Bassmaster Elite Series pro Cliff Pirch knows about the value within a western fall grab bag of fish!
September 30, 2024
By David A. Brown
After the Bassmaster Elite season concludes, Cliff Pirch likes a good party as much as anyone; and he knows that regardless of the occasion, the crowd’s going to gather around the food. Whether it’s hors d'oeuvres or a proper dinner, the prospect of filling bellies is always the crowd pleaser.
Same deal with fall fishing. It’s feed bag time and just like that end of summer pool party or something with a gridiron and pigskin theme, a pile of vittles will gather a rich diversity of fall friends.
“A lot of fish will get on schools of bait,” Pirch said. “They’re pretty pelagic and everything’s feeding on those shad, or smelt, or whatever it may be. Every predator in the lake starts to feed up and follow those schools of bait.
“You might catch largemouth, smallmouth, spotted bass, stripers, yellow bass, white bass, and even rainbow trout.”
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The assortment varies thought the west, but the principle remains consistent.
“If you’re on Lake Shasta (northern California), you might catch spots and rainbows and largemouth,” he said. “If you’re on Roosevelt Lake or Lake Apache where I guide, you’re going to catch largemouth, smallmouth, yellow bass and crappie, and you might even catch a big flathead (catfish).”
Pursuit Plan Most of the Western lakes offer plenty of structure, but he said this game is almost exclusively an open water deal. For one thing, the bait’s on the move and traveling offshore highways gives them a chance at evading predators.
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Crappies are numerous, but you may run into bass, yellow bass and even a rare flathead catfish. On the bank, baitfish that park by rocks, wood or manmade structures usually end up meeting with hostile locals. Predators certainly know this, but they must put in the work to find the food.
Anglers seeking predators owe an equal effort.
“A lot of times, they’re not on structure or cover, they’re just following the bait in open water so it’s really variable,” he said. “They might come up to the top for a little bit and then they might go down to 40-50 feet. You’re just following them around with your electronics and mostly open water fishing.”
As he points out, forward facing sonar makes it easier to spot your targets, but back in the day, he would simply idle around and look for the action. It was a little harder to keep up with the schools, but because the bait was in such great numbers, he could always locate the action.
For anglers lacking advanced electronics, he said finding this fall feeding fest is still doable. “One, you look for birds; find diving birds or seagulls. But also, just driving and watching your sonar, you’ll see big groups of bait and fish around them.
“Forward-facing sonar has made it easier to stay with them. But sometimes, it makes the fish a little smarter, because they see a few more baits. But when they’re feeding on big schools of bait, they get catchable.”
When It’s Best Generally, sunny and calm is best because easier for presentations. Can catch them on a choppy day, but light penetration aids the visibility, both in terms of predators spotting baitfish and your lures.
As summer turns to fall, the fun is seemingly endless in western reservoirs. “It does seem like that midday 9 to 2 period can be some of the best times,” he said. “The fish have a little better visibility, and it tends to get them biting.”
Fall, of course, starts to usher in cold fronts, so plan accordingly. General rule of thumb states that you’ll find an uptick in feeding aggression with the barometric fluctuations on the leading edge of a weather system, but once a front passes, the dreaded high-pressure bluebird conditions can put the kibosh on this party for a day or two.
Good thing about the fall pattern is that predators know the score. Shortening days, progressively cooler nights; it all adds up to the looming end to the food abundance.
Simply put, the law of supply and demand is at play here, so as soon as post-frontal pressure lessens and conditions stabilize, the party resumes.
Baits for the Bunch Pirch said one of his favorite fall offerings is a dropshot rigged with a Big Bite Baits Scentsation Cliff Hanger Worm. He finds the cranberry juice and polluted dawn colors work best, but he stresses strategic presentation.
“You’re not necessarily fishing your dropshot on the bottom, you’re just getting it in or above a school of fish,” he said. “Bright colors work best and it does seem like you can catch them best on the worm above them; unless they’re close to the bottom, then you drop it down and kill it.
“Any of your shad imitating baits that you can fish at various depths also are good. It might be a heavy spinnerbait, a spoon, a crankbait, an Alabama rig, a blade bait.” As for presentation, he finds that sometimes the moving baits work best with a fast retrieve, but just getting your bait in the strike zone is typically more important.
Sometime getting blade bait is the key to triggering them and then target with dropshot.
“After you’ve caught a few with something, you might have to change,” he said. “And don’t just fish one spot. The bait will move around, so you’ll have to look around and intersect them.”
