My friend Don Budd and I had spent a long, fruitless morning chasing walleyes on Wyoming’s Wheatland Reservoir No. 1. Neither of us had fished the reservoir before, but I thought if we pulled crawler harnesses behind bottom bouncers we could cover water, learn the nuances of the reservoir and find some walleyes. The tactic worked to a degree. We caught a few decent perch and we couldn’t keep the catfish off our hooks. The walleyes, however, were a no-show.
Feeling frustrated, we decided to shift gears. We put away the trolling rods and dug out some spinning outfits. I’d heard there was a burgeoning smallmouth bass population in the reservoir, so we decided to probe the rocky face of the dam by casting jigs and assorted plastics.
Not long after, Don was fast to a spunky bass—his first-ever smallmouth. Shortly into the contest, he expressed his admiration at the fight.
“Dang!” he said. “These things pull!”
This feeling of pleasant surprise is something many Western anglers experience the first
