By: David Chong

Global warming has a prominent influence on fishing over the years. It seems that late summer extends well into September. We sometimes don’t like to think about how quickly the years are passing. It seemed like it was just yesterday that my brother Gord and I made a “fall” fishing trip up to Elephant and Baptiste Lakes in the Haliburtons. It was the third week in September and every morning we woke up to frost and chilly cold temperatures. We also fished a couple of days in driving snow which is not a whole lot of fun out in a boat. Of course luckily the fishing was dynamite and made up for the tough weather conditions. Winter clothing was definitely the wardrobe of choice that week. Now when I think hard about it, it was actually more like 18-20 years ago. Man, how time has flown and how things have changed!

Where do you find these fish in your lake? Number one, locate for the freshest green weeds on your lake. My preference is milfoil or coontail. If there is some cabbage-weed mixed in as well even better. This could occur in depths of two to twenty plus feet of water. How far these weeds extend out into the lake will depend on the clarity of the water. The second and most critical factor especially in the shallows is rock! Rock tends to hold heat longer and when mixed in with some lush green weeds, is an absolute magnet for Mr. Bucket. This is where I like to target those fall Largies! Two to six feet of water with rock/rock piles dispersed thorough-out the weed bed or weed-line. The third factor when dealing with these rock-weed areas is the availability of access to deeper water. Often this rock and weed mixture is found on the inside weedline as well. If you have areas in your lake like I’ve described above. then you have potential for some stellar fall Largemouth fishing. Quality polarized glasses are vital to this type of fishing. They allow you to see the weed pockets and edges more clearly, enabling you to target the key spots. Once you find a weedbed like this, every bare patch in the weeds is most likely a rock or rock pile. That’s where you want to put your first pitch. That’s the high percentage fish holding area.

Heavy duty equipment is required to fish these areas properly. This is no place for ultra-light spinning rods. I prefer a medium-heavy to heavy action pitching/flipping stick in the 6’10” to 7’6” length. I like to combo up these rods with high-speed retrieve bait-casters with at least a 6.3:1 retrieve ratio. A 7.1:1 ultra high-speed retrieve is even better. My personal pitching combo is a 7’1” heavy action Team Daiwa Steez rod geared up with a Team Daiwa Fuego reel. For flipping and dunking, I use a Team Daiwa Light & Tough 7’6” Flipping Stick combined with a Team Daiwa Zillion 7.1:1 retrieve ratio reel which picks up an incredible 31.6” of line with each turn of the handle! These outfits are spooled up with 50 lbs. test SpiderWire Ultracast braided line. Braided line with it’s no stretch quality makes it extremely sensitive in order to detect those subtle light bites. It also aids in getting a solid hook set and is able to move those large fish away from the weeds before they wrap you up. The other factor that we have to contend with these days is zebra mussels. If there are rocks in the area then chances are pretty good that there are zebra mussels on them. If you hook up with a large Bucket around those rocks, braided line will help you prevent it from brushing up against any zebra-covered rocks. The edges of zebra mussel shells are razor sharp and will slice through the toughest line!

My second choice if the jig is performing up to expectations is a Berkley 10” Power Worm. As with my jigs, I lean towards dark colours, black being my #1 choice. Other colours that I will use are black/blue, red shad and black/chartreuse. I use a 5/0 wide gap offset worm hook and a 3/8 ounce screw on tungsten worm weight with this rig. The tungsten weight makes a huge difference in your feel. It is much harder and denser than lead. This allows you to have a weight that is physically smaller so it can penetrate the weeds better. Because it is harder it transits the feel of bottom back to you much better. You should be able to feel the rock amongst the weeds as you retrieve the tungsten weight through them. There will be times when the fish are not that aggressive and due to the size of the worm you should wait just a split second just before hauling back with that hookset. I prefer to dunk the pockets with this rig on my Flipping Stick. The extra length on the Flipping Stick will allow you to drop that bait very stealthily into those pockets.

These are my one-two punch when targeting big O’Buckets in the fall. If these presentations happen to fail, in desperation I will turn to a Flipping Tube in particular a 5.5” Mizmo Grandes Flipping Tube. I Texas-rig the tube with a 1/2 ounce Tru-Tungsten weight left unpegged. This allows the tubes to follow the weight down into the pockets that I am fishing slower! I also like to inject Berkley Power Scent into the tube and insert a loud rattle like the Rook’s Thunder Rattle. This rattle is extremely loud and large enough to create some suction to stay inside my tube.

The neatest thing about this pattern at this time of year is that generally you can duplicate it just about everywhere on the lake that you can find these same conditions. This is about as close to a sure thing as there is in bass fishing. This rock and weed connection is definitely a recipe for success!

David Chong