by Bruce Middleton, October 08, 2007

Fall brings with it a great many changes to the lakes we fish in up here with the Pacific Northwest. Even complete amateurs can see these changes, but how to fish them becomes the really hard part.

The lake’s water temperature drops steadily down from the 70’s to the 60, and then to the 50’s and finally the 40’s. This cooling has a charging effect on the bass. The days become shorter and the lessening amount of daylight also has an effect on the bass. They know by instinct that winter is coming and they start to feed ravenously to put on as much weight as possible so as to be in as good a condition at the end of winter as possible when spring finally comes around again.

This is the time of year that the biggest bass are caught…

One thing that you notice right away is that the morning bite falls off later and later until it doesn’t exist at all. Another is the vegetation turns brown and begins to decompose and rots away. When this happens the water in the flats and near the bottom of the lake floor is covered with a lot of slimy, brownish, gunk and this decomposing matter eats up almost all the available oxygen at the bottom of the lake at night. This low oxygen level will keep the bass out of this entire area at night. This is because the flats and points that the bass eat and hunt on, need day light time to produce enough oxygen with whatever greenery is left in the area to make it habitable for the minnows and bass to go in and search for food. The sun provides the energy for this to happen and as the decomposition continues the later the bass can move into the flats to feed. This is a somewhat simplified way of explaining what happens in the flats both at night and in the daylight. But it is covers enough bases so you get the big picture about what is happening in the fall cold water turn over.

Now at this time of the year, bass will suspend out off the lake bottom in deeper water, usually at the depth they are going to be hunting at. After the sun comes up and oxygen levels rise, these bass will move into the flats or points to gorge on anything that moves and believe me it takes a lot of food to fill up an eight pound bass let alone all the bass in the lake. Note that the deeper a bass feeds the longer he will have to stay out suspended. This is because it takes the sun longer to produce oxygen at deeper water depths than it does shallow water. This doesn’t count really deep water where there was no vegetation to start with.

Surprisingly too, at this time the night feeders often times move to the daytime to do most of their feeding. This is because there is just not enough oxygen in the water at night to sustain them, so they have to move out and suspend with the other bass and feed during the day or they have already moved to very deep water where decomposition is not a factor. This is the time when the most bass of the year are caught. Now scanning the 20 to 30 foot levels looking for these large schools of bass that hold at 6 to 16 feet of water is where the big action is. Not all the bass rush into the flats at the same time in the morning but they are all out of the flats by a certain time in late evening. The school will generally have some numbers of bass in it at all times. Your job as an angler is to find these schools and to find out what lure or bait they will strike and what presentation they want with it. Since they are suspended near the surface they fall into the active feeder category and should be fished that way. These huge schools of bass can make you just stand there staring at the fish finder/depth finder. This is the only time of year you’ll see these schools and they can contain a few bass or hundreds. Finding a massive school, of say 375 bass ranging in size from 2 pounds up to 9 pounds, can leave huge blips on the
screen and make your jaw drop. Grab a lipless crank bait, spinner bait, regular crank bait or a swim bait either hard or soft, whatever and get it in the water as soon as possible. Get it down to the right depth and start working it. Keep working it and fine-tuning the presentation until you have a lure or bait the bass just can’t help but eat it. Once you have a pattern established you have a lure you can use when these bass stop biting and you move on looking for another school. Remember not to toss any hooked bass back as they produce a pheromone that will tell the other bass to get out of Dodge, and suddenly the bass stop biting.

Remember the depth the bass were in and how deep they held in. This way all you should have to do is run either side of that depth level and look for another school of bass. Throw the same last lure or bait in order to catch more bass and to keep the pattern continued. Should it start to fail you, you can fall back on the same lures you tried before you tied on this last lure or go back to the original school and refish it. I suggest the trial and error way. That way you can fish the whole lake and not just one part of it. That or look at the time and see if it’s time to move into the flats and point to fish for the bass looking for food in shallow.

Use a depth pattern search pattern to cover the lake if nothing else. This is a slow way to cover the lake but you will not miss any bass this way. Either that or move to the next area that fits the pattern and start looking for the bass before casting your lure. This however may mean a lot of time without a lure in the water. I would suggest fan casting while you search, as this is one way to find bass too.

Some of the best fishing in the fall is done in the early afternoon or late morning. This gives those bass that are schooled up a chance to run into the shallows and start to feed. These bass don’t just feed they gorge themselves. They instinctively know what time of year it is and they are trying to put on as much fat reserve as possible so they can better survive the long winter coming up. Fishing the flats can be very rewarding with fast moving lures and top water lures. These bass are very active.

Now a lot of book heavy fishermen call this time the cold-water turn over. This means that the warm summer waters are being replaced by the cold waters of winter. Like spring it is a time of great of activity. The bass move around a lot more than usual and they feed the most at this time of year. A bass with a full stomach, two crawfish in his mouth will still attack a third crawfish. These bass are very active feeders at this time of year and they will take small baits and large ones. They will strike colors that they never would have at any other time of year. And you have better have 20 # test line on or better because these bass hit hard and they don’t let go easily. There are very few times you have you finesse fall turn over bass, but basically all you do is just throw the lure out as far as you can and reel it in with what ever retrieve it accords to your trial and error fine tuning tests in order to catch bass.

Now earlier I stated that the bass out in the lake suspended will be shallow as compared to the bottom. This is because they don’t like to move from one depth to another and when they do, they do it by one or two feet a day. So if a group of bass are going to swim into a small bay that is 8 feet deep, they will more than likely be found out in front of the bay in 20-30 feet of water and suspended in 5 to 9 feet of water. This way when the sun comes up and what green vegetation has improved the oxygen levels in the little bay the bass will start to move into it and start to look for food at one depth level. When done feeding they will return to the schooling area holding to that same depth. It is all extremely efficient and easy to understand. This is a great place to fish, it is usually a safe bet for finding schooled bass during this time of year. So in the end you have three places to fish. One- you can fish the schooling area, two- you can fish the flats after the sun has been up for a few hours and three- you can fish the points where the bass will feed at different levels. Remember too that each place will be fished differently and using different lures and baits.

