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Mike Buchanan, owner of Souvlaki's Restaurant in Blacksburg, pulled this great smallmouth bass from the New River during a March 9 float trip with his friend Doug Goldsmith.

Rivers are up a bit from the recent rain. As they come into shape, they could offer some awesome action for prespawn bass. You probably won't crush them, but the fish you catch will be decent.

My favorite lures for prespawn river smallmouths are suspending jerkbaits such as the Smithwick Rattlin' Rouge, and Rapala Husky Jerk and X-Rap. If the water has some color I like spinnerbaits with big Colorado blades.

Has anybody else hit the James or New for smallmouths yet this year? How'd you do?

Have you ever seen a good bluefish blitz? The kind where a school of big chompers just attacks a school of prey? It's unreal.

I felt like I was in the middle of a blitz on Sunday when, after getting some project supplies at Home Depot, I swung into the soon-to-close Sportsman's Warehouse.

The place was an absolute zoo, with lines at that registers that stretched back toward the middle of the store.

Now, I could understand a buying blitz if everything in the store was 50 percent off. But most of what I saw was discounted 10 percent, although fishing terminal tackle was 20 percent off. The best I saw was 30 percent off hunting clothes, some of which already had previous discounts.

Now, 10 percent is better than nothing, 20 percent is getting somewhere and 30 percent is good. But the 10- and 20 percent discounts have been common at the store. All you had to do was get your hands on the discount cards SW handed out like candy at outdoors events and meetings.

The only thing I can figure is that everybody showed up looking for killer deals. When they saw the huge crowds they figured they better get in on the action, even without killer deals, for fear the items they were after would quickly sell out.

"I've had my eye on this tin of pellets for a while but I just couldn't do it when they were $3.99. But now that they're $3.60, I'm all over it! Yeah, man! I saved 40 cents! Now I excuse me while I go spend the next half hour in line."

Strange.

In my Tuesday column I wrote about how some local bass tournament promoters plan to hold a bass tournament at Smith Mountain Lake at the same time the BASS Elite Series will be here, April 23-26.

The amateur tournament, named Beat the Elites, will operate with the same format, running for four days with cuts after days two and three.

The boater entry fee will be $450, with a top prize of $12,000 based on a 100-boat field.

Well, let's just say I've heard some interesting feedback on this.

Critics say the open tournament is rude and will reflect poorly on the region. Some predict ugly confrontations between pros and locals fighting over fishing areas.

But some amateur anglers point out that other lakes host local contests on lakes during Elite Series tournaments, and claim there is room enough for everyone to fish. They also argue that BASS reduced the potential economic impact by eliminating co-anglers from Elite Series tournaments and say that having another tournament will help make up for some of that hit.

I'm still not convinced the local tournament will come off. Tournament organizers say they need 40 or 50 boats to make the tournament worthwhile. I wouldn't be surprised if they can draw enough boaters, but I can see them having a hard time getting enough co-anglers (at an entry fee of $225) to match up with the boaters.

I'm wondering what others think about the tournament.

Good idea? Bad Idea? And why?

Montgomery County taxidermist Jeff Acord spends most of his time preserving trophy bucks for other hunters. This year he got a chance to mount a big deer for himself.

Acord shot the buck directly above his head with a crossbow on his own property during the early archery season. The deer's unofficial score under the Virginia system is 157. The other buck in the picture is one Acord shot in 2000, while the doe was killed by his daughter when she was 10.

We're down to the bitter end for deer hunting in Virginia. Pressure isn't anything like it was in November, but quite a few people will get out there this week for a couple of final hunts. I won't get the chance for a few days as we're in South Georgia at my father-in-law's for a few days. We hit one of his farm ponds yesterday for an hour or so and the bass fishing was unreal. My girls were just ripping them and must have caught two-dozen between them. I stayed so busy helping them and my visually-impaired father-in-law that I really didn't fish. But that was fine because I was still having a blast.

This morning did not start out well when I opened the paper and saw that the wrong picture had run with today's Fishing Report.

This picture of catfish expert Travis Patsell of Vinton and this awesome 28-pound Smith Mountain Lake flathead was supposed to run. Instead, due to a production glitch, we had a picture of Harry Townsend with a huge smallmouth bass he caught earlier this summer. That picture had run in the report in July.

The error was my fault because I attached the picture of Travis to the wrong story in our publishing software database.

I've gotten a lot of snide phone calls and e-mails already, and I'm sure more are coming. I'm glad some people are able to laugh about this because, at this point, I'm not.

At the Virginia Outdoor Sportsmen's Classic on Sunday I got a chance to catch up with pro bass angler John Crews, whom I hadn't seen in person since the Bassmaster Classic way back in February.

Crews, who lives in Salem, had a frustrating year on the Bassmaster Elite Series, catching plenty of fish but falling short in weights and failing to qualify for the upcoming Classic.

We didn't talk much about the pro scene, but we did talk fishing. And the more we talked the more it became clear that fishing isn't just a job for this guy.

For a while I picked Crews' brain on fishing buzz frogs, a technique those of you who kept up with my Summer Smallmouth Tour in The Roanoke Times know I'm just getting into.

