i fish a lake near home quite often. a clear and deep lake - full of smallies.

 

it has been in the upper 70s for the past few weeks during the day and in the 50s at night.

 

this weekend we have a nast storm coming through friday night. and the day temps this weekend willl be in the 50s while at night will drop into around 40.

 

what do smallmouth tend to do following a fall cold front?

Smallies will go shallow in late fall to feed before they congregate to go deep for their winter haunts . It's all about the timing in your waters based on water temps.

Smallies tend to be a little less affected by fronts than the largemouth. If you can figure out where they are in their seasonal movements you can likely still catch them post front. 

Right now the smallies where I live are spread out again, the bigger fish were coming up when the water temp had dropped into the 60s. What I bet will happen is 3 or 4 days after the front you'll start finding fish up shallow, they will be feeding up so topwater and spinnerbaits will be good baits to use and big square bills may get you some real pigs.

Cold front is going through right now. Going tomorrow air temps will be high 20's for the low to the mid 50's for the high. So we will see!

We had a major cold front move through a few days ago that dumped a ton of cold rain, dropped the water temps 6 degrees in 2 days, air temps have been 20 degrees colder during the day and 30 degrees colder at night. We went yesterday and the smallmouth were eating everything we threw at them. They had pretty much all moved up shallow and had schools of shad pushed up on the banks and were feeding heavily.