It May Be Deer Season, But Who Says You Can't Still Catch Fish?

One November, a deer hunter found himself with a week's vacation but nowhere to go. Seems his planned hunting trip had fallen through at the last minute, so now he was looking at the potential for having to sit home and just take care of some items on a long "honey do" list that he had put off all summer. Those thoughts, however, all took place before he ambled out to the garage and started puttering around.

While there, his Ranger bass boat kept catching his eye. He hadn't yet removed any of his rods or other tackle from it, nor had he winterized it yet. He accordingly couldn't help feeling drawn to the boat.

"It's too late in the year, though, to go bass fishing," he kept telling himself. "The air's too cold. The water's too cold. The fall bite was weeks ago."

As he rattled off these excuses not to go, each one sounded weaker than the one before. Actually, the forecast for the coming week was for perfect fall weather...bluebird skies, cool temperatures, and light winds.

"Why not take the boat out for one last hurrah before putting it away for the winter?" he thought. "I have the time, the weather's nice, the boat and gear are ready, and bass season still is open on my favorite lake. There's no reason not to go."

So right then and there, he decided to hit the water the next day for one last bass trip of the year.

The next morning was a bit bizarre. Having never fished this late in the year, it seemed more than a little odd, pulling the boat out of the garage with the thermometer hovering at 28 degrees F. When he got to the launch, it was just before 10 a.m., and there still was a skim coating of ice on the ramp.

"This is crazy," he thought. "Shouldn't I be sitting in the bush somewhere with my muzzleloader, looking for deer?"

An hour later, though, he couldn't have disagreed more with what he just had thought.

"I already had caught two nice largemouths (a 3-10 and a 4-14), plus a half-dozen smaller fish, and it only got better after that...so much so that I ended up fishing two more times that week," he said. "I have to admit," he continued, "that I never before had considered November as fall fishing. I now know that was a mistake.

"As it turns out, November bass fishing can be just as productive as September and early October if you take the time to learn how bass transition to their early winter haunts. And a fall bass outing doesn't mean you have to exclusively target those gangs of hungry smallies that are more synonymous with that time of year. Largemouth bass...big ones at that...are more than happy to eat your lures late in the fall if you present your baits where and how the fish like them. Best of all, bass fishing this time of year doesn't require the typical summer large arsenal of rods and tackle piled up on the front deck. Two or three rods and a handful of lures will do the trick."

The angler went on to note that "late fall largemouth fishing is all about keying in on specific areas and structure and then working them with simple, yet effective, techniques. Prime areas to target during this period are rock ledges, scattered weed edges, and isolated, deep offshore structure. The most important aspect of the first two is that they must offer quick access to deep water of 18 to 20 feet or better."

By early November, near-freezing overnight air temperatures have cooled a lake's surface considerably, and deeper water offers a slightly warmer refuge for bass. However, bluebird skies and a few hours of warm sun in the morning will draw bass up out of the depths and into the shallows, where they hunt among the scattered, decaying vegetation and rocks, gorging on sluggish, frigid baitfish.

"When water temperatures cool, and the weeds start breaking up in the fall, big smallmouth can be found roaming shallow water and will fall prey to wide-wobbling crankbaits worked slowly through the vegetation," he said. "By the time I got the boat in the water that Monday morning, the air temperature had warmed up to 40 degrees F or so, and the surface temperature on the graph read 47 degrees F. Not really knowing how or where to start the day, I picked up my crankbait and began covering water. By pure chance, I started casting along the closest weedline to the launch, in 10 to 12 feet of water, but near where the bottom dropped quickly to a depth of more than 25 feet.

"Being so late in the fall," he continued, "the weed edge wasn't nearly as well-defined as it was in the summer. Clumps of vegetation were scattered, but some still looked surprisingly lush and green. As I slowly put the pieces of the puzzle together, I realized this was also the key to catching numbers of good fish. Most of my hits came when I pulled my lure slowly through weeds that still were green. Late-fall bass, it seems, don't want to work too hard for a meal."

