry about are weeds and rock piles. You can use lighter rods, lighter line and smaller lures, and boy is it a lot of fun. 

One trip really stands out in our memory. We were fishing a big rocky shoal out on the edge of Lake Ontario where we found ourselves surrounded by the biggest bunch of smallmouth that either of us had ever seen. Literally six to ten acres of spawning bass!
 

Right then and there we decided to try and catch as many fish on as many different lures with as many different techniques as we could.
 

We started going through our tackle boxes, lure by lure. First, one of us would pick a lure and make a cast and see how many casts it would take to land a fish, and then the other would pick a lure and do the same.
 

The depth ran from six to 20 feet, and we caught them on every kind of crankbait we could find, from shallow runners to deep-divers. Then we went through our spinner baits and caught just as many, finally working our way up to top-water stuff.
 

By this time, a couple of guys had anchored about 200 yards off, not really having much luck. We were laughing and joking, trying to keep score of who had caught the most, when these two guys finally motored up beside us and asked us what we were catching all of these smallmouth on.
 

Billy took the tackle box, set it up on the front deck and said, “We’ve caught them on everything in this tackle box here.” The guys just shook their heads. “What do you mean everything in this tackle box? You’ve got to be throwing something special.”
 

Billy told them, “No sir, we caught them on everything but the kitchen sink.”
 

We invited those guys to tie up to our boat and we started throwing different lures out there and showing them the importance of tackle selection and lure presentation. That was the secret to catching those smallmouth. It wasn’t what you threw in there, it was the presentation . . . making it stop or go or do something different.
 

We had an unbelievable day, catching and releasing between 300 and 400 smallmouth on that shoal without even pulling our anchor.
 

Several times we caught two bass at once on crankbaits, but Billy aced me out when he caught two bass at once on a spinner bait. And they were good, solid two-pounders!
 

To this day, I’ve never seen anything like it.