Jeff Samsel

Learn the secrets of an approach that capitalizes on the crappie’s winter behavior and produces outstanding fishing this time of year.

Anglers often wonder how to catch crappie when the water gets cold and the fish start getting finicky. For Weiss Lake Guide Lee Pitts, that answer often comes in the form of the “float & fly” technique.

“Fly” in this technique’s name comes from the technique’s origin. Popularized as a winter bass tactic on clear mountain lakes in Kentucky and Tennessee, float-and-fly bass fishing is traditionally done with small hair jig, known regionally as a fly.

How to catch crappie with a float & fly essentially mirrors the bass anglers’ approach, except in types of areas fished, the even smaller size of the jig and the common use of soft plastics bodies on jigs. For Pitts, the perfect “fly” is a Bobby Garland Baby Shad or a 2-inch Slab Slayer on a 1/24-ounce Mo’ Glo Jighead and 6-pound-test line

Targeting late season walleye can be brutally cold, but the fishing can be red-hot, which is why knowledgeable anglers continue to troll for walleye even after fall has realistically given way to winter’s grip.

By Jeff Samsel

Ice locks in many northern lakes, and winter winds deem the biggest waters unfishable some days. When and where you can get out, though, late-season walleye fishing can be outstanding, with trolling for walleye with crankbaits often yielding the best results and the strongest prospects for trophy fish.

Paul Castellano of Cast Adventures guides on the Lower Niagara River and lakes Ontario and Erie for a variety of sportfish species. Late in the year, when conditions get right near the mouth of Lower Niagara, he spends a lot of time trolling for walleye and connects clients with large numbers of trophy fish.

We asked Castellano for tips on how to successfully troll for walleye with crankbaits late in the year and continuing through the winter. Some tips are season specific. Others are important year-round.

1. Pay Attention to Forage

You’ve heard it before, and not only about late-season walleye, but it is absolutely critical to this situation. Walleye generally aren’t relating to structure or cover this time of year. They suspend and follow food, primarily open water baitfish species.

Paying attention to forage becomes extra important when you’re talking about trolling a crankbait like a Bandit Walleye, a Smithwick Rogue or a Bomber Long A because these lures are designed to imitate baitfish.

The location and depths of schools of gizzard shad, alewives and shiners dictate not only where Castellano trolls, but also his trolling depth range and the sizes, shapes and colors of lures he fishes first.

2. Look for Current

Current is critical to Castellano’s late season strategy because the baitfish just mentioned relate heavily to moving water. Beyond drawing baitfish, current positions both the bait and the walleye predictably and prompts the walleye to feed more actively.

The Lower Niagara and areas that are close enough to the mouths of the Niagara, Welland Canal and various smaller Lake Ontario tributaries to be significantly affected by current become very important late in the year.

3. Consider Water Color

A change in water color in key areas signals the start of the best late-season walleye bite for Castellano and actually helps trigger the action. After heavy fall winds and resultant waves stir up Lake Erie – typically during late fall – the off colored water dumps into the Niagara and Welland Canal.

When the dark water finds its way to Lake Ontario, baitfish are drawn to the stained water, which is more readily warmed by the sun. The walleye move in for the buffet and feed more actively in the off-colored water, where they can ambush prey effectively.

Specifics vary by waterway, but anywhere wind, rainfall or current create stained areas adjacent to substantially clearer areas, the walleye tend to feed more actively in the stained water or along the edge than in the clear water.

4. Slow Trolling Speeds

Speed is a critical factor any time you troll for walleye with crankbaits, and Castellano’s approach to speed always involves experimentation, altering speeds on a regular basis and paying careful attention to his precise speed every time a fish bites. “Speed is huge,” Castellano said, “and even a slight change of speeds can make all the difference.”

While patterning the most productive speed is an ever-present consideration, the major difference late in the season is that the range of trolling speeds Castellano works within is slower. The baitfish are naturally slowed in the cool water and slower trolling speeds offer a more natural match for the behavior of the forage – along with lessening the need for walleye to chase. Castellano will troll as slowly as 1 mph this time of year and will mostly work within a 1.3 to 1.6 mph range.

5. Mix it Up

Because of quickly changing conditions from winter’s parade of cold fronts and due to the variety of baitfish species using areas, walleye can turn very picky late in the year, ignoring normally productive lures and devouring others. Castellano experiments with lures that offer a big range of shapes and swimming actions, as well as mixing up colors. He then pays careful attention to which lures get bit and continues to refine the pattern as the day progresses.

