The Last Shot at Open Water
By Adam JohnsonI've been chasing grouse in the northwoods and watching deer from my perch in the tree stand patiently waiting for a whitetail to get into bow range, but I've not yet given up on the open-water fishing yet. As a matter of fact, fishing is outstanding right now.
The largemouth bass are shallow and you need to use a slow approach to catch them. I’m partial to artificial lures so I pitch a big live-rubber jig tipped with a scented plastic trailer right up to the shoreline and drag it back over the bottom.
Great locations to present this lure are where you have some sand that tapers out to an inside weedline. Rip-Rap that’s supporting a shoreline is also a great spot. The bass will be in water from two to ten feet deep and if there is some cover nearby you can’t go wrong.
The big northern pike are meandering around in the vegetation searching for the schools of shiners and ciscoes there. I like to target the pike with a spinnerbait; one with a big single Colorado blade that I slowly retrieve right over the top of the weeds. Wherever you see an opening in the vegetation let the spinnerbait drop in for a few feet before you rip it out of that pocket.
Another good pike technique is to jerk a suspending crankbait along a weed edge. The vegetation is loosing some of its density now and those big eating machines can spot that erratic minnow action and will dart out and pick off what they think is an easy meal. Make sure to use a light stranded-wire leader or you will lose a lot of lures.
Walleyes can be found shallow this time of year. I really love to drift down a sand/rubble shoreline at dusk and cast those long-thin shallow-running crankbaits out as far as I can and slowly retrieve them back to the boat. And why is this so exciting? Let me tell you; when you hook up with a big shallow-water walleye they put up one heck of a good fight.
Where a lot of anglers go wrong with this presentation is that they don’t retrieve slowly enough. You only need to have the lure running about a foot or two below the surface and barely wobbling to get a positive reaction. Long casts and slow retrieves are the components that make this technique successful.
When it gets dark I will switch to an eighth-ounce jig tipped with a black plastic grub-tail. Just cast it out, let it sink to the bottom, and slowly bring it back. It’s so simple, yet so effective.
The water will be hard before we know it, and we’ll be limited to a vertical approach. There’s still time to do some casting.
Reading Outdoors Archives
