Fall is a great time to land a big fish
News | Published on September 6, 2022 at 2:06pm GMT+0000 | Author: Chad Koenen
0By Cody Hill
Chill Fishing Report
Fall is in the air and that means some of the best fishing is around the corner and the fall bite is a great opportunity to land that fish of a lifetime. This past weekend we had great results pulling medium suckers on lindy rigs along the weed lines and on the breaks. This presentation can be a lot of fun because you do not know what will bite and we had four different species get landed biting on a medium sucker minnow.
Ideally my set up this time of the year is a 3.5-4-inch minnow on a simple 6 foot lindy rig with just enough weight to keep contact with bottom. If you are catching too many weeds on your hook shorten your lindy rig down to 4 or 5 feet long to keep the minnow closer to your weight. This presentation will find the aggressive fish, but the simple presentation is enough to entice a negative fish into grabbing a quick and easy meal. Due to a lot of our lakes having very strict slot limits I encourage you to stock up on hooks because you will need to replace a few throughout the day especially if you find a school of aggressive pike.
I have the best luck with a #2 snell hook in chartreuse or red in color. I hook my minnows through their mouth and out their nostril and this is the best way to keep the minnow alive the longest. I target around a half mile per hour with a mile per hour being the max speed I travel. Focus on the edges of weeds and slowly work deeper from there. When you get your bite remember that hook is in the lip of the minnow, and you will need to give the fish plenty of line before setting the hook. When you set that hook you will never know what will bite and we landed everything from walleyes to crappies using this presentation this weekend.
GPS this time of the year can really help you find sweet spots. I tend to mark as many bites as I can as we are fishing to see if there is a pattern. Fish will have trails going through the weeds and if you can find a few of these trails coming from deeper water into the shallows you can spend more time focusing on that little area and improving your odds.
With the sun setting earlier and the cooler nights this is having bigger bite windows on some of our local lakes. Stereotypically we have that early morning or last light bite windows but with the cooler days our bite windows are stretching more and more into the middle of the day.