Northwoods Bass Fishing Report, September thru mid October, 2021

We’ve recently concluded one of the longest Indian Summers in history. As a result, September fishing was a hit or a miss. October has actually been far better in comparison. Lately, we’ve been experiencing 1 hot window per day and the rest is history.

As we now enter middle of October, we just finally settling into typical fall patterns and pre-turnover fishing. In about a week, many lakes and their bass will begin the pre-wintering phase. Good bites will continue through the end of month, and my season will conclude then.

I’m off the water now until October 21st. Will be back for the last dance then.

After end of summer vacations and not wanting to do anything with fishing for a bit in August, I returned to the water again on September 10th thru October 6th. Indian summer persisted throughout this entire time. Daytime in the 70’s and 80’s. Flat calm conditions. Heat….. These are by far the worst conditions to ask for in fall if chasing smallmouth bass & muskies as I do, and not what we signed up for.

Water temperatures stayed the same for almost an entire month, ranging from 64 to 69. Right now, they are holding in the low 60’s. Fish haven’t had too many triggers yet to feed. However as of last week, we were finally experiencing short feeding frenzies. These will gain in the next few weeks.

Depending on outlook and expectations, fishing has been about average, but still tougher than usual. Per my unrealistic high standards, it’s been poor to fair. Despite this, we were able to catch several 20 inchers this autumn and we aren’t finished yet.

We’re about two weeks delayed with turnover. We had all been wondering if it’ll ever arrive this autumn.

In September, summer patterns were still very much in play. Lots of shallow water casting atop sand and gravel flats, weedlines, run and gun approaches, and aggressive fishing strategies with swimmer and search lures dominated. As of now, these tactics all mostly still in play.

Since my fall trips started, we’re exclusively fishing for big smallmouth bass only. Really no action fishing, and if the interest is in numbers September and October are the wrong months. Or this is not the right fishing service for you. These past few weeks, 10 to 15 fish days of mid-size to large fish have been the usual result. Meanwhile, we also had some numbers of 20 to 30 fish days too.

Big fish have been up shallow all month long. September sand has carried itself into October.

We’ve got about another week left of shallow pre-turnover fishing remaining, and then the next phase of fall begins and pre-wintering follows. As we progress deeper into October, you will want to focus most efforts on deep structure and potential wintering areas. The shallows will vacate, and when the lakes fully clear themselves up, the shallows will mostly be empty!

90 percent of the fish will only be located in 10 percent of the lakes.

You will want to rely on electronics to find fish. When you do, you’ve struck bronze.

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You can still fish shallow. We’ve got about another full week.

Turnover hasn’t yet started, but it’ll be ongoing quickly here soon.

Once it concludes, it’ll be time to start position fishing atop and around deep structure and wintering sites.

In order to locate most of this month’s biggest bass, I always spend more time motoring around and slowly idle around key spots and wintering locations before fish are confirmed on the screen. Only then, with waypoints marked and a track established, would I even consider fishing and drifting across the specific location.

Once these deep water bass are found, they are really easy to catch for the first half hour you’re camped over them.

While deep schooling, non-dormant bass are often catchable, the presence of nearby food greatly enhances catching them. The food needs to be present down deep where smallmouths are beginning to home for the winter. Schools of yellow perch and bait balls of cisco should be nearby. Crayfish also burrowing themselves in deep mud bottom too for their overwintering.

With big fish on my mind in October, I only focus my bass fishing efforts on a half dozen different lakes throughout the month. Due to short feeding windows and thanks to the process of eliminating dead water it’s illogical and poor strategy to drive all over the place and lake hop like normally. The lakes I limited myself to in October tend to fish well for bass in fall. I have systemically patterned their specific fall bass movements, and know where wintering holes are located.

Worthwhile locations and money spots are fish cribs and deep wood, where dormant and coldfront affected bass will like to lay. Additionally, deep rocks with nearby mud transitions from 25 to 29 feet held bass most frequently and are typical overwintering locations for BOTH crayfish and smallmouth. Steep breaklines and shelves dropping into deep water are also holding some fish too.

Main lake basins and deep underwater structure. Rocks, boulders, gravel, hard bottom. All in, or near proximity to their wintering locations. Look for all of this on your favorite smallmouth lake right now. Once turnover completes, majority of that water’s bass will be in their wintering locations. Each lake will have multiple wintering areas for bass.

Flowages are in drawdown, and low. Deep channel holes and old lake basins are worthy of visits.

River systems are running very low as well. Due to lack of fish and lack of migrations happening, they haven’t been worthwhile ever since spring.

