"The bug bite" was everything Britt Stoudenmire had promised and formed the strategical foundation for two days of float-fishing on Virginia's spectacular New River. A river guide who, along with his wife Leigh, operates New River Outdoor Company, Stoudenmire cherishes "bug season" because it provides some of the best opportunities of the year to catch big smallmouth bass. Every summer the fish feast on falling cicadas, which emerge, live short adult lives and die during the dog days, and the dying bugs dictate where the big fish congregate and how and when they feed.
Stoudenmire commonly uses a variety of flies that imitate cicadas this time of year, and he has even helped develop a lure he calls a spin-bug, which serves the same function for spin-fishermen. He and the bass clearly showed me, however, that making the proper presentations in the right types of places and understanding how conditions affect the bug bite are more important than the actual lure that's tied to the end of the line.
My best fish of the trip, a thick-bodied fish that measured barely shy of the 20-inch mark, took an XCalibur Zell Pop Xz2. Stoudenmire's best, which stretched the tape to 21 inches, grabbed a wacky rigged Senko. Both were in textbook "bug water," as it had been described to me from the onset, and fell for total deadstick presentations, and my topwater fish even took my lure exactly the way Stoudenmire had described smallmouths taking popping bugs and real cicadas after they die and crash land in the river.
The bad news is that the bug bite won't last too much longer. The good news is that the team of guides at New River Outdoor Company stay tuned into what the river's abundant smallies are doing throughout seasons.
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