Yee Haw!!

Not your typical largemouth river. The Haw is loaded with water like this.

    This definitely wasn't what I had in mind when my buddy Mack invited me to come catch some largemouth bass with him on the Haw River. Most of my river experience has led me to believe that largemouth bass prefer the slackest water a river has to offer, and my first impression of the Haw didn't reveal much slack water at all. In fact, the Haw looks like smallmouth heaven, strewn with boulders, rapids, and riffles so common to quality smallmouth streams. I figured we were in store for some fun kayaking but I'll admit that I was at a loss as to where the largemouth bass would be hiding on the Haw.

    "Does the river look like this all the way down?", I asked Mack, hoping he would tell me that the river slackened and got deeper just around the first bend.

    "It's pretty much like this everywhere", said Mack. Not the answer I wanted to hear.

    Having grown up in Georgia, my experience with quick and rocky rivers has always been that they have low largemouth populations but tend to be loaded with spotted, redeye, or shoal bass (species that traditionally thrive in shallow, rocky flows with good current). Most of my smallmouth outings have been on rivers that look a lot like the Haw, but the only bass species in the Haw is largemouth bass. Needless to say, I was a bit pessimistic.

    One factor that did provide a hint of optimism was my partner, Mack. Mack knows as much about North Carolina rivers as anyone I've ever met, and if he was willing to spend his day off trying to catch largemouth bass from what looks like a smallmouth river, then it probably wouldn't be a good idea to write the day off just yet.

    After launching, I made it a point to turn around and watch what Mack was doing. He was throwing his buzzbait to the same type of water you'd hope to catch a smallmouth from on other rivers: behind rocks, in current eddies, and above and below shoal areas. So that's what I started doing. I tied on a big white buzzbait and pretended I was smallie fishing. Minnows were skipping everywhere in the rocky shoals and short pools, and every now and then something larger would boil beneath them. Below the first significant rapid (a small Class II), I stopped at the head of an island to dump some water out of my kayak. Making a few casts across a midstream eddy pocket, I almost had my arms jolted from their sockets by something pretty big right on the edge of the flowing current and the calm water.

    After a short but intense fight, I landed a sizable bowfin. Well, I say I landed it, but I actually lifted my line out of the water and asked Mack to take it off the hook for me. Bowfin have strong jaws, sharp teeth, and are just about the thrashingest fish there is once they've been reeled to the boat. I don't touch them unless I have to, and thanks to Mack, I didn't have to. Surprisingly enough, this was the first bowfin Mack had ever seen taken from the Haw, and I was lucky enough to lose another later in the float. I normally associate bowfin (also called mudfish or grinnel) with the slow, meandering rivers that largemouth bass call home, but apparently the bowfin have adapted to the Haw just like the largemouth have. Luckily for me, the largemouth greatly outnumber the bowfin.

A little girl and her bowfin

    It didn't take long before the bass started biting. We were blessed with good cloud cover for most of the morning, a blessing on a July day that would eventually see temperatures in the upper nineties. Mack caught the first bass of the day off some woody bank cover, and I caught a solid fish just above the next shoal on a 3/8 ounce spinnerbait. We were catching all our fish from relatively shallow, fast water. These largemouths were behaving like smallmouth bass, hiding behind rocks in tailouts below rapids, often in midstream away from the banks. They were smashing fast-moving lures and fighting much harder than the slow-water largemouth to which I've grown accustomed. The action stayed fairly consistent until about 10:00 AM when the sun finally burned through the clouds.

This healthy Haw largemouth nailed a spinnerbait near that rock in the background

    Of the nine bass we landed on our short float (we were off the water by 12:30 PM), all but one came from quick and rocky sections of the river on fast-moving lures. On the few stretches of calm water, we only raised one small bass. I doubt this pattern holds true year-round on the Haw, but it certainly is a good one to keep in mind during the summer when the water is relatively low. According to Mack, the bass average around a pound on the Haw and anything over four pounds is a really nice one. We caught a few fish close to two pounds, but most were right around a pound. The fish all seemed really healthy and fought like the dickens. I can't imagine what a four-pounder from the Haw would feel like.

    Mack called our outing "a little on the slow side", but I thought we did pretty well. The Haw is an interesting river to paddle and fish, and Mack is a great fishing partner. Mack put me on all his favorite spots first and fished behind me all day. I hope we can get out together again soon.

    At these river levels (a tad under 400 cfs and 3 feet on the Haw River gauge), the Haw is a bumpy ride in a canoe or kayak, but none of the rapids pose any real difficulty other than a little dragging through the shallow spots. There are also some good areas to wade at these levels. A little more water and you'd better start paying attention, though, and you should never set foot on the Haw without checking the river level. It muddies up and rises quickly after a hard rain and sections of the river can be really dangerous.

OK, it's a bad photo but Mack tends to break cameras so consider yourself lucky. This picture illustrates the kind of places we were catching fish and the kind of fish we were catching.