In the valley just before dawn the town lights glitter in indigo shadow while the sky begins to fire from the rising sun. I like to leave the house then, though I know the settled clouds of autumn still shroud the lakes and rivers where I’ll fish. It is a good time to be alone or with a close friend. It also is time for the last smallmouth bass hunt of the year.
The very early morning is not best for autumn smallmouths, but I like to be near the water then, readying a boat or canoe, watching the swirling mists, listening to how the wet leaves muffle my usually hollow footsteps on the path to the river.
Autumn. The heaviness of summer lifts and rivers come alive once more. Smallmouths quit their sulking by day and move near the edges of sweeping foam where fast currents slow. In lakes the fish swim over rocky points and cruise near shore once more. It is their last chance for putting on fat to carry them through the lean winter season. The fish you catch now will be beautiful things, thick, hard, all muscle. On the water you will find a quiet that you never knew in summer.
Smallmouths are simple homebodies, really. Though you may have found them difficult to catch just a month or two ago, they were there. Likely they were in the deeper water, sulking on the bottom until night or a freshening rain brought them in to feed. Now that they are on the move again, it does not matter if you choose to fish with bait, hard lures or flies. If you do it right, if you work the proper places, and understand how the cooling water affects these fish, you will catch them.
Fishing Lakes vs Rivers
In lakes there are two phases of fall smallmouth fishing, in rivers only one. The autumn smallmouth river season is a fleeting thing, but while it lasts it can build a winter’s worth of fireside dreaming. Before the rains begin, I like to go down to the big bends of rivers, past the nearly dry runs that held the fish in spring. Here the current still sweeps past the gray boulders, and in the smooth current, just beyond the riffly water, I find my fish. This is the time for standing on midstream bars and casting to the outside bends where the water sweeps.
Moving steadily downstream, I give the summer holes at tributary mouths only a short time now. The better fishing usually is along ledges that shelve into deeper water. When rains raise the river I fish the finger channels. Here, increased flows sweep food to the river bass. At this time of year, if the fish do not soon take your offering they are somewhere else and your job is to find them. When you catch one there should be more in the same kind of water.
One day I rounded a bend to find a man building a deer stand and dreaming a little, just in from the water’s edge. He asked what I was fishing, and I showed him the deer hair streamer with the peacock herl body. He shook his head. The streamer floated lightly down the long run. I ducked it under where some downed tree sweepers reached a crescent of rocks. The bass took just then and nicely moved away from the snags to leap in the late afternoon sun.
The stranger stopped his hammering to watch. He watched two more fish after that, and when I gave him another look just before I left, he was rubbing his head and grinning. “I quit too soon,” he yelled.
I nodded once and hurried on. The sun had gone, and big purple clouds were building out past the river mouth over the lake. If a storm was coming, so was the fastest fishing. I had only a few days of this, I knew, before colder days would cut off feeding in the river. In lakes it’s different.
I begin a regular check of springtime smallmouth haunts after the cool nights of early autumn have begun lowering the surface temperature of my lake. At first there is nothing. Then one day I’ll find them. Both big and small fish will have moved to places where I catch them early in the year, and they’ll feed by day. I will tell the few friends I know who care, and we will be on the lake in the morning mist, waiting for the sun to burn things clear. We’ll find our smallmouths on the shoals just offshore and on the hidden rocks that make the underwater points of islands. The fish will be on the rocky humps close to shore, and sometimes they’ll be in places you would not believe.
Overlooked Haunts
The weeds near shore were dying from the cold. They were brown on top where they floated at the surface. There was a clear channel and then another bank of weeds, this one just offshore, slightly deeper, and not yet affected by the cold. I moved my boat between these two weed lines one day, firing out a small, white, silver-bladed spinnerbait, hoping to coax some of the big chain pickerel I often caught here because the smallmouths had not yet started eating well near my favorite rocky islands.
The poplars had gone to yellow along the lake’s edge, and ribbons of woodstove smoke eeled from chimneys, flattened out, then were whisked away by the slight breeze at higher elevation. It was a mild, hazy early fall day, the kind on which working indoors is a tragedy. The two pickerel I had caught and released came from the channel’s green weed side. I was moving from a little tributary, working my way along the channel toward a rounded point of land that gave onto the more open lake. The hit was strong, and when I responded I knew the fish was far more solid than what I had had before.
Six-pound line pulled out against the creaking drag in two short, hard spurts. Then the fish came up to show me what I had. “Smallmouth,” I laughed aloud. After unhooking him I jaw-held the fish at the side of the boat, felt him shake his body to be free and then released him. Only then did it hit me. If the fish had been a largemouth bass I would not have been at all surprised, but here was a smallie in the wrong kind of cover, a place that belonged to bigmouths and pickerel.
The catch proved to be no accident. Since then I’ve taken many fall smallmouths from such places and also at isolated spots of cover near shore, places where old stumps thrust their gnarled roots through the water. These spots are especially good when you find them near channels or deeper open water. They hold individual straggler bass and seem to be best just before the main groups of smallmouths turn on at the offshore rocky places.
