My bicycle ride to my childhood fishing hole spanned only a few minutes, but that was plenty of time to awaken dreams of hooking a big bass and enjoying an epic battle.

Looking back over 60 years, I recall I would visualize my dream. It came to life as I coasted down the street toward Yellow Creek where it meandered around the boundary between Poland and Boardman Township. A few pools, wash-outs below riffles, harbored the fish we kids aimed to catch.

The visual in my head was like the realistic illustrations in Outdoor Life and other magazines, which I read when I wasn’t busy with backyard baseball games, school studies and the chores my parents expected me to accomplish. The illustration I saw was a 10-year-old boy clutching a bowed spinning rod tethered to a leaping smallmouth bass.

Yellow Creek didn’t have any smallies, but a boy could hope, right? Someday, I imagined, a big old bronzeback would dart from the shadows and gobble the garden worm threaded on the little Eagle Claw hook on the line that ran to my Johnson Century spincast reel.

Never happened, of course. If a smallmouth bass ever swam in Yellow Creek, it never found my bait. On the other hand, smallies are playing big time already this year, as rivers throughout our part of Ohio seem to be teeming with the acrobatic brown bass.

Reports from the Lake Erie tributaries are that big smallies (my favorite oxymoron) are running up the rivers in large numbers. Anglers are capitalizing on opportunities to hook up with the Lake Erie trifecta: steelhead, walleyes and smallmouth bass.

Erie’s bass eat well throughout the year and grow long and fat out in the big lake. As the river temperatures push up through the 50s, the bass head to the harbors, breakwalls and tributaries, where they will spawn when the waters warm past 58 degrees into the 60s.

Anglers are catching river-run bass now on spinners, jigs and small crankbaits. The Rocky River is an early-season hot spot. Fish also migrate into the harbors and rivers further east. The Cleveland breakwall and marinas are productive, as are Fairport, Ashtabula and Conneaut harbors.

The Erie bass are built like bulldogs, well-muscled from their jaws to their tails. Their diet of emerald shiners, gizzard shad, alewives, round gobies and young perch fuels their growth spurts. Anglers last week were reporting fast action on fish exceeding three pounds and ranging up to five pounds.

Bass action also will be heating up in the rivers south of the big lake. Our Mahoning River is a bass factory, as are the Shenango River from Pymatuning through Sharon, Pa., down to its confluence with the Mahoning near New Castle. Little Beaver Creek in Columbiana County is another local smallmouth hot spot.

Bank anglers can hook up at many locations on the Mahoning around Newton Falls, Warren, Niles, Girard, Struthers and Lowellville. Kayakers also get in on the action, with 40-bass not uncommon when the spring run-off stabilizes and the river starts running clear.

The big bass dreams of my youth may have been more hope than reality, but the real thing certainly is happening now as we head toward the peak of the spring season.

Jack Wollitz ranks smallmouth bass at the top of his list of favorite freshwater fish. Contact him at jackbbaass@gmail.com.