By Stephan Headrick, Think Smallie with Smallmouth Guru

As a lifelong angler in the heart of smallmouth bass country, I've had the privilege of introducing lots and lots of largemouth anglers to brown bass fishing. Some of them have been really good fishermen, but most of them have had a lot of trouble getting the hang of smallmouth fishing. Far and away the biggest struggle they've had has been in setting the hook.

Hundreds of magazine articles and many television and video segments have been written and made about how to set the hook when bass fishing. The problem is that none of them that I've ever read or seen really covered smallmouth hook sets. Just as smallmouths are different than largemouths, the proper way to set the hook on a brown bass is generally different from the best way to set the hook on a green fish.

I love to go jig fishing at night in the summertime for big smallmouth, and when I take a largemouth fisherman with me, I'll just about bet that he misses most of his first few strikes because he doesn't get a good hook set.