Bass Bling

I can write and talk about the great casting and flats fishing we enjoyed in September with swimbaits and minnows, but after turnover that’ll be old news and not the winning strategy at most lakes in October.

Warmer than normal water temps has the fish shallow.

Days with some wind has fish chasing spinnerbaits, lipless cranks, swimbaits, and Xrap 10’s. Even on calm days like we’ve had most of last week, bomb casting and slow rolling a paddletail was accounting for most strikes.

Paddletails have accounted for about 80% of our biggest bass in September and October.

Many waters and feeding preferences are forage specific right now. Some lakes Cisco… others perch….. and if they’re out, crayfish. Try them all between swimbaits, jerkbaits, and football jigs.

As water temps begin to cool into the upper 50’s, the tackle box shortens. I also begin to move towards deeper structure with the fish.

My customers have all hammered the big fish with St. Croix Mojo Bass.

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• 71 MHF Power Spins handling most football jigs and bottom dragging presentations.
• 73 MHF Power Shake bomb casting all paddletails – this is a great setup for folks who aren’t able to handle a casting rod and reel.
• 75 MHXF Swim Frog casting is the most used rod in the boat this fall, and all swimbaits are being thrown with it. Long rod does all the casting for you, and the fast flex of the tip assures good hook sets from long distance.

Feeding windows are short and sweet. Catch one, you may quickly follow up with 5 more. Then the bite dissipates, only to return with a flurry of more fish hours later.

Swimmers and search baits are dominating. The jig bite is present on some waters, but not the best choice. Bottom baits are being mostly ignored.

October’s bounty is providing many numbers days, when we find the fall mother-lode. This late in the season, I don’t care for numbers unless I can locate schools and fish are of excellent quality average size. We want big bites.

A little bit of everything has been working for the boat during the past 3 weeks. On lakes with heavy perch or Cisco, we conform to them with minnows and swimmers. Meanwhile on lakes with crayfish, we follow suit to the dominant forage preference.

Paddletails and search lures have been outfishing everything. Rage Swimmers, Suicide Shads, Keitechs, Kalins Tickle Tails, etc. Rig em on a swimbait jig, and bombs away. Tis the season.

A new great rod I’ve been enjoying casting with is the St. Croix Rods 73MHF Victory, The Marshal. Lightweight and long cast ability.

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Additionally, the Mojo Bass Swim Frog, and Power Swim are each preferred choices for this too.

Some days, we’re catching good ones too with lipless crankbaits, a weightless minnow, and suspended jerkbait.

The football jig bite hasn’t fully started yet. Visualize a smallmouth attempting to kill a craw, putting it into a daze, then dropping it, refusing to eat. No chance on these fish. Most of these hits haven’t been worth a hook set. As water temperatures cool, this bite will improve, and your pickups will turn to bites and hooksets. Want to learn how a smallmouth destroys craws, turn to Engbretson Underwater Photography for his underwater feeding videos. That’s exactly what smbs are doing with our jigs.

The tackle box is pretty wide open still. Some days have even required finesse, or something totally outside of the box. The fishing is fair, but not good.

If water temps ever cool down, and as turnover is nearing, the tackle box will gradually close up. Post turnover, I’m working more crankbaits, heavy jigs, blade baits, heavy paddletails, and even livebait rigs – all that can be worked thru deep water and get down to the strike zone quickly. I’ll share these in the next bling.

September 10 thru 11th – Fall 2021 is off to an ok start. Per my super high standards, just satisfactory

Had a fun two days hosting Rob and Art. Rob is my neighbor from back home in IL, and Art flew in from North Carolina. Day 1 was mixed bag (settling in for crappies all day), and day-2 was smallmouth.

On Friday we enjoyed 80+ crappies with several nice 13-15’s released. Remember selective harvest and never keep anything over 12”. We each took 4 fish apiece. Vertical presentations and plastics scored all.

On Saturday we were fishing another bass derby all day….. sigh. Boats everywhere but our best 5 fish were all 18-19.5’s. Rob and Art each connected with their new PB’s on football jigs.

Location wise fish are everywhere currently. No specific patterns. Check the flats and deep humps. Have fish eating fluke minnows, crankbaits, swimbaits, paddletails, tubes, and football jigs.

Water temps 66-70. Warm spell incoming and lasting thru entire week. Fall is nearing but not yet in sight. Remember to apply Indian summer strategies this week.

September 16th – Good hurricane smb trip with Greg. Not sure how the other Mariners did in yesterday’s rough seas, but we enjoyed our nice ones and even the few 4’s that shook us off. We were the only idiots out there.

