Schooling fish in the early Fall can be a huge kick in the pants to most anglers because of their tendency to turn their noses up to any and all baits you toss out.
This can all change with the help of a little old springtime hero known as the soft plastic jerk bait! My favorite is the YUM Houdini Shad, and we will go into greater detail about why further in the blog.
Why guess at the best lures to use when you can call on the expertise of one of the world’s most accomplished bass anglers?
Early fall bass fishing presents challenges. The fish stay on the move and can be in many different types of areas. With changing conditions, they also can be a bit moody. That said, if you understand seasonal bass behavior and use lures and approaches that capitalize on that knowledge, fishing can be very good this time of year. With that in mind, we talked with Jason Christie and got his picks for the 10 best lures for early fall bass fishing.
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.
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.
