News & Stories

September smallies provide good fishing!

By Mike Frisch

One of my favorite outdoor activities involves catch and release smallmouth bass fishing during fall.  Starting in September and continuing into later fall, these fish can provide some of the best fishing action of the entire season.

Fall smallmouth bass fishing can be a feast or famine deal as the fish often school very tightly now meaning staying on the move to find a school is paramount to success.  Rock humps adjacent to nearby deep water have been my most productive spots.  Add some weeds on the hump and the spot is usually even better. 

Finding productive spots often involves sonar searching.  The good news, however, is that a hump that holds fish will often be productive year in and year out.  Still, I always start my day motoring around a hump and looking for fish “marks” on my sonar, so I know precisely where the fish are.  

When fish are located, I break out the drop-shot rigs.  A drop shot rig has a hook tied into the line and then a drop-shot weight tied to the end of the line about 12 to 18 inches below the hook.  Small finesse plastic baits are the usual bait choices.  

A drop shot rig can be cast to likely fish-holding areas.  However, when the fish are deeper, as is often the case in clear water lakes, a more vertical approach often is more productive.   In this instance, it works to drop right down below the trolling motor and transducer and “sit” on fish marked on sonar below.   Shaking and quivering the bait on a semi-slack line is often too much for even a finicky fall smallmouth to ignore!   

Using a semi-slack line shakes the bait rather the sinker which can happen on a tight line. It may take a few minutes of shaking, quivering, and coaxing to get the first bite.  Once the school is “fired up,” however, several more fish can often be caught in short order!

A lively minnow-imitating bait is my “go to” for getting bites during fall, with the Baby Z-Too being my favorite.  This small soft jerkbait floats well and has a deadly “shimmy” that smallies can’t seem to resist!  The bait is also very durable, meaning you can often catch a fish, unhook, and drop right back down to catch another one without having to rebait.

The right bait choice is a key to success, but so is choosing the right rod, reel, and line as drop shot fishing is a finesse approach requiring good “feel.”  My rod preference is a Custom Lite drop-shot special rod designed precisely for this technique.  I pair it with a Custom Series reel loaded with 8-pound fluorocarbon line.  The rod is light and sensitive allowing me to feel the lightest of bites and the reel has a quality drag to protect light line when an angry smallmouth makes a hard run away from  the boat.   Fluorocarbon line like 8-pound test Tour Grade is my choice when drop shot fishing.  This line is strong and it’s nearly invisible so it won’t spook line-shy bass.

If you want to battle some strong, hard-fighting fish yet this season, consider smallmouth bass fishing this month.  Heading to a good smallmouth lake and utilizing some of the suggestions just offered may, in fact, lead to some of the season’s best fishing!  

As always, good luck on the water and remember to include a youngster in your next outdoors adventure. 

Mike Frisch hosts the popular Fishing the Midwest TV series.  Visit www.fishingthemidwest.com for more "fishy" stuff.

PHOTO – Mike Gottheardt and Mike Frisch with a couple fall smallmouth bass.

SIMPLER FISHING

by Bob Jensen

Different people go about their fishing in different ways.  Some anglers, when they catch a fish, like to try to figure out why that fish was where it was and why it was willing to eat that particular bait. They put a considerable amount of thought into their fishing, and that’s good if that helps them enjoy their fishing experience more.  Curious anglers often catch more fish, and they also often teach other people how to be more consistent fish-catchers.

 Other anglers just want to go fishing.  They’re not interested in figuring out why fish do what they do, they just want to catch some fish.  And there’s nothing wrong with that either.  However, if these folks were a little more interested in why they’re catching fish the way they’re catching them, they would probably catch more fish, but again, fishing is different things to different people.  

Sometimes a simple approach to fishing is the most productive.  I’ve been reminded of that many times over the years.  I often think back to fishing trips that were memorable not just for the catching, but also how we caught them.

I recall a couple of years ago when we were on a large lake that had a very healthy walleye population.  It was a lake like many lakes across walleye country.  The walleyes were on rock humps in depths from six to ten feet.  We employed a very simple rig.  After anchoring just upwind of the hump, we tied a hook to our line and crimped a medium sized splitshot onto the line above the hook about eighteen inches.  We added a leech, cast to the hump, and reeled back in slowly, giving the rig lots of stops along the way.  Every five or ten minutes we’d catch a nice walleye.  Pretty simple stuff.  We did add one twist to the rig.  The hook had to be a colored hook. Orange or chartreuse were the best colors.  Color is a very big factor in much of our fishing.

 There were other boats working similar humps close to us.  They were backtrolling and front trolling with crankbaits and spinners and all sorts of other rigs.  They didn’t appear to be catching much though.  That’s because their baits were out of the fish zone much of the time.  Our baits, due to our anchored position and slow presentation, were almost always in the fish zone.  When your bait is in the fish zone, your chances for getting bit go way up.  In this case, the walleyes wanted to get caught, they just didn’t want to work too hard to get caught.  If we let the leech wiggle on the walleye’s nose for a few seconds, the leech was eaten.  If it went by too fast, it didn’t get bit.

As in most of our fishing, we employed some technology on this trip.  We relied on our sonar to find the best spots and the best “spot on the spot”.  Without sonar, we wouldn’t have been nearly as successful.  In fact, we probably wouldn’t have found the spots that we fished.  The best spots were the smallest spots. 

Then again, there are times when, if you want to catch more and bigger fish, you’ll need more than a hook and a splitshot.  That’s the fun part of fishing:  You can make it whatever you want it to be.  Sometimes I like the simple stuff, sometimes I like the flashier stuff.  What I really like is whatever’s working on that particular day on that particular body of water.  The thing is, if you’re enjoying your time on the water, you’re fishing the right way.

PHOTO CAPTION----Mike Frisch with a big Midwest largemouth.  This guy ate a very simple jig/Ocho Worm combination.  Sometimes simple is best in fishing.