“Triple! Triple! ANOTHER Triple!”

Rick Correa is hollering, laughing and dancing around the bow, straining without success to stop 4 pounds of red-eyed smallmouth bass from going wherever it wants. In the stern, Tony Tantalo is locked into the second smallie, his rod bending under the boat, and I have a grip on the lower lip of a 2-pounder.

Incredibly, this isn’t just a triple header. It’s another triple.

The author and angler Rick Correa hammered smallmouth with tube jigs on the Northwest's salmon rivers.

At least a dozen triples were hooked before this one, and before we called it a day — albeit a great day — we would dance the triple step two dozen more times. These weren’t 6-inch schoolies either. These smallies were measured in pounds — aggressive pounds, bordering on mean. Only the bitter end orange tail of my 4-inch, green-pumpkin Gitter Tube bait is outside this bass’ mouth. Local wisdom is that a 4-inch tube won’t fit in a smallmouth’s mouth. Nobody in this boat believes that. We have whopper evidence to the contrary.

These bass are just plain big and nasty, and when they hit a plastic bait, they annihilate it. I’m guessing that’s what happens when smallmouths grow up dodging 20-, 30-, sometimes 50-pound king salmon; they get big, aggressive, prowl in packs and develop the kind of attitude that’s still standing when bar fights end.

In recent years smallmouth bass have been storming Washington and Oregon salmon rivers, turning powerful salmon and steelhead flows into what many are describing as the hottest bass fishing on the continent. You’ll get no argument from me.

We’re about 100 miles east of Portland, Ore., tucked into a nest of volcanic basalt rocks on the Washington side of the Columbia River, not far below the Highway 97 Bridge to Biggs, Ore.

Cold-water salmon country.

Oregon’s heavily glaciated Mount Hood punches into the horizon. Tribal gill nets are stretched into the current, straining for fall kings. A few miles downriver, a tight cluster of 100 or so small boats filled with salmon diehards are slow-trolling, gunwale to gunwale, most in absolute boredom at the mouth of the Deschutes River, hoping, praying or begging for a chinook strike. A bite: one, uno, singular.

Almost everyone is complaining about weak runs of Columbia River salmon in recent years but still they fish, ignoring what just might be the hottest smallmouth action in North America slipping under their boats. Like me, a lot of anglers have learned that whacking big numbers of 1- to 6-pound smallmouths sure beats not catching 30-pound salmon.

Salmon Down, Smallmouths Up

Northwest salmon runs are sliding, but in these rivers, no one is complaining about a shortage of smallmouths. There isn’t one. Just the opposite, in fact. Smallmouth numbers have exploded in Oregon and Washington salmon rivers during the last three decades, to the point where just a couple years ago, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife with its heavy pro-salmon bias — in a misguided effort to protect salmon smolts — considered launching a smallmouth eradication program. Bass anglers howled, cost estimates soared, feasibility floundered and ODFW eventually dropped the idea.

Mount Hood looms majestically in the background as smallmouth anglers cast on the Columbia River.

What impact smallmouths are having on the quick little salmon fry is unknown, but probably little because Northwest bass feed primarily on slow crawfish, leeches, lampreys, suckers, squawfish and shad fry. It’s a diet they thrive on and, when combined with the agreeably cool water temperatures of salmon rivers, it delivers nearly non-stop feeding binges from May through September. A big draw is the fact that the hotter the weather, the hotter bass action. There is no summer smallmouth slump in the Northwest.

Prime Waters

Most Northwest prime bass water is either in the Columbia River or a tributary. The other prime rivers include the Snake, which cuts through Washington, Oregon and Idaho; Washington’s lower Yakima, Okanogan and Palouse rivers; Oregon’s John Day (100-fish days are routine here); and, amazingly, the Willamette River in downtown Portland. The Umpqua River is a nationally recognized steelhead fly-fishing and salmon river that flows well south of the Columbia system from the Cascade Mountains directly to the Pacific Ocean at Reedsport, Ore. And this renowned steelhead/salmon producer is now a hotbed of smallmouth bass, and sight-casting to specific fish is a common technique. Responding to demand, the Big K Ranch, (800-390-2445) has developed a drift-boat guide service in the Elkton area that specifically targets Umpqua bass up to 6 pounds.

How-To

Most Northwest smallmouth techniques involve plastics, especially tubes jigged to quiver, lightly bounce or dead drift along rocky bottoms. River currents guide presentations and create lure action. A growing number of Northwest anglers, however, are stealing Southern magic and using conventional drop-shot and Carolina rigs.