Now a lot of anglers fish the creeks that feed the lakes at this time. The creek mouth represents a huge source of fresh oxygen rich, warmer water as compared to the lake water. The creek has an abundant supply of food in the form of worms, crawfish and freshwater bugs as opposed to the lake. Also too if the creek is large enough a great many baitfish will have moved up into the lower part of the creek and the bass will be right behind them. A creek is a much better place to over winter than a lake if a bass can find a piece of good overhead protection or water that is deep. This is a great place to use good search lures that don’t dive too deep like a floating minnow or small spinner baits. Small tubes and other plastics rigged as swim baits or rigged slit shot style are just the ticket here. It is also a great time for those who don’t own a boat or who like bank fishing. Now is the time they can really catch quality and quantities of bass.

Now out in the main lake body the places to look for scattered bass are the ends of points and other structure that bass followed as they migrated into the flats during the spring. They moved out of the deep into the shallows when the are making their way to the bedding grounds, during the spring and in the cold water turn over they will reverse this migration and move back using these routes, back into deep water in the fall. Therefore you have several choices as to where to look for the bass during this time. One of them will have the bass depending on the length of the daylight of the day and the temperature of the water. And speaking of the length of daylight, this has a direct correlation on where the bass will be found. The shorter the day the deeper the bass will be, no matter what the temperature of the lake.

So now you have four places to find bass to fish for. One- they are in schools out in open water suspended, two- they are in the flats and shallows actively feeding, three- they are on the points in deeper water already or four- they are in the creek mouth or up in the feeder creek in warmer water where they will over winter before returning in the spring.
The one common factor in all these places is that all these bass are actively feeding. This makes it easier to find and catch them. Search lures are the best lures to use at this time of year and basic colors are always in fashion. By this I mean crawfish red, shad, Tennessee shad, black, black/blue, black/silver, green, pumpkin seed, and motor oil red. The DT series of crank baits is a very important series of depth controlled crank baits to use and other long minnow baits like the Bomber Long A series of suspending crank baits are worth their weight in gold. Top water baits are not as effective at this time of year as is spring or summer but do a respectable job of catching bass none the same. A Spinner bait is a real tool of the trade at this time of year.

Now a bass’s tendency to be territorial goes out the window at this time of year. Since bass only school up by age groups when they are young and small it is uncommon to find them mixed together. In the fall it is common behavior to find all sizes of bass mixed together but I think the bass don’t care for it. And even then bass only hang together in age groups. These groups don’t mix even though they may be close to each other. It’s like high school. A freshman doesn’t hang out with a senior. It’s just an unwritten rule. Well the same thing applies to bass. Now we all know that a bass strikes a bait for one of four reasons: Anger, reflex, hunger and defense of territory. During this cold water turn over the need to feed over comes behavior such as being a loner or swimming with a different age groups. And since they feed well past the stage of being hungry, this overrides the four reasons to strike a bait. It is a drive to eat and eat until they can hardly swim every day until the water becomes so cold that they no longer can tolerate the shallows.

When that happens the bass sink down to the deepest parts of the lake or deep cover that they go to each winter and lower their metabolism to about 1/5th normal and patiently wait for a sushi meal to swim by. Depending on the depth of the lake they may be forced to winter over in 60 feet of water or just 15-feet of water under an old log out in the middle of the lake which is 19-feet deep at its lowest spot or it may stay in a creek channel that has been its year round home for the last 8 years. It has never left it’s home in all that time because it has everything the bass needs no matter the time of year.

When setting the hook on a bass it is vital that you use as much leverage as you do force. Leverage comes from reeling down on the bass and then using your whole body, swing the rod tip sideways across your body so as to move the tip as forcefully and as far as possible all in the least amount of time. This is leverage and power. One is no good without the other and you will never get a good hook set by using just one. The rod must come around your body in a sideways swinging motion with all the force you can add to it. This is the way to insure the bass is well hooked. While this holds true for all seasons it is especially true for fall fishing since the bass are more likely to take a bait and then spit it out in just a few seconds. You have to set the hook as fast as you can and with great force and leverage. Scent too plays an even bigger role in the fall too. If you want the biggest bass of the year out of a school of bass, your presentation must be perfect and it must not be contaminated with foreign smells.

Fall is the time of year for fast action and noisy lures. The same can be said for all other plastics. Top water lures work too but not well. For the most part they are not a great lure to use at this time of year but never count them out when it comes to catching bass. But rattles in almost every other type of lure is all but a must. Yes, there are a few exceptions but not many.

Anglers too seem to be out on the lakes more at this time of year. This is because they don’t fish in the winter and they are trying to bulk up on bass fishing to hold them over until spring and the pre-spawn starts the whole game over again. LOL

Fall fishing is a challenge and is not easy but if you look around and listen to what the bass say, you let them tell you where they are. All you have to do is come up with the perfect presentation using the right lure. Sound like you have a pretty easy job considering you only have 1000 lures and baits and know 12 different ways to present each. Why that is a mere 108,800 different casts in order to find the right lure and right presentation, assuming you use the rule of three when it comes to fast and slow retrieves. Why that sounds like it’s nothing at all (Laughing out loud). LOL Oh, I forgot, there are 166 different colors too so brings the total up to 18,660,000. It’s a snap.


bpmiddleton@peoplepc.com