Spring is one of the best times to fish for smallmouth bass, and an excellent time to catch some of the biggest smallmouth of the season. Fall can be the best time to catch a trophy.
Why fall
After the autumnal equinox, the drop in daylight triggers smallmouth to feed heavily and start moving toward their wintering areas. Those wintering areas are much more compact than the water they use the rest of the year, which means you can narrow your focus to a much smaller stretch of river. Their metabolism will slow drastically once winter sets in, but during the fall they're still feeding heavily to prepare for the colder months. Fish feeding heavily while grouping into tighter areas: that overlap is what creates fast action and some of the biggest catches of the year.
Finding the wintering water
The first step is narrowing down the best wintering areas: spots with lower flow, where the bass don't have to burn much energy to survive, but still close enough to current to get food. Finding where the fish are located earlier in the fall is critical to your success once winter arrives.
Lures, flies and how to present them
Once you've found these areas, my favorite way to target these fish is suspending jerkbaits on conventional gear, or throwing baitfish-style streamers. Don't discount soft plastics that mimic worms or crawfish, or bottom-bouncing flies, either.
How you present these lures and flies depends on where you are in the fall. Start with more active, moving presentations, then transition to dead-drifting as the season progresses. Once the smallmouth settle into a winter pattern, you may need to leave lures and flies sitting on the bottom for extended periods, a technique known as dead-sticking. You might work a lure on the bottom for minutes at a time with only a short window where the fish will actually eat.
The cold-water window
It can be a frustrating stretch once water temperatures drop and the smallmouth's metabolism slows, but it's also the best time to catch an absolute giant. As metabolism drops, bigger fish need to eat more often than smaller ones do, which drives your odds of landing a trophy up drastically.
You may get more overall action earlier in the fall or later in the winter, but once it turns cold, your odds of catching a trophy smallmouth climb fast. There's a learning curve to finding and catching these fish. Come fish with me this fall and winter and learn how to target trophy smallmouth bass.
