I love it when the weather starts to cool in the early fall. The days get shorter, and the leaves begin to turn colors and fall to the ground. This signals to me that it’s time to get active, fish quickly and capitalize on feeding largemouth.
On my home waters, Kentucky Lake, the winter drawdown starts, and it can help position largemouth in predictable places. It’s happening right now, and I’m finding good quality largemouth are taking up residence on small, shallow spots with cover like a stump, a laydown log, a brushpile or even a crappie stakebed on it. The trick to the whole thing is having deeper water nearby.
The targets I’m fishing are in 1 to 2 feet of water in the back two-thirds of the creeks, but while I’m fishing that shallow, my boat is sitting in 4 to 6 feet of water. The other key is there must be an ample amount of bait for the fish to forage. These areas give bass the ability to ambush baitfish, but there’s also some verticality to escape when the water falls.
In my experience, the best way to capitalize on these situations is to move quickly and cover water. The bass are aggressively feeding up for winter, so moving quickly and making erratic retrieves is going to be the best way to draw the attention away from all of the natural forage in the water.
I rely on three baits during this time of the year. I have two different moving baits tied on, and I’ll have a jig ready to make precise casts should I need to. My first bait of choice is a 3/8-ounce Strike King Tungsten Thunder Cricket and Blade Minnow trailer in some sort of shad pattern. I really love the Blue Glimmer Flake Thunder Cricket matched with a Pearl or Glacier colored Blade Minnow depending on the water clarity. I burn this bait around the edges of the cover, reeling, pausing and restarting to create that erratic retrieve
The other moving bait is the Olive Shad colored KVD 1.5 squarebill crankbait. This has the perfect shad color, and it has the hunting action when you reel it quickly. It also allows you to crash into the wood cover and reel it through like a four-wheel-drive vehicle; that really triggers strikes.
I throw both of these on Lew’s Custom Lite rods and HyperMag reels and 17- to 20-pound-test Seaguar Invizx Fluorocarbon.
The final thing I have tied up is a 3/8-ounce black and blue Strike King Hack Attack Fluorocarbon Jig with a matching Rage Bug or Rage Craw. I pitch and flip this on a 7-foot, 6-inch Lew’s Signature Series Greg Hackney Flipping Stick and 7.3:1 HyperMag reel spooled with 20-pound-test Seaguar Invizx Fluorocarbon line. This gives me a follow-up bait for when a fish shows itself and misses the moving baits, and this lure also the ability to work through cover.
These three options give me ample opportunity to catch early fall bass on reservoirs when the weather cools.
