Hit the water last night at 9:30 for our maiden fall trolling run and we weren’t alone. The perfect weather brought a ton of boats and left the shallow reefs looking like a mini opener.
With the warmer water temps (58.9 degrees) I wasn’t expecting the fish to be in everywhere yet so our gameplan was to cover a ton of water and see if we can figure out a spot or two holding fish. We spent a few hours hitting over a dozen different areas and picked up only about a half dozen eyes and several rock bass. We then headed back to our best spot of the evening and fine tuned our presentation.
It was still understandably pretty slow based on what I was hoping it would be before the warm weather and I’m pretty sure we were actually doing better than most judging by how quickly the boat traffic died down. Once we had a pattern figured out we were we were able to boat 6-8 fish per hour. We ended the night with 20 eyes and about half that many smallies and rock bass. The key for us was to use what I call “Early season baits” which have a much faster tighter action (such as husky jerks and shad raps)
