Welcome to the Orvis Fly Fishing Guide Podcast with Tom Rosenbauer, bringing you tips, tricks and techniques to help you get the most from your time on the water.

Here's acclaimed fly fishing author and lifelong fly fishing

enthusiast Tom Rosenbauer.

Welcome to the Orvis Fly Fishing Guide podcast. Gary Kurtz of Columbus, Ohio, sent us an email and said that he lives in an area where

there's lots of small mouth bass and he wants to know about how to find them, how to catch

him and how to present the fly.

So Gary, this pods for you. It's funny that smallmouth

bass although they're they're pretty well distributed across the country

are actually only native to the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi River system.

And you find them in Maine and New Hampshire and California and Oregon and in the deep south

where you have at least where you have cold clear lakes, but small moths were actually native to a fairly limited area of the eastern United States, but they were stocked all over the place back around the turn of the century when the fish stocking craze was in full bloom and they were transporting fish back and forth across the country.

So a little aside there on small moths, but you'll find them.

Anywhere you find cool clean water with lots of rocks. You seldom find small moths

where it's really weedy and mucky or muddy. You'll seldom find

them in backwaters. Most of the places you'll find them are in a current or in a lake

along a rocky shoreline where there's some good wave action and

oxygenation.

They like a little cooler water than largemouth bass and they like a little clearer water

than largemouth bass.

And of course, they're nowhere near as popular

as large mouths because you don't find them everywhere.

And they don't grow as big as large mouths,

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