One problem with fall is tree-shed leaves.
We are still trying to repeat an October fishing experience of years ago when Chuck Edghill and I drifted a reservoir shoreline to find bass stacked up like cordwood. Hungry cordwood, if cordwood could be hungry.
Using deep diving lures to scour and scrape along the bank, we caught fish after fish in the few-pounds-or-larger range. We think that they were cruising the shallows for crayfish. We released several dozen lunkers by day’s end.
Fall is a great time for fishing. Cooling weather makes fish active, as they fatten up for winter. Most species are anxious to eat something, anything.
One problem with fall is tree-shed leaves. Grab a floating leaf on your line as you retrieve a lure, and it follows down the line to the lure to ruin that cast.
The answer is to fish a long rod and hold the tip below the surface. With the line from the rod tip to the diving lure underwater, there is no more surface leaf interference.
To fish surface lures with lots of floating leaves, use hollow baits such as those by Scum Frog, Snag Proof, Dean Rojas or the soft plastic Texas-rigged Stanley Ribbit.
You can scoot these weedless lures past floating leaves using a long rod (7-foot casting or spinning) to lever the rod to the right or left around leaves.
Fall trout fishermen can take advantage of surface leaves, since trout get used to fall leaves dancing along their visual ceiling. Often, the biggest trout are living under low overhanging branches or beneath undercut banks. Casts or approaches at other times of the year are impossible.
To get these trout, position directly upstream of the lie, and hook your streamer or nymph into the fragile edge of a leaf. Then float the leaf downstream, and to the trout lie. When positioned, twitch the line to jerk the fly free from the leaf. Solid hits are often the result.
When using casting or spinning gear, the quickest way to remove hooked leaves is to swing the rod in an arc to slap the lure a glancing blow on the surface and tear the leaf free. Just don’t slap hollow shallow-running minnow lures straight down on the surface. I’ve snapped them in half doing this.
Do not use snaps to attach lures. Tie the lure directly to the line. Snaps pick up more leaves than the line alone.
Bay anglers seeking breaking stripers under birds often encounter a reverse of the leaf problem. Breaking stripers can be found by spotting gulls and terns diving on bait, but a normal high overhead cast can result in a line-wrapped wing or hooked bird. To avoid this, make hard, low trajectory sidearm casts to get under screaming seagulls.
Keep a towel handy to throw over a bird to gently unhook it if one is caught. That same towel also works well to give you a better lip grip on stripers when unhooking a lure or fly. Another unhooking alternative is the Fishoff glove available at all tackle shops.
One tip for breaking stripers is to never motor into a breaking school. It can put them down. Instead, kill the engine up-tide or up-wind a cast length away. Then you can cast to the outer edge of the school while drifting into them.
Realize that surface plugs for breaking stripers must be retrieved rapidly through the chop to provoke hits. That’s why the best surface striper plugs sink — they stay in the chop rather than bouncing around like a bumble bee in a mayonnaise jar.
Often, breaking stripers and blues are so frantic that they miss a lure. For this, keep on reeling without skipping a beat or stopping the lure. That fish — or another — will find and hit the surface plug.
Single-hook lures are best for unhooking stripers and blues, the hooks changed at home using a large single hook with a heavy split ring.
While rapid retrieves are best for Bay stripers and blues, slow retrieves are best for fall bass. Their metabolism and movement starts to slow with oncoming winter, and a low gear ratio reel is better than the high speed models.
I learned that also on that October bass extravaganza. At one point, I switched to a high-gear fast-retrieve reel. Even with lure changes and other adjustments, I caught nothing until going back to the slow-gear reel and slower speed retrieves. You just gotta pay attention.
C. Boyd Pfeiffer is an internationally known sportsman and award-winning writer on fishing, hunting, and the outdoors. He can be reached at [email protected].
