Fish of the Week: A big smallmouth bass comes in late fall from southern Lake Michigan

Kevin Higgins caught a 6-pound smallmouth bass in the Indiana waters of Lake Michigan in late November to earn Fish of the Week.

By Dale Bowman

Kevin Higgins with his big smallmouth bass from the Indiana waters of Lake Michigan.

Smallmouth bass, even in late November, draw boaters to southern Lake Michigan for a good reason, as Kevin Higgins showed on Nov.25.

With water temperatures down to 41 in the Indiana waters, he caught a 22¹⁄₂ -inch smallmouth weighing 6.03 pounds on a Tight Rope Fishing Baby Firework Super jig.

“It was a special catch for the southwest basin,” he messaged.

The Indiana smallmouth record, surprisingly, was not caught on Lake Michigan, but by Dana Yoder in 1992 from Twin Lake in LaGrange County.

FOTW, the celebration of big fish and their stories (the stories matter, as this one shows) around Chicago fishing, runs Wednesdays in the paper Sun-Times. The online posting here at chicago.suntimes.com/outdoors goes up at varied days of the week, depending on what is going on in the wide world of the outdoors.

To make submissions, email (BowmanOutside@gmail.com) or contact me on Facebook (Dale Bowman), Twitter (@BowmanOutside) or Instagram (@BowmanOutside).

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