Early autumn is a transitional period. Many lake smallmouths will be in the shallow areas I’ve already mentioned, but some will be slightly deeper. Each day it’s a new hunt, in a way like exploring the different bird covers you know, finding the grouse or woodcock here one day, somewhere else the next. If you know your lake the way you should, you’ll simply try both shallow and deeper areas until you find the fish. The bass seem to feed most actively during warm or mild days that come during the middle of a definite cooling spell. These warm days can be extremely productive even when sunny. This comes as a surprise to anyone who knows the smallmouth as a somber fish that seeks shadow and eats well on overcast days or during a light rain. At first I thought it was crazy. No more.
Really, the fish are not so different from us. In the height of summer we can take just so much basking in the sun. When the days grow short and the weather cools, what a wonderful thing it is to feel the warmth of a less-strong sun on our shoulders.
I went underwater with scuba gear to see if the smallmouths were in the open or holding in the shadows of the rocks the way they do in shallow water in summer. I found only a few loners. Most fish were in small schools, swimming freely, slowly, in the open, near rocky shores and rubble slopes. The fish were in the open even in lakes with clear water. They swam or rested in the broken rays of sun. I found one large lone fish resting on the bottom in the open sun, its only form of cover a single, thin tree branch which provided no protection whatsoever except, I suppose, psychologically. I went above water again where I belonged and went fishing, but not without having noticed one thing more.
What Smallmouth Eat in Autumn
The small forage fish that springtime small mouths often eat were nowhere to be seen. Not that they weren’t still around. I knew schools of little smelt were farther offshore, being ravaged by rainbow trout and landlocked salmon. The point is that smallmouths do not roam to hunt as salmonids do. What do smallmouths eat in autumn? The answer is easy. Crayfish.
If there is one secret to getting autumn smallmouths to eat, it is crayfish. Bass eat minnows, even worms, but these baits are far more effective in the spring. Crayfish are effective in spring, too. And summer. Crayfish generally inhabit the home territory of smallmouth bass all year, moving shallow or deep with the seasons as the bass do. If you need more, listen to this. A recent study shows that when crayfish are available, smallmouths eat them seven times more than any other food item.
Further, a smallmouth will eat a natural crayfish or crayfish imitation even if the crustaceans normally are not readily available. Just show one to a bass. He’ll know what to do with it.
I use crayfish. I use a deer hair-squirrel hair crayfish fly when I’m flyfishing, but a muddler will do nicely, too. With casting or spinning equipment I sometimes use a small crayfish crankbait, but more often these days I’ll work a plastic crayfish on a leadhead jig. I’ve had my best luck with the green crayfish made by Burke. I hear good things about the Breathing Crawfish made by Action Lures, but as yet have not used one. There’s one exception to my nearly monomaniac obsession with crayfish.
Read Next: Best Smallmouth Bass Lures
During early fall when the fish are in the shallows they’II hit another bait that you normally think of for spring fishing. It’s a fly rod popping bug. Don’t limit your use of this lure to sheltered areas. Some of the best autumn popper fishing is in the wind, wind so brisk that you must work to cast the little bug. The trick is to fish the popper parallel to the wind-swept shore. If there is just a little wind, little enough so you can cast right into it, you can do well with a popper right from the bank. Don’t fail to try those areas that look as though they’d be best for largemouths. Try the poppers in rivers, too. In autumn, smallmouths will hit popping bugs on windy sunny days as well as in warm, misty weather. To me, a haze, a soft rain means autumn smallmouth fishing more than any other weather, no matter what bait I use. There’s excitement on the water in weather like this. An easy, steady wind and a small chop on the gray-green lake make it perfect. The trees along shore reflect the richness of their colors into quiet places sheltered from the wind. There’s the hollow-solid sound of ax on wood, and if you are far enough north, the mad laugh of a loon. Finally a gentle misty rain will start to fall, driving you deeper into the protection of your slicker.
Smallmouth Island
On days like this you’ll find me at a place just off an island on a lake I like a lot. There are boulders down there, some rocky rubble and some water-preserved saw logs that escaped from the old mill that burned away down the lake nearly 100 years ago. There are places like that in a lot of lakes all over smallmouth country. Dry in your slicker in the rain with the smell of wood smoke in the air and the urgency of the season a nearly palpable presence now, what you want to do with no motor running is cast out a little crayfish imitation and just let it sink.
Gather in the little coily slack that tells you the lure is down as far as it is going to go, point your rod tip like a sorcerer’s wand horizontally over the lapping water, then lift quickly yet still gently so the plastic bait will hop once. That’s all. Do it again, and yet again until that barely felt contact with the bottom disappears in a momentary emptiness that means just one thing. With no need to think about it you will come back and up with your miraclematerial rod, precision-engineered reel in a swift, totally physical response that stops in moving solidity. Watch the line now, thin and slicing like a knife through the greenish gray water, then rising to the place where the fish will come up. Come up he will, like a cat touched by a cattle prod, all brownish bronze as wet and shiny as the outside of your raingear, the dark vertical bars visible if he is very close.