8 Great Crankbaits for Walleye Trolling

Bandit Walleye Deep

Smithwick Perfect 10 Rogue

Bomber 24A

Cotton Cordell Ripplin’ Red Fin

Bandit B-Rotan

Norman Deep Little N

Bomber 15A

Cotton Cordell Magnum Walleye Diver

Beyond experimenting with lures to find the right shape size and action, Castellano often varies leaders, especially after he has figured out the right lure. He runs braid on his reels and will go all braid for some lines and add a section of mono leader to others, having found this to slightly alter the running depth and action of the same lure. If the ones rigged one way start getting all the bites, that is important patterning information that can help him catch far more fish that day.

6. Standardize Rods & Reels

As much as Castellano advocates changing speeds, baits, colors and other details to pattern fish, he is equally adamant about keeping certain controls constant in order to best see what is making the difference. He wants the same action for all of his rods so he can see differences in how baits are moving and detect subtle strikes. He also uses all line counter reels that have been carefully calibrated because knowing exactly how far back each crankbait is running is critical to efficient patterning, which is the key to catching most fish.

7. Use Scent Sense

Castellano is a major advocate of adding gel or spray-on scent to crankbaits, and he considers this extra important through winter when cold fronts can make fish more tentative.

The scent serves a two-fold purpose for Castellano, with the most obvious being an attractant to make a crankbait seem more like food.

The second purpose, which he considers equally important, is to cover any negative unnatural scent that might be on his hands. While the walleyes don’t seem to be line shy during winter, which is something many people worry about, Castellano has found the smell of gasoline, sunscreen or a host of other impurities on the hands of someone who is handling crankbaits to have a major negative impact on fishing success.

8. Handle With Care

Fish handling might not affect today’s fishing, but it affects things in the big picture when you’re catching big fish that are potentially important spawners.

“Late-season fish are very heavy because they’ve been gorging on so many baitfish,” Castellano said. “When they are held vertically, they can’t always support the weight of their bodies and it can cause dangerous tearing around the gills.”

Castellano said that walleye always need to be supported horizontally when they are being unhooked and for photos. He suggests measuring fish instead of weighing them, believing that offers a better gauge of quality anyway. If fish are to be weighed, he suggests using a scale with some type of cradle.

Ready to Go?

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Learn how to catch crappie during fall, when cooling water triggers excellent fishing action, and enjoy some of the best crappie fishing of the year.

“They’re under there – all the way back,” Terry Blankenship said with a smile as he watched his electronics. “I should be able to reach them through that hole.”

Blankenship, veteran Lake of the Ozarks crappie guide who reaches fish that are way under docks by “shooting” crappie jigs bow-and-arrow style under the docks and through gaps in the dock structure or between docks and boats, was pointing at a gap between floating sections that might have been the size of a dollar bill.

With the confidence of an NBA player draining a free throw, he knelt, drew, aimed and fired. The bait shot through the hole at the perfect angle to hit the water well under the dock before skipping all the way to the back. Almost immediately, Blankenship’s fluorescent line jumped and he set the hook with a quick downward snap. Soon after he was swinging a 1-1/2-pound crappie into the boat.

Shoot Docks

Blankenship uses many crappie fishing techniques, but shooting is his specialty, and fall is prime time for this innovative tactic. Crappie congregate under docks during fall, and the shooting technique allows you to put a jig in front of fish that cannot be reached any other way.

Big crappie relate heavily to shad during fall, and they feed well as the water gradually cools. The crappie don’t like fighting current in cool water, so Blankenship focuses fall efforts on docks in coves and creeks arms, as opposed to the main lake.

It takes a bit of practice to get the timing and aim right and know the amount of line to have out, but the basic shot isn’t really that hard. With a spinning reel bail flipped but your finger holding the line, pinch the bend of the hook (not the head or you might get jabbed!) and pull back to put a strong load in the rod. Aim and release the hook just before the line so the jig shoots forward.

Feeling a bit like I’d been placed in a jigsaw puzzle scene, I took a moment to take in the Crayola-bright treetops and their reflection the next pool upstream. Of course, I wasn’t just leaf-peeping. I needed to study that same pool and the shallow run it gave way to in order to strategize casts and a stealthy approach.

While brown trout do become a bit less wary at times during fall, they are still brown trout. Cautious and easily spooked. Because browns sometime abandon their deep dark lairs during fall, I decided to cast to the lower end of the pool and swim my lure through the shallow tail-out before I walked through it. That turned out to be the right choice, as the cast resulted in a modest-sized but spectacularly marked brown trout that hit in a nothing-looking, shallow spot.

Autumn delivers magical days on brown trout streams.

October can be an outstanding fishing month, with fish of many kinds keying on baitfish congregations and instinctively feeding heavily in preparation for leaner times. Some species school during October, and topwater fishing commonly delivers major excitement.

