While lots of bass anglers look forward to spring, my favorite time to get out on the water is in the fall. It’s not that I don’t love fishing up to the spawn, but the early part of the year is so busy with shows, rigging and wrapping our boats and then the tournaments themselves that we don’t really have time to enjoy the process. Additionally, the lakes tend to be pretty crowded.
So yes, I have plenty of great springtime memories, but over the past five or six years most of my best times have been in the fall. Especially here in the South, when the water temperatures get down into the 60s, the fishing can be lights out.
There’s a great variety of bites going on here from October to December too – everything from bank runners to super-deep fish – so I’m always looking for new presentations to stay on top of things. There are several new Strike King baits that have me particularly excited.
The first is the Clickin Chicken. You may just think it’s another plopper-style bait, but there are some key differences that make it super effective. I remember when the ploppers first came out the fish had never seen them and went crazy, but over time they’ve become educated.
This one has some different sizes to distinguish it, but more importantly it has a very distinct knock. It’s a customized sound like we’re used to in a buzzbait and that can make a big difference. You don’t have to go crazy with colors – just find a shad pattern you like, get on a good looking bank and cover water. You’ll run into wolf packs of them, and it’s amazing when that bite gets going, especially because the average size of the fish will be big.
I use a 7-foot, 2-inch or 7-foot, 3-inch Lew’s Custom Lite rod in a medium action for maximum casting distance and control. I spool up a HyperMag (7.4:1) with 40-pound test Seaguar Smackdown braid. You need that high-speed reel because you’ll want to be moving the boat forward and burning the lure at the same time.
Shaking a minnow with forward-facing sonar isn’t my favorite way to fish, but I know that it’s necessary these days. The Strike King Spotlight Minnow is the best tool I’ve found for it. Out of the million or so minnows out there, it has just the right minimal action to convince finicky fish to bite, and with the Spike It Sonic Coat it shows up better on your screen, especially when used with a tungsten head.
There are two sizes: 3 inches and 5 inches. I like the bigger one around here, and if I need to drop back I’ll switch to the smaller size. As the fall progresses those bass will bunch up in tight schools in channel bends, and this lure makes it like taking candy from a baby.
Finally, everyone knows that I love to crank, but usually that means deep cranking. At this time of year one of the best ways to get on a bunch of fish is to go to the back of a major creek, find the channel and fish isolated wood with a shallow crank.
The Strike King Hardliner is perfect for that. Again, I like shad colors like Sexy Shad 2.0 or Green Gizzard Shad. This has the look and action of a traditional balsa lure, but it’s plastic, so you can make much longer casts. I like 12-pound test Seaguar InvizX.
The cranking deal is kind of a sneaky pattern because while it used to be popular and obvious, the heavy emphasis on forward-facing sonar has reduced the number of people doing it.
These three lures will allow you to cover a lot of water and a lot of different depth zones. In fact, I’d feel comfortable going out with not much else from October through December and being confident that I’d get bit. Yes, the springtime is great, but it’s a much more fickle bite as cold fronts can shut everything down. In the fall, however, those colder blasts just make ‘em bite better – so while everyone else is in a deer stand you’ll have key areas all to yourself.
