Quartet of fall bass catchers

For most of his fall creek missions, Web Collums depends on four baits:

• Shallow-running crankbait – A shad-colored Strike King KVD 1.5 is a good bait for probing creek mouths, points and river cuts leading into backwaters. This little bait also does a good job of stimulating otherwise persnickety bass.

“I’ve seen it where the bass are suspended in 10 feet of water, and they won’t come up and eat anything on the top,” Collums said. “They may be down there 3 or 4 feet deep, and you can run the crankbait through them and they’ll just crush it.”

• Walking topwater – A Lucky Craft Sammy or a Zara Spook is the go-to bait for surface activity.

If Collums spots bass busting shad up top, he will fire his bait toward the fracas for what can be explosive strikes.

“You always want to have a walking bait tied on because you never know when or where they’re going to come up,” he said. “This is especially good in the fall, because they’re so keyed in on the shad.”

Now, it might seem futile to offer bass a piece of plastic and metal when they’ve clearly rounded up a pile of the real thing. However, it is definitely possible to make your bait stand out from the masses. As Collums said, it’s all about the presentation.

“The key to that is your retrieve — finding out how the fish want it,” he said. “They may want you to throw it out there and let it sit until all the rings in your line are gone, twitch it once or twice and let it sit for 30 seconds. You have to experiment with those schooling fish. Do they want the really fast retrieve? Do they just want the steady side-to-side? Do they want it really slow?

“Typically, if I’ve been fishing an area and I’ve seen them come up, I try to stay off of them as far as I can and make a really long cast. Once the bait hits the water, I let it sit five to 10 seconds. I’ll hit if five or six times really fast to make it look like something’s after that shad, and try to make those bass come up and react to it.”

Generally, Collums finds 55 degrees the magic number for fall topwater action. At or above double nickels, and he expects to catch fish at the surface. Below 55, it’s usually an exercise in futility.

• Tail Spinner – A Wing Ding or a Mann’s Little George sees a lot of fall action, as the added thump and flash of a spinner blade enhances the appeal of what resembles a dying shad. Collums fishes his little offerings on 15-pound fluorocarbon for maximum sink rate.

“The key, I’ve found, is to let that bait go all the way to the bottom,” he said. “I’ll reel up the slack, hold my rod at 10 o’clock and rip it up to 12. It’s very similar to how you’d fish a big spoon.

You don’t want it to go back to the bottom on a tight line — you want to be able to feel that blade turning. Ninety-nine percent of your bites will come on the fall, and of those 99 percent of your bites there’s no doubt they will knock slack in the line.”

• Fluke – Weightless and Texas rigged on a 4/0 wide-gap hook, the fluke mimics a dying shad and Collums finds this bait especially productive around vegetation like hyacinth and dying lily pads.

“When the lily pads die and start drying up, you can twitch that fluke aggressively on the surface, and if you come to a hole, edge or a point of (vegetation) and you know there’s gotta be one there, you can twitch it right up to that spot and just pause it,” Collums said. “It starts a very slow sink, and if they’re there they can’t stand it because that time of year they’re programmed to feed.”