14 fish caught, which included a 20” and 19”. Poor Greg couldn’t keep his few 20’s buttoned up.

Water temps 66-70. Everything caught 10ft or less.

Fluke / jerk minnows, lipless cranks, and football jigs produced. In heavy winds with gusts, my observation is most smallmouth have difficulty seeing and tracking many horizontal presentations. We couldn’t buy a fish on swimbaits and spinnerbaits all day. Thus we found other search methods that worked.

Almost everything where we went was unfishable, but found some comfortable areas to do work.

September 20th –  I hosted the Drancik’s and Confer’s. Did a follow boat day, and happy we enjoyed catching several species, and the group learning some new waters.

We hooked into some big smallmouth early in the morning, which included Bob’s new PB at 20”. Good paddletail and swim jig (perch pattern) bite happening over sand with patches grass and weeds. If there’s too much, then IMO lesser fish. My weeds of choice right now is coontail. Most bites as shallow as 2ft and deep as 8ft. Today my boat botched another 20’ and a 19

Once the sun disappeared for the day, so too did SMB’s. We jumped lakes in the afternoon. After hitting a midday road block, we turned lemons into lemonade, ditching the smallmouth altogether, and their locations, and turning the remainder of the trip into a mixed bag affair. In our final hour on the water, we boated walleyes, pike, some smallmouth, and had 6 muskies up to boatside which included two eats.

Awesome time and enjoyment with the group. I had a blast! Thanks again. Will be doing a muskys only trip the next time with these guys.

September 25th and 26th – Had a great time hosting Barry and Jacob for the past two days. A single day trip turned into a 2 day adventure as day-1 high winds and cold front prevented us from fishing where we wanted to for our hawg hunt. Therefore on Saturday we settled for more protected waters. Barry and Jacob’s flexibility along with the courtesy of my Sunday’s original guests enabled us to be in a succeeding situation to hawg hunt on Sunday instead with primo conditions. Lucky guys, they had me for 2 days instead of just one. Thanks everyone for making this happen.

We caught some numbers Saturday. None over 17”.

Sunday rocked. Jacob scored a megafish. We also caught some others too.

My boat’s been fishing swimbaits and minnow imitators hard. If it isn’t a moving search lure, it hasn’t been getting bit too often. Kalin’s Fishing Tickle Tail paddletails, Rage Swimmers, and Suicide Shads are producing. No reason to fish slow either with our warm water temps. Keep moving, and often. But no reason to bail on lakes entirely unless they’re totally dead or weather tells you what to do. Many waters are very off right now.

Sand flats with grass, cabbage patches, and yellow perch activity are my areas of interest. So too is deeper wood. We’re finding fish of all sizes using them, and feeding. Coldfronts have driven many fish off from humps and bar tops, but they could return to them again midweek after recovery.

Water temps 65-67. Heat wave incoming this week will likely further stagnate what we need for fall bites happening. Indian summer continues. But what’s excellent ahead is the most stable weather we’ll have this year. Better later than never.

September 30th – Small lakes, big bass. Real big bass.

St. Croix Rods Mojo Bass Dock Sniper did heavy lifting yesterday afternoon on some Wisconsters. Pictured is a 22″ and 20″.

I have never targeted big largemouth so late in the season. Shorts, T-shirt, flip flops on September 30th!

All fishes of every species are very confused right now.

Indian summer still sucks.

PS – The jig trailer of choice only catches 45% more fish.

October 4th – Jamie’s awesome adventure from last Monday 10/4.

We went to the pig’s playpen for a hawg hunt. While we had the ideal conditions for it, the lake and its inhabitants thought otherwise. After scouring thru much of the lake without any smallmouth (first 4 hours of the day), I motored us over to an area of the lake I never fish – a beach shoreline; the only one I know of in existence on this lake.

September Sand = October Sand

That beach shoreline is very boring and nondescript. In almost 7 years of fishing this water, I had never bothered fishing it until with Jamie. I always bypassed it.

When nothing else is working, try new areas and fish unconventionally.

We had been scoring with the beach pattern all of September, and this has carried itself over into October as well.

We had a 90 minute window in which 7 smallmouth from 19 to 21 inches were caught. All on a paddletail. The only window of the day.

The St. Croix Rods Mojo Bass Power Shake spinning (73MHF) is an awesome bomb caster and swimmer rod. My boat is on year-2 with it. https://stcroixrods.com/products/mojo-bass-spinning

After Jamie caught the first, he exclaimed, “You’re off the hook!”

