2 Steps to Finding Fall Bass

Oct 28, 2012, 5:16 PM EDT

In the northern climate of Minnesota that I live in, our fall fishing days are numbered, so when you get out on the water you want to make the most of your time. On lakes that have grass, bass use the grass all year, but in my experience there is a brief but glorious period when bass get on shallow hard cover like no other time of the year.

In early fall, there is usually a 2-3 week window where a large percentage of the largemouth bass swarm the shallows to feed up. When this window is right, you can fish the most obvious and visual shallow cover and knock their lights out. You can score numbers and size during this window, for me jigs and Texas-rigged soft plastics are the ticket. Most of our natural grass lakes do not have shad, so this is different then following the bait to back of creeks down south, I believe that is why jigs can be so effective this time of year. But almost as fast as the fury starts, it starts to go away.

So if you hit a lake and try the hard cover for awhile and come up empty handed, don’t beat that dead horse, time for step two. The next step is only slightly more complicated; find the remaining green grass. Find that green grass on or near a drop and you find concentrations of bass. Mine this grass with suspending jerkbaits, crankbaits and jigs, as water temps continue to fall you will need to be a bit more methodical, but trust me, the fish are there.