When he has finished his grand leaping, fight him in quickly, for on a day like this there will be others waiting below. All of them will eat your little crayfish imitation, grinding it, tearing it to uselessness. Don’t miss many days of the early fall season, for all too soon it will stop. Like that.
Yet unlike rivers, when the first big cutoff occurs in lakes there is more to come.
Phase Two
It happened like that with friend Rick Bemus. We’d fished hard, very hard, all morning for no fish. On days like this when the bass aren’t coming, I like to break to go ashore and boil water for tea, good strong black tea in my ancient dinged and sooty pot. At heart I’m a terrible romantic, and the open fire tea reminds me of shore lunch time in the far north in spring or summer. It also gives me time to think.
“Obviously they must have gone down,” Bemus said, staring at the fire. “We didn’t check the temperature.”
“Should have,” I agreed. “I keep forgetting how fast things change now. Four days ago we were catching them like crazy, right here.”
We drank the tea, smoked a pipe, killed the fire and went on out again. The thermometer said the water was in the low 50s.
“That’s it,” I said. “It was 60 when I fished last. Phase two, here we go.
Phase two of autumn smallmouth fishing starts when the water temperature drops to the mid or low 50s. Fish that were along the inshore structures. move out. The bass schools become larger than they were in early autumn. The smallmouths are not as active now but your chances are good for collecting a good size bass simply because of the number of fish present. The bass go to deep places where gravel or other rocky bottom gives way to soft strata.
You can tell the difference in the signal on a good depth sounder. If they are not at the junctions of two different bottom types, the smallmouths can be found on steep offshore drops or gravel-topped humps that you may call underwater islands. In my lake that’s in water 25 to 35 feet deep. If you know where these places are you can anchor and work your jig. If not, troll slowly on everdeepening contours until you make fish contact. If you can get natural crayfish, now’s the time to use them hooked to a leadhead or a weedless bait-holder hook. A minnow is second best. The way to make this rig is with a coneshaped worm slip sinker. Thread on the sinker, then tie in a barrel swivel behind it. Follow with 26 inches of mono to which you tie your hook. Bounce this rig in a slow troll very close to your boat. If your fish hit aggressively, don’t wait to stick them. A slow moveoff means you’re snagged or the fish needs a little time before you strike. If that happens, slip your motor into neutral and watch what the line is doing. If it moves, you should know what to do.
That time with my friend Bemus, we found the phase two fish where they should have been. They were in 28 feet of water, holding on a rocky drop due west of the island I usually fish. There was the drop, some scattered rock at the base of it, and then a sandy bottom away from the break. There were no smallies over the sand. During late autumn dives I consistently found the smallmouths on steep drops. I checked some good-looking timber in the same depth range, but no smallmouths were using it, even when a series of blowndown trees reached far into the deeper water. The places just weren’t steep enough to suit the bass now.
Late last fall my youngest son, Jon, and I took my red canoe and went up a little lake to the place where the smallmouth river we usually fish empties in. I figured that if the big lake bass were dropping deep, the river bass must be doing the same. We went to the deepest hole on the river that I knew, the mouth. There was a shallow delta where the river came in, and just above it was the deep pool. It was like Christmas. We caught and released an embarrassing number of hard-sided bass using the plastic crayfish and the crayfish fly. They were river fish, not huge but wonderfully tough. Then something much bigger ate my bait. He rushed straight away without jumping, then came right back at us. I saw his big, black, thick-shouldered shape going down under the canoe in the clear water. Surely it was a lake fish that had bellied over the shallow silt of the delta and holed up in the big pool.
Lord, he was big. I properly dipped my rod into the water and thought, no problem now. Just swing the rod behind the stern and finish it off in fine style. There wasn’t even one snag there. I don’t know what happened but he came unglued. I couldn’t believe it. Then some ducks whistled overhead, winging toward the marshy shallows down the lake. The first shotguns went off when the birds dropped in.
I saw the flare of wings and silvery splash where one bird hit the water. It was a good blind. We hadn’t noticed it on the way out. In a little while a highflying flock of Canada geese passed overhead, barking. Well, all right. We’d had our fun. We paddled swiftly down the still water and packed it in. For three days after that the weather stayed leaden. The wind curled the wave tops white on the bigger lakes. On the fourth day the sun came out.
I took my dog down to the shore and looked out. The water temperature had been just 52 before the front moved in. Out there it was probably in the high 40s now. Below 50, the smallmouth fishing is too slow for me. If you worked at it you might get a few. I have friends who catch them after the ice has been on the lake awhile, but it’s not my favorite thing.
The dog looked impatient. I knew she was waiting for me to put the tackle away and get going. The bird season wasn’t all that long. But the clouds had blown away and the weak sun was trying hard to warm the water just a little more. I looked to the islands and wondered. Maybe I could give it just one more try.
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