Oddly, the entire lake was dead and lifeless except for this one stretch of beach shoreline. It’s shallow at 2ft, and gradually transitions off with a moderate drop-off and transitions into some grass with muck bottom at 13ft. All of the fish were positioned at the face of the beach, waiting eagerly and aggressively for any passerby forage.

Never leave fish to find fish. We drifted through 4 times. Caught at least 1 big one on each pass. I’m sure we left a few other fish on the table. We concluded the trip hitting more new areas only to find the same story – a dead lake.

Was fun hosting Jamie. Him catching 6 big ones on any trip day is a lifetime’s worth of trophies for most.

October 5th – Jason’s Awesome Adventure

Last Tuesday I hosted Jason for round-2 of this year. Our plan coming in was either of the following: 1) River float, somewhere that wasn’t dry – no chance due to low water and no migrating anywhere. 2) Muskies – which haven’t been strong anywhere. 3) Lets go to a pig’s playpen.

We settled for option 3. And knowing that our window would expire promptly midday, we’d swap to largemouth fishing somewhere in the flat calm dead afternoon to conclude our trip.

Conditions were foggy, windy, gloomy. Like we had launched on Loch Ness in search of a sea serpent….. But indeed we were, after 4 and 5 pounders.

First spot of the morning, and 10 minutes in, we caught 4 really nice ones. All of them 18-19’s or better.

They got conditioned.

Second spot of the morning, Jason’s first 5 casts, he banged a 19, and two 20.5’s. I scored a few too.

They got conditioned.

Third spot of the morning, we were kept busy on for the next 90+ minutes, catching dozens more of all sizes including some more 18-19-20’s.

Everything caught on a variety of swimbaits.

Beaches & flats.

Then our window totally ended by noon. The rest of the day was flat, calm, hot and sunny. We settled for pike and largemouth in the afternoon.

For three and a half hours, Jason had the best SMB fishing anybody in my boat has ever had. 11 smallmouth were 19″ or larger. We caught a 35 lb. bag between them. We’ll be remembering this one.

If this was the finale of hosting 2021 trips, it was awesome and as good as it gets.

October 6th – If there’s one specific fish benefitting the most from Indian summer right now and the longer growing season, it’s largemouth bass. They are ON right now at many waters I’ve looked at throughout the past week and a half. Vulnerable, hungry, and waiting for food in the shallows.

On Wednesday midday I caught and released one of the biggest northwoods Wisconsin LMB’s I’ve ever captured.

I was launching and swimming a Rage Swimmer with my 7ft St. Croix Rods Avid 7MHF. Upon the stop of death, the rod was bent in half, without much of a hookset needed. The drag was singing…… and this six+ pounder launched herself 4-5ft above the surface.

It made me smile and giggle.

I will remember that huge jump, for life.

She went 22.5”

What a remarkable specimen.

Trophy largemouth are way more difficult to focus on than smallmouth. Queens are also less abundant. Take precious care of the population members and fishery – your DNR won’t.

It’s been a fun week of chasing big ones. Take what the conditions and your lake is giving you.

October 2021 Fishing Forecast

I try not to host wintering trips because exploitation of wintering holes and sensitive lake locations isn’t of interest. October fishing is similar to September’s strategy. Except now we enter post-turnover and coldwater period. Many of the same fishing strategies from September are still utilized in early October. After turnover mid-month and as water temps creep into the low 50’s, almost 100% of our fishing is over deep water, incorporating jigging, casting, and position fishing. Some days we may incorporate the usage of specialized livebait rigging.

Most bass trips for the year are completed by October 15th, but I keep some dates open during the 3rd and 4th weeks of the month before I call it quits for the year as weather and fishing can still be awesome. A pro-longed productive season may still continue into late month and November 1st depending on weather, climate, water temps, and ice formation. We are finished bass fishing for the season by the time water temps reach below 45 degrees. In 2020, my last bass trip of the year took place October 6th. This year, we will be fishing thru the end of this month.

During October month, the tackle box closes. I also limit my lake selection to a rotation of about 5 to 10 different lakes whose fall patterns and locations have been specialized.

• River and flowage smallmouth
• Midday and afternoon fishing times prioritized
• Shallow flats swimbaits and lipless cranking smallmouth
• Deep water position fishing
• Vertical jigging smallmouth
• Football jigging
• Blade baits and rip baits
• Live bait rigging

October trips are full day trophy hunts, and smallmouth trips only. Midday and afternoon hours are prioritized. We’ll only fish 1 lake for the full day. This is not a numbers month. Live minnows are carried in the boat for insurance purposes. Trips can last through end of the month, weather and water temps permitting.