This is my first post so please take it easy on me.

 

I have been bass fishing for the past 20 years but I just bought a new boat and am trying to take my game a new level.  I have never really fished in the fall, I have always been caught up in football and hunting.  After reading a lot about fall fishing, I have been extremely excited about the water temperature reaching 70 degrees.

 

So the water temp finally hit 70 degrees this week in my local lake so I grabbed the lures I have been reading about to target bass running shad in the shallows and hit the lake on Friday and again on Sunday.  After watching Timmy Horton kill them with a chug n spook and reading about KVD using a sexy shad swimming jig I just knew I was going to slay them.

 

Well it didn't go so well, I did much better last week when I wasn't really targeting bass to be in a fall patern.

 

Friday-temp 74 degrees, sunny and windy, color stained------used swimming jig, spinnerbait, lipless crankbait, chugnspook, alabama rig-------2 small bass

 

Sunday-temp 70 degrees, sunny with no wind, color stained--------used chugnspook mostly with a little lipless crank.  I was stuburn to stick with the spook after I saw huge schools of shad in the shallow flats.-------- zero fish

 

It rained pretty good saturday morning.

 

Question is should I be targeting bass in the shallows with baits that simulate shad or am I out thinking myself, did I hurt my chances by switching to a sexy shad color on my stained lake?  I usually go with darker colors.

 

Was topwater a bad idea considering it was sunny today?

 

Just trying to figure out where I went wrong today

 

 

Thanks

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ive been on my fall pattern for 3wks roughly, any shad like color bait has worked for me, the only thing tho is we had a cold front move threw then that cooled the water down from 70-71° to 63-66. Have you tried a black n blue jig by the docks? Warmer water and sun thats what I may try if we warmed up

How's the fishing pressure in your lake?  You did fish on Sunday and other could have pressure the bass during Friday and Saturday.  That can change the striking mood too.  I think you should have tried something slow to change up the presentation.  Going from something fast like a swimbait to crankbait, etc.. are still identical in presentation.  Changing it up to a slow presentation could have show you what the LMB mood were in. 

 

You could have even tried a jerk bait.  That would have been a lot slower for a swimbait.

Welcome to Bass Resource! 

 

What lake in Missouri are you fishing and how stained is the water (1, 2, or 3 feet of visibility)?  How deep do the fish go in summer (i.e. 30 plus feet or does a thermocline develop at less than 20 feet)?  What is the main forage?  You mentioned shad so I assume that is your forage.  These are all keys to where the fish will be and what you should be fishing.  For example, if you had a thermocline setup at 15 feet during the summer on your lake, it is likely that the fish will all be shallower than that depth until the fall turnover occurs.

 

I was fishing Table Rock Lake Thursday and Friday.  Surface water temperatures had dropped in the last week from the low 80s  to 74 - 76 degrees.  There were shad and minnows in the coves and I expected there to be a bite on crankbaits, spinnerbaits, or swimbaits but that wasn't the case.  The pattern for my two days there was jig and craw fished very slowly in darker water on bottom at 20 - 30 feet, in trees with surrounding brush.  Trees with no surrounding brush held no fish.  The areas like this that were best were on points or secondary points.  I was able to consistently catch fish with this pattern.  Topwater worked somewhat in the first hours of sunlight but it wasn't consistent. 

 

In your post, the presentations you mentioned didn't include slower presentations like t-rigs, jigs, finesse worms, etc.  Though it is Fall, the fish don't always follow what is considered a typical fall pattern and even though the main forage is shad, bass aren't always going to bite a shad imitating lure.