"The fish bite twice a day - just before we get there and just after we leave" - Unknown
The Millers is a great smallmouth River and anyone who has been there can vouch for that. Lots of "Snapper" bass in the 6 to 8 inch range are always willing to do battle with you but you may be looking for something more. If you want larger smallies you have to ditch your trout flies and go with something bigger and heavier to get down to where these fish live. Here are a few tales of some encounters with big bass on the Millers.
The photo above is of a women I guided one hot, humid June day. The scene is at the Bridge Street Pool in Erving and I set her up with (you guessed it) a size 10 black wooley bugger which is simply a great fly. It had a weighted body to get it down to the depths of that pool and it worked because after a 10 minute battle she cradled and released a 15 inch smallie. BTW, this pool gave up the largest SMB I've seen on the Millers that tipped the scale at 4lb!!! The hardware fisher had a single hook lure and easily released that fish.
Let's go upstream to the Kempfield Pool (just downstream from where Whetestone Brook joins in) and I'm fishing a black Marabou Leech when something BIG smacks it and tears off downstream. There is no happy ending to this story because it threw the hook after a 10 second battle but not until it tore off about 50 feet of line off my reel. A big brown?? I think it was a big smallie.
Now, let's wade upstream to the very head of this section. There is a HUGE boulder near the middle of the river (you can't miss it) and across from that boulder is a series of large brown rocks. I put a large, heavy stonefly nymph against one of those rocks and had a massive hit which took line from my reel as I ran after it. There was a flyfisher fishing right at the bend in the river and he netted my fish. Was it the mother of all Millers brown trout? Nope, but a 16 inch smallmouth!!!!
Then there was the time when I was fishing just below the Holtshire Rd bridge to a steadily rising fish that was tucked right up against one of the bridge supports. Nice brown I thought as it sipped in my comparadun. Wrong again. It was a smallie of around 14 inches that went airbourne before running out of gas after a good run.
I've caught others in that river but these are etched in my memory just like the brutes I've lugged out of Wachusett Reservoir.
There are many mid sized rivers in eastern and central Ma that have smallmouth bass and are begging to be fished.
Ken