That said, October has its challenges, with the largest one probably being the fact that conditions change dramatically during the month and sometimes from day to day. Many predator and prey species are in transition, working toward winter locations, so the location of the gamefish tends to be a moving target. As significantly, the fish’s locations and behavior can shift dramatically from day to day or even within a day when an early cold front crashes through.

Change isn’t bad. You simply must understand that change is likely and must set strategies accordingly.

Because the fish are on the move, often following forage, it’s typically prudent to spend time searching before you start fishing. Look for baitfish schools, both visually on the surface and with electronics. Whether you’re talking about shad or herring in reservoirs or mullet or bunker in bays or the ocean, if you find a bunch of bait, that is a major step toward finding the fish you want to catch. Pay attention to specific areas and characteristics of areas where you find the most baitfish.

Also think about transition zones. Because water color, water temperature and barometric pressure change quickly and frequently during October, fish make heavy use of structures like points and reefs that connect deep and shallow habitat, especially structures they can readily move up and down when conditions change. In the brine, passes that connect inside waters with the ocean are important October transition zones.

Any time you can tie on a lure in the morning and fish it confidently all day, that’s a good thing. Make that a topwater lure that prompts violent attacks, and a good thing becomes a great thing!

Welcome to autumn.

Moderating water temperatures, an instinctive drive to “feed up” before winter and shallow congregations of shad and other forage species make bass active and prompt them to look high in the water column this time of year. Surface lures get their attention and prompt strikes all day long.

Bad to the Bone

“Bone, of course.”

Even if the words, “of course,” aren’t stated, they are implied in the answer any time you ask a Bone enthusiast what color is producing.

Strikingly simple, highly visible and fabulous for suggesting the whitish flash of many forage fish species, the lure color “Bone” transcends being a good color in the minds of many anglers. For certain applications – like waking a Bomber Long A across a slick-calm surface – Bone is seen by many as the only color.

Beyond a Long A, other baits that Bone owns among certain anglers include several classic topwater lures. Heddon Spooks in various models, Rebel Jumpin’ Minnows, Cotton Cordell Pencil Poppers and Bomber Badonk-A-Donks all have core users who choose Bone over anything else because it offers great visibility from a below in a broad range of conditions and looks like dinner (and, most importantly, because it produces fish!)

Bandit Series 100, Series 200 and Series 300 crankbaits, Bandit Rack-Its and Bomber Long Shots are among the most popular sub-surface lures in Bone.

Two brand new Cotton Cordell Red-Fin colors, Pale Perch and Bone Appetit, are painted on a Bone base, providing Classic Bone visibility and appeal as a backdrop to natural color patterns.

Bone, although productive year ‘round, works extra well during autumn, when shad congregate and migrate shallow in reservoirs and saltwater baitfish of various kinds push close to beaches, opening frenzied fishing opportunities for everything from stripers to bluefish to tarpon.

How about you? In what situations, do you insist on Bone, and what species do you expect to catch?

See surface dimples, scattered splashes or water that appears dark in areas from hordes of baitfish swimming just beneath the surface? You could be close to tapping into excellent autumn fishing action.

Late in the summer, shad congregate in massive schools, and as summer begins giving way to autumn, those schools begin moving predictably into tributary arms of reservoirs and eventually onto shallow flats well up creek and river arms.

Not surprisingly, where thousands of shad gather, feeding bass are typically nearby. Although some fish will continue to relate to crawfish, bluegills or other forage and can be caught various ways, there is no more dependable way to find and catch bass this time of year than to locate shad schools and use lures that “match the hatch.”

Because the shad play such an important part during fall, it is prudent to spend time searching out the biggest baitfish concentrations before making a cast. A reservoir’s largest creek arms typically attract the biggest schools, which show up first near creek mouths and work their way back as the season progresses. Sometimes you need electronics to find the bait. Often, you will spot little rings on top when the shad roll or will see the shad themselves if they are high in the water column and the water is reasonably clear. Other times, bass pushing shad on the surface will give away the bait and the bass.

Better from the bank?

Many areas provide quality fishing access to anglers who don’t own boats. Often, though, these seem like bonuses, where shoreline anglers “also” can enjoy fine opportunities. The fall walleye night bite contrasts this notion. In many places bank fishing or is substantially better than boat fishing and provides outstanding big-fish opportunities.

On autumn nights walleyes push surprisingly shallow to feed. Moving tight to the shore in many lakes and onto bars at the heads of holes in river, they get in spots that would be difficult to work effectively from most boats and where navigation could be treacherous after hours. Anglers who work from the shore, or occasionally by shallow wading, but still on foot, can fish key zones very thoroughly.