Crews' eyes brightened as he talked about the technique. He gave me some great tips on hook types and confirmed my suspicion that the rig I had been throwing the frogs on (medium casting rod with 10-pound mono) probably contributed to my low percentage of good hook ups. (I'm ready to roll with a heavier rod loaded with 30-pound braid.)

Crews also talked about his own fun fishing, including the time he's been spending with his 9-year-old stepson, Noah. They've been going to the Roanoke River here in the valley and fishing for smallmouths. His priority has been keeping Noah in the action, but clearly Crews has been getting into this himself.

He told me about one hole he found that has some resident smallmouths in the 2- to 3-pound range. "You can see them, but they won't hit anything," he said.

He tried one finesse technique that was so unbelievably tricky that he said no fish in America could resist. But these did. Crews outlined other techniques he plans to try to get these bass.

Keep in mind this is a guy who gets to fish some of the country's best bass waters.

It think it's great that he can get fired up about catching (or trying to catch) bass even when there's not a $100,000 check on the line. I think most of his peers on the pro tour would be the same way. They are pro bass anglers not because it's a job, but because they just love to try to outsmart fish.

Crews' enthusiasm shows something else: Fun fishing is where you find it.

I feel sorry for the poster who wrote in a comment to an entry below that, "There is NO real fishing around here." He just doesn't get it.

But John Crews does.

During our recent vacation to South Georgia we got out on my father-in-law's farm pond for some bass fishing. The girls had a good time. I hooked them both up with spincasting rigs with Zoom Baby Brush Hogs and that's all it took.

The pond is packed with stunted bass so we took a bunch home. We ate some down there and I was surprised that it was pretty good compared to some mushy late-summer bass and bluegills I've had before.

After the girls had their fill I spent maybe 10 minutes working the shallows with a Zoom Horny Toad and had a blast. I got a bunch of blow-ups, although I was having trouble keeping the fish buttoned. Needed a bigger hook, I think.

Here's a short video from that recent float trip my friend Alfie Hammerstrom and I took on the New River.

I got out for a few hours on Smith Mountain Lake on Monday afternoon with Scott Wiley and Charlie Machek, two guys on the Virginia Tech bass fishing team. I'm doing a story on the team for Friday's paper, the day before they host a college bass tournament at the lake.

Wiley and Machek have been fishing the past few days and it's been tough. It was slow Monday, too.

Then in the middle of the afternoon we saw some bait moving around in the upper end of a creek and went to check it out. I was fishing, too, and about the third cast I felt a tug on my Lucky Craft jerkbait. I set the hook and the bait flew back at the boat and nailed Wiley right in the back. It didn't hook him, but it got pretty well stuck in his VT team jersey. I managed to get it out without damaging the jersey too bad.

We ended up catching some of those fish -- big gizzard shad that we were snagging. If there were any bass eating those things they would have been huge. But we fished around just in case, and also in the hopes of maybe finding a big striper. That didn't happen.

With temps near 70, it was a pretty great day to get out on the water for a few hours. I expect fishing should really pick up out there in the next couple of weeks.

I'm back in Roanoke after spending the past few days at the Bassmaster Classic in Greenville, S.C. I'm beat, so I can't even imagine what the anglers feel like. I guess they're used to it.

OK, I have to admit that the second and third days weren't as rough for me as the first. The second day my coverage focused on the weigh-in. I went to the Expo but it was absolutely insane. There were no parking spots. But even if I had taken a shuttle bus I would have been out of luck as I learned that the fire marshall showed up and wouldn't let anybody else in the Carolina First Center. Seems the people of Greenville are just a bit hungry for outdoor gear.

If you saw my stories in the paper you know that amateur angler Jeff Freeman of Max Meadows just missed the cut on Saturday, coming in at 28th. I hated that for him because he was so close. It's really impressive that a guy who works 48 hours a week can do so well against guys who do this for a living.

On the other hand, he was so sick that he needed a break even though he didn't want one.

Sunday I went out to the lake in the morning (but not too early) to get on a media boat so I could get some pictures of John Crews. The ESPN/BASS folks track the anglers using GPS units, and that helped us know the general area where Crews was fishing. But that lake is 56,000 acres (well, it is when it's full, which it's not, by a long shot) and it turned out John took off as soon as we did. So it took us about 45 minutes to find him. The media boat driver had to be back about an hour later to pick up another photographer so we had all of about 30 minutes to watch Crews.

He was fishing almost in the shadow the football stadium at Clemson -- Death Valley -- so I got a couple shots of that. So I was OK. But I really wanted a fish. I said to the boat driver and the other photographer with me, "I really need him to catch a fish."

Next thing I know Crews had one on. When he got his hands on the 4-pounder he let out this incredible whoop. The only thing that wasn't perfect was I was shooting with second-rate, obsolete Nikon digital gear that I got when our photo staff switched to the good Canon pro gear. Despite that, I was pretty happy with the series of shots I got.

I thanked Crews for catching the bass and we took off. It was kind of funny.

He ended up having a really solid day with the 5th best bag. But the way it worked out he didn't move up a single spot, and finished 16th. Amazingly, the guy just ahead of him was Charlie Hartley, who started the day in second.

Crews has had some really solid tournaments, and some great days out there on the pro tour. His best finish is a third. I think it's only a matter of time before he puts it all together and gets his first win.