Lakes are empty, but bass are biting

I’ll be the first person to admit that I don’t fish nearly as much as I should in November, because I’m in the woods hunting so much.

And that’s one overriding reason why you should be on the water in November, trying to catch largemouth bass. No, not just because I won’t be there. There will be a lot of guys who would normally be on the front deck of a bass boat who are in a tree stand somewhere. The big reservoirs around South Carolina will seem like they’re empty.

But there are other reasons. First, the weather is just so comfortable. Being on the water is a pleasure for most of November. By the end of the month, it might get downright cold, but the weather is usually very mild — the kind of weather that makes you want to be on the lake.

Last but not least, boy, will the bass bite!

I have had some really good days in November — days as good as any early-spring day I’ve ever had. I think a lot of it is the fact that fishing pressure is way down, but also, the water temperature has dropped enough that fish are more aggressive and feeding up before winter arrives.

I fish a lot of boat docks this time of year. I’ll fish a crankbait a lot, and I’ll keep some Buckeye mop jigs tied on. I’ll fish the jig on the bottom, but I’ll also swim it a lot, because bass will suspend under floating docks and around pilings.

A brown mop jig with a green pumpkin trailer is great, and I’ll also fish a shad-colored jig and shad-colored trailer like a silver-white. I’ll fish the brown jig on the bottom because that’s more of a crawfish color, and I’ll swim it, but I really only swim the shad-colored jig. For a trailer, I use a Yamamoto double-tail. I like to dye the tails of the green-pumpkin trailer with a little chartreuse on the tips.

A shallow-running crankbait — a little square-billed bait or a flat-sided bait — is normally what I start with, because you can cover so much water with it; it’s a great search bait. I’ll fish it around any kind of shallow cover I can find, as well as around docks.

When I swim a mop jig, I’ll also using it as a search bait, and it’s really good around boat docks. For some reason, I’ve found that bass will really suspend under floating docks in November. There is plenty of shad and cover, and they are up off the bottom, which is a perfect situation for swimming a jig.

The mop jigs I swim, I usually fish them on a 6½-foot medium-heavy All-Star baitcasting rod paired with a 6.3-to-1 Pfleuger Patriarch reel. Because you’re swimming the jig, you don’t want a slower retrieve ration: 4.3-to-1 or 5.1-to-1. You don’t want to burn it back, but you want to be able to keep it moving within about 18 inches of the surface, and the 6.3-to-1 is just about right.

Bass spend most of the fall back in the feeder creeks on our major reservoirs before they move back to the deeper areas where they’ll spend the winter once the water really cools off.

I usually start looking for them mid-way back in creeks in November. In South Carolina, November can be like February, really cold, or it can be 80 degrees. Normally, it will be cool in the mornings, but really nice in the afternoons. Where you find the bass will depend on how the weather has been, so keep up with the water temperature. I think the bass will be moving back out of the creeks, and if the water temperature has dropped into the low-60s or the upper-50s, you can be sure they’re on their way out. In November, they’ve usually started heading that way.