While you may have caught a boatload of smallies in the shade of boat docks and in shallow weed beds during the regular season, fall smallmouth are an entirely different animal. Unlike in the summer when smallmouth congregate around shallow structure waiting for food to happen by, in the fall they go in search of it. The bass move from their shallow summer locations out into open water areas. They’ll push into this deeper water, anywhere from 10 to 20 feet deep, gathering and hunting around sharp drop-offs, deep rockpiles, and off the points of islands.
Smallmouth move to these spots in search of baitfish such as shad and cisco, which by the end of summer have congregated into large schools around these areas in search of their own pre-winter feed. Finding these points of structure and these baitfish schools is absolutely vital. The bass will only be hunting and feeding in the areas where the baitfish have gathered, which leaves a lot of dead water in between.
The best way to find the structure and the baitfish schools is with electronics. Fish finders will show structure on the bottom and give clues as to what fish are present. Some fancier models will even pick up the gathered schools of baitfish and the smallmouth themselves. However, if you don’t have a boat with sonar, then the best way to find the bass is by using a bathymetric map. These maps show the underwater topographical structure and depth of lakes and reservoirs. They can be found online or through your local fish and wildlife department.
Additionally, thanks to the wonders of technology, bathymetry can also be attained through a mobile app such as Humminbird’s FishSmart or Navionics, or downloaded onto a simple GPS unit. Search the maps for shallow points of structure in the middle of the lake as well as long flats of shallow water that extend out to dramatic drop-offs. These are your points of attack. They’re places where baitfish will gather, with the smallmouth not too far behind.
How you fish for fall smallmouth depends entirely on what they’re doing when you find them. Their habit of constantly roving in search of prey means that you’ll end up catching fish in different areas of the lake and at different depths almost daily. Ergo, the key to success in fall smallmouth fishing is flexibility and being able to capitalize on feeding fish wherever you find them.
One of the easiest and most productive ways to catch fall smallmouth is to target them when they’re feeding on baitfish near the surface. This usually occurs on bright, sunny fall days when the schools of baitfish are drawn to the top of the water column to feed on phytoplankton. Start by traveling around the lake slowly looking for the feeding baitfish. Sometimes they will appear as small, raindrop-like, ripples on top of the water. Other times they will look more frantic, with small splashy rises and tiny silver flashes appearing just beneath the water’s surface.
Once you find a pod of baitfish, approach within casting distance and start casting small spinners or jerkbaits into the fringes of the school and retrieving them back to the boat at a leisurely pace. Smallmouth feeding on the baitfish will absolutely smash the lures, believing that they are panicking baitfish trying to escape.
When the bass are down feeding in deeper water, they can be a bit more challenging. You may have to travel to several different likely spots and do a bit of prospecting before you find the fish. This is where crankbaits come into play. Start casting the lures along the edges of drop-offs, across deep flats, sunken rockpiles, and off the points of islands. Fish methodically, retrieving your baits at different depths and at different speeds until you get a strike.
Once a bass or two bites, keep fishing around the general area until you’ve pinpointed exactly where the fish are holding and feeding. Then position your boat over the top of the smallmouth and switch up to either a heavy jig or a drop-shot soft-plastic rig and sink it down right on top of their heads. Let the lure hit the bottom and then begin jigging and twitching it with the rod tip. Bounce and thrash the lure along the bottom where it can stir up sand, clack against rocks, and basically cause enough commotion to trigger a hungry smallmouth to shoot over and inhale it. You’ll stack them up like cordwood.
One of the best things about catching smallmouth in the fall is the size of the fish. During the fall, those gigantic smallmouth that are so reclusive during the summer seem to come out of their hiding places and feed with reckless abandon. This makes fall a true trophy season, a time of year to catch that big slab of a smallie you’ve always dreamed about yet never been able to find. So, as the bright days of summer begin to shorten and the end of smallmouth season seems to have arrived, keep your bass stuff on hand. The pursuit of a giant smallmouth is a worthy obsession—one you should stay after until the bitter, frosty end.
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