Beaver Creek Smallies

Beaver Creek Smallies

By Dave Freeman

It’s early morning just past daylight and there’s a slight mist laying on the stream. You wade into the water waist deep no matter what time of the year it is usually a pretty good wake up call. You open the bail of your open face spinning reel, your first cast is to a small cove just on the down stream side of some rapids where the water is calm. Your tiny torpedo launches from your rod and as it touches the water, the water explodes with action. Your first cast of the day gets an immediate hit from a two pound small mouth bass. There’s nothing any writer can put in words to describe the feel of that action. If they say a picture is worth a thousand words, certainly a picture of a beautiful bronze back tail walking at first light is worth a million words. That description describes the opportunity to fish for small mouth bass on Beaver Creek, a stream which empties into the Ohio River near the Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia border. A stream, where as a kid growing up , if you caught a rock bass and a sucker both in the same day, it was a great occasion.

Now several Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania bass clubs having fished Beaver Creek, have listed it as one of their top small mouth creeks in this part of the country. Although in the past couple years small mouth fishing on the creek has been off to varying degrees depending on who you fish with, who you talk to and what part of the creek you fished, this year seemed to be an explosion with every size small mouth imaginable. While one and a half to two pounders seem to be the average, four and five pound small mouth bass on Beaver Creek are not impossibilities and from conversations with tournament fishermen are becoming more numerous.

It’s above and below these rapid areas in the rock laden bottom and grassy banks of Beaver Creek that create the spawning and feeding beds for the small mouth which provide anglers with an exciting opportunity depending on your ability to withstand weather for as much as ten months out of the year.

The particular July morning described in the beginning of this article, saw my son David and I with over forty fish caught in little more than a three hour time span. We won’t number the misses. If not the number one day in small mouth bass fishing on Beaver Creek for me , it’s definitely in the top five. Bass that day were tenaciously attacking tiny and regular size torpedoes zuro spooks and even buzz baits. Several strikes produced so much action that the lure was actually blown back toward us, as the small mouth hit it with hunger and zeal.

For my money, pound for pound, the small mouth bass is the most exciting game fish that God has seen fit to grace the angler with. Standing in three foot of water, in the small mouths living room and having the opportunity to hook one of these beauties, in a definition taken for a commercial it doesn’t get any better than this. For the angler who fishes from the shore or is willing to put on a pair of neoprene waders in early spring as early as April bronze backs can be hit along the creek and I have seen fishermen fishing as I made my way to my deer stand in late November.

While the tactics and locations of the small mouth change through the season, the excitement remains high and the same when the small mouth are on a feeding frenzy. Early spring and late fall fishermen seem to have better luck in still quiet pools of the creek and as surprising as it is to a lot of anglers, as the hot summer months hit, small mouth sometimes lay in very shallow pools of water waiting for gizzard shad and emmeral shiners.

If you have never experienced wading for smallies on Beaver Creek or any of the many steams in Ohio, Pennsylvania or West Virginia, I would put the excitement level at or above that of catching a twenty pound king salmon on the Niagara River, a thirty inch walleye on Lake Erie and even having the opportunity to lock into the fish of a thousand casts a musky at Leesville or West Branch.