The page on my calendar for September has only 30 days, but I’d swear sometimes it feels like there should be two months there.
It’s kind of a Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde thing, except all of the bad stuff comes first. It’s one of those feast-or-famine deals for bass fishermen. The first part of the month is really, really tough, but by the end, the fishing gets really good.
For a bass fisherman, September is like two completely different months – and it’s the only month you can say that about.
The first part of the month is going to be tough anywhere you fish. Bass are moving, because the shad are started to move back into the creeks. The fishing is hardly ever consistent.
You can catch a big stringer of fish if you find the right spot, but those honey-hole days are mostly long gone. The first part of September, you just your trolling motor in the water and cover as much territory as you can — and don’t get set on any one thing getting you through.
Where you find fish at the beginning of the month depends a lot on what’s happened in July and August. How much rain have you had? Rain usually means water flow through dams, and that means good levels of oxygen in the water, so fish can live and thrive deep.
If it’s been a dry summer and not much water has been moving, there won’t be a lot of dissolved oxygen in the deep water, and the bass will move shallower.
Because shad are moving, they aren’t concentrated, and bass will tend to be scattered, too. Some will go all the way to the back of a creek right away; some will be at the mouth. You’ll find fish scattered between shallow water and deep water.
I can remember fishing High Rock Lake in September years ago. You could start on the railroad trestle at Rt. 8 and catch a couple of fish, then you’d go to Sheets Bottom and catch a couple, then go to the back of Flat Swamp Creek and catch two or three. You might have caught two bass at 5 feet, two between 8 and 10 feet, and maybe two or three at 12- to 14-feet deep.
You can get by with a DT-10 or DT-14 in situations like that, but at Buggs Island or Wylie, they could be even deeper and you’d have to fish a DT-16.
Nothing would be consistent from day to day, or even from one creek to another in the same day. But there are a couple of things that can help in early September.
First, the Fire Tiger color starts to really come on. And you’ll find shad congregating at places such as road beds, real long points and rip-rapped banks. Those are your best chances for finding concentrations of bass.
But finally, you’ll get to the end of the month, and it’s more like October than August. The weather has usually started to cool off, and the fish are more concentrated. They’ve all made the big move, and many of them are finished. You don’t have the problems finding them you did three weeks earlier.
The end of September is totally different from the beginning of the month. Not only will fish be toward the backs of creeks, they’ll be starting to move up.
I like to start halfway back in a creek and fish my way back. That’s a good way to start toward the end of the month. And where you find them has to do with the creek channel.
They’re going to get on bends in the channel, steep breaks into the channel, rip-rap that runs up close to the channel or a long point that touches the channel. Creek channels are the highways that shad use to migrate, and the bass will be right with ’em.
When it comes to baits, I’ll make a big change once the weather cools and bass start to really gather in the creeks. I’ll go with a flat-sided crankbait, a DT-Flat, in Fire Tiger or carp, the color Rapala calls “brown/bone.” That color starts to come in as the fall progresses.
I like a flat-sided bait early in the year when the water is still cold and in the fall when it starts to cool down. A flat bait has got a nice, tight action and a lot of roll. Those two things can really draw strikes at the right time of the year.
The big transition from tough to tremendous doesn’t happen overnight. You can sense it a little, especially if you have more nights where the weather cools off. It’s just a matter of observing and understanding.
Everything is going to be moving all over the place early in the month. By the end of the month, everything is going to be concentrated.
Figure out what stage the fish are in on your home lake, and that will help you get rid of Mr. Hyde and bring back Dr. Jekyll.
David Fritts is a 50-year-old professional bass fisherman from Lexington. He won the 1993 Bassmasters Classic, was the 1994 Bass Angler of the Year and won the FLW Tour Championship in 1997. He is sponsored by Ranger boats, Evinrude outboards, MinnKota, Zoom, Rapala, Bass Pro Shops, American RodSmiths, Solar Bat and Chevrolet.
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