Falling water temps and bass

[EBass]

Hello,
Just a question I was thinking about.

What water temps do Largemouth put on the feed bag when loading up for fall? 50 degrees kinda like smallies?

[Navigator]

Ebass,
It's not a matter of a certain temperature, but a consistent trend towards falling temps. Confused??? For example, I see activity increase when we have a week long cold spell and I'm not saying that I limit it to one week. It's just that a week is usually long enough to have an impact in the water temperature, at least the surface temp. Something else happens too and is probably the key to increased activity, bait and cover. Bait such as insects cut back their hatch frequency, while frogs are reaching maturity and looking to make transistions to open water bays. Young of the year fish are getting sizable too. The cover that is used to hide this bait isn't as thick as it once was.

Opportunity knocks for any predator!! Under low-light periods bass are especially active in the fall. I use lot's and lot's of top waters in the fall on lakes and BIG spinnerbaits. Even on lakes that show a definte preference for anything other than a spinnerbait during the summer.

Right now the water temps in the Annandale area is around 76, in a week I would expect them to be around 73. Fun time & bass time starts!! Nav

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Jon Navratil
Navigator Guide Service
www.naviguides.com
Serving Central MN rivers & lakes

[Wayne Ek]

EBass, Jon's right. The fall bite is triggered by a number of things. Cooler water, less veg., shorter day time hours. The prey/predator relationship changes also. Now the fry are fingerlings or larger. Shortly the frogs and craws will start to make the move to winter habitat. With the on-set of cooler nights we should start to see a drop in water temps. It has not happen yet, in the Alex area. As of Thurs. the temps on the chain of lakes varied only a couple of degrees from 76 to 79. But the good thing is the shallow veg is starting to die back and the crank bait bite started to heat up this week.

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Wayne
Agape Fishing Guides
www.agapefishingguides.com

[jeffyo45]

The bass had the feed bag on today. We were throwing scum frogs over lily pads for a tournament. We (my partner) ended up with a 5 fish bag of 22.05 lbs. My partner was a machine with the scum frog. I have a new technique for big fish.