A big regional difference in the Northwest is the use of light lines — 6- to 10-pound mono or equivalent diameter braids or super filaments — knotted into nearly invisible fluorocarbon leaders. The thin line, coupled with a loop knot, maximizes the action of the lightweight jigs and lures (down to 1/16 ounce) commonly used and is also a concession to ultra-clear river water. The Umpqua and John Day rivers, in particular, flow window-pane clear for most of the summer and deep into fall.

While there are some local variations in fishing techniques, wherever smallies are found in the Northwest, the key that unlocks hot bites is finding flowing water. Find where the current spills, edges, gushes or purls around rocks and you’ll find smallmouths ready to pounce. “These bass go to current,” Rick tells me. “Find current and you’ll find aggressive smallmouth.”

Predictably, when the monster power dams downstream in the Columbia and Snake rivers shut off water releases, the upstream bite dies. But when the locks operate to pass a grain barge or flush water through power generators, the bass bite takes off. The two factors controlling Northwest river smallmouth success are rocks and current. Find those in combination and you almost always find a stack of smallmouths.

Increasingly In The Spotlight

Tony Tantalo landed his share of rod-bending smallies on the Columbia River.

The reef we’re working is typical Northwest smallmouth habitat, a puzzle of visible and submerged volcanic rocks. Flowing current streams around the edges in breaklines and swirls into eddies. Not another boat is in sight. We are alone in smallmouth heaven, giggling like school girls, holding bent rods, being beat up and lure shredded by nasty bass deep in the heart of cold-water salmon country. If other bass fishermen know about this mother lode of bronzebacks, they’re keeping out of sight.

Rick, Tony, Jeff Staggs, Mike Gibney, Jeff Boyer, Steve Fleming and other Northwest smallmouth fanatics have mixed feelings about the Northwest developing into the most overlooked bass bonanza on the continent.

Locals have had this bronzeback bonanza to themselves for a couple decades. They love being neck deep in big bass and not having to worry about competition, but they also recognize bass fishing is coming of age in the Northwest. It’s a double-edged smallmouth sword, and it may already be poking into the national spotlight. Just last spring, the first nationally televised big-dollar (more than $100,000 prize money) bass tournament was held in Washington on the Columbia River at Tri-Cities. The top two finishers pulled a mind-blowing 102 pounds of bass off one rock pile. The second tourney is scheduled this September.

This kind of explosive bass    action is drawing attention, local and national. John Day River smallmouth specialist Steve Fleming tells me his Mah-Hah Outfitters (888-624-9424) books up every season with a waiting list for the best dates. Steve rows with counters mounted on the oars of his drift boat to keep track of individual catches. It’s a rare summer trip when anglers don’t catch more than 100 bass each, he says.

On average, the John Day River fish are smaller than Columbia or Willamette river bass, but there are a zillion of them, more than 5,000 every mile, according to ODFW.

While the Northwest’s temperate climate means no seasonal end to bass fishing, most regional bass specialists mark their fishing calendars with an early fishery — March through mid-May — targeting the largest bass of the year. Cold, high-water Northwest springs mean tougher water conditions and fewer fish, but more 5- to 7-pounders than the rest of the year combined. Record-pushing bass are harder to dig out from June through September, but escalating water temperatures trigger an aggressive summer-long feeding binge that produces those magical, yet almost routine 100 bass days.

On a high-cloud and blue-sky morning, we trailer Mike Gibney’s 20-foot bass boat to the park launch ramp at Ceilio Falls off     I-84 on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, squeeze it between an armada of chinook salmon trollers and, two hours after daylight, head west, riding 225 horses at a speed that makes my eyes tear and ears flap.

Under the railroad bridge and just short of a white string of tribal gill-net buoys, Gibney powers down, swings into easy casting range of some sterile-looking riprap rocks and says, “Fish here.”

The boat hangs in the current, 40 feet offshore, controlled by an electric motor. The tactic is to cast to the rocks and work tubes and plastic worms toward deeper water. The bass must be lined up like vagrants at a church feed. Plastics hit the water, fall, twitch and get bit.

We drift, cast, hook up, battle and cast again. The bass are holding along the banks in the rocks where the riprap meets the river bottom and on the reefs that we find under waving willow bushes. After a few passes, the fish catch on, the bite drops and we move to another wall of rocks or reef loaded with hungry bass.

And not another bass boat in sight.

These super-sized, red-eyed predators are storming into salmon country, and amazingly, it’s still a national secret.