The retrieve that achieved the best results was cranking his bait hard a couple times right off, to drive it down to depth, then crawling it back to the boat as slowly as he could. When the lure contacted weeds, he just lifted the rod tip and twitched it through gently, instead of ripping it out as he would in the summer. More times than not, as the crankbait slipped through the clump, he'd feel a bass suck it in. A medium-action 6-foot, 6-inch crankbait rod with a soft tip and spooled with 12-pound-test fluorocarbon line was essential in feeling the difference between weeds and fish.

"As I noted before," he said, "the fishing was so good on Monday that I couldn't pass up a second (and third) trip that week, so the following Thursday, I coaxed a co-worker, TJ, out with me by promising big things. The bass didn't disappoint. That morning was even colder than the previous morning, but the sky was clear, and the sun felt good as it warmed both us and the upper layers of the lake...perfect conditions to intercept hungry bass as they invaded the shallower water, looking for an easy meal.

"We began on the same weedbed I had fished on Monday, and I started catching bass right away on a crankbait with a slow, wide wobble. TJ likes to throw a spinnerbait, so out of habit, that's what he started with that morning. But after nearly a half-hour without a bite, he switched over to a medium-diving crankbait, and it didn't take him long to connect with his first 3-pounder of the day.

"We finished working another long weed edge adjacent to a steep dropoff and caught a half-dozen good bass each. A light breeze had slowly pushed us off the weed edge, but by another stroke of luck, we discovered a second late-fall bass pattern for the week: a small hump in deep water.

"Looking down at the Lowrance, I saw that we had drifted into 22 feet of water and were marking a small hump with several arcs around it. I pointed this out to TJ, and it didn't take him long to drop his crankbait rod and pick up another, rigged with a plain jighead and Berkley Gulp straight-tail worm. He let the bait spiral to the bottom right next to the small piece of structure. Immediately, his line jumped, and he set the hook on what turned out to be a feisty 3-and-one-half-pound smallmouth. When I saw that, I frantically began digging through my boxes and came up with a 3/4-ounce silver Hopkins jigging spoon. I tied it on, dropped it down onto the hump, lifted, dropped, lifted, dropped, and WHAM! I had a hit that felt like a freight train. I landed a good smallmouth, just slightly smaller than TJ's."

Realizing they had stumbled upon a little gold mine, they spent the next several hours wandering around the general area, looking for similar pieces of structure in the deeper water. Every time they found one, they would catch fish...and not just smallmouth. Several nice largemouth came out of 20 feet of water or more.

Similar to summer patterns, bass don't require very large pieces of structure to congregate around them in the fall. Summer bass anglers will flip and pitch to the smallest stick or branch that's in the water, because they often will hold a decent-sized bass or two...so, too, with offshore spots. The important thing to remember is that these pieces of structure usually are the only oddity on an otherwise featureless piece of the lake bottom. They will hold fish...and usually more than one.

High-quality color sonar units are a must to find and fish such structure, and GPS/sonar combos will make it that much easier for you to stay on the structure as you work it. Don't be surprised if you end up spending more time looking at the graph and moving around with the trolling motor, trying to find them again than actually fishing them.

One of the great things about late-fall bass fishing is that there's no need to get an early start. Hitting the water at 6 or 7 a.m. for the early-morning bite is unnecessary and can be rather painful in the freezing dawn temperatures. So sleep in and wait until the sun's well up, and the surface-water temperature has inched upward a few degrees. With water temperature hovering in the 40s, bass need a couple extra hours to warm up and begin to feed. On the water by 10 a.m., off by 3 p.m. is a typical day...and often results in some of the most productive trips of the year.

A lesson to be learned here is that it can pay great dividends to delay the start of deer season and opt instead for a prolonged late-fall bass fishing season...with potentially outstanding results.