Flipping & Pitching for Fall Bass with Jeremy Lawyer

Hi, I'm Jeremy Lawyer and I'm here with BassResource and hopefully today I'm gonna give you some tips that's gonna help put more fish in your boat and educate you maybe a little bit on that transition from summertime into fall and utilizing the flipping technique on your favorite body of water. I wanna set a specific area like say Grand Lake O' The Cherokee in Oklahoma or Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, in the Midwest, you know. Both of those bodies of water have a lot of boat docks, a lot of shallow structure and a lot of bait.

You know, when you're thinking about spring, you're thinking about crawdads. You kind of go into the perch around the spawn, the summertime fish are gonna get deep and grouped up. And in the fall, I mean, bait is number one key. If you're not around the bait, you're probably not around the bass. You know, the water's been in that 70, 80, 90 degrees depending on which part of the country you live in, and now it's cooling off at night. Maybe thinking about frosting, possibly, you know, but you're talkin' about here in the Midwest from that first of October on into the fall transition to where the fish are gonna get super shallow, you know, and you're thinking about a topwater even coming into play.

But what happens a lot is the vegetation ... we don't have in Missouri, but we have a little bit of algae. And in the fall that algae kind of starts to die a little bit. And then gizzard shads get up on the bank and they start pushing down the bank and little groves feeding on everything that's kind of decaying and still alive, and they really like to do that. And a boat dock is like the Ramada Inn for a bass whenever them shad get up there.

You know, there's gonna be a lot of perch doing the same thing. They're gonna get up there and get utilized and fish in shallow as well, but the bass can use the floats on the walkway, the back corners of the dock. This is the time of year when that's gonna come into play more than inside the stalls themselves on any given day to where the fish are super shallow and wanna actually be close enough to ambush those shad.

In order to do that, I like to go with a darker color. You know, throughout the years as it progressed into summer, I went from crawdad to bright, and now as we're going into the fall, I like to go with a dark color. You know, Freedom Tackle has a Structure Jig that's called Midnight. It's black, got a little bit of a gray shine to it, a little bit of silver shimmy. And what that does in the Midwest is really, really matches those big gizzard shad or grizzly shad that run down the bank and grows. They've got a real dark hue to 'em. So I like to go with that dark color.

Now, I don't like to have it a really, really big profile you can see there that's pretty good size and everything. And so what I'm gonna do is utilize some sort of a trailer on here that's more of a beaver style, more of a non-traditional to where it's gonna have less movement and more profile like a big shad, like a big forked tail, you know.

And so what I'm gonna do in order to show that off a little bit is I'm just gonna trim that a little bit of an angle. I like to have it kind of going uphill a little bit. And I'm not gonna get every single one of them. I like a few of them to kind of be out there. But what that's gonna do is give you just a little bit more flare on the sides of your bait and not have so much just straight across like a haircut. We can trim that down, and you can see here that's got a really good trailer keeper on it.

And so we're gonna take our beaver-style bait here, any kind of a bait of your choice and slide it on there. And the reason I like this is because it kind of has a paddle tail, flat beaver-style tail on it. And when you push that up there, it's really good. But you can see there it's not gonna have a bunch of movement. It skips really good, and it glides. Those old gizzard shad are up there just swimming around, not making a lot of commotion. And this bait here is gonna do the same thing. It's just gonna kind of glide. When you pitch it up there to a float or under a walkway, it's just gonna glide on momentum's gonna make it. Really, really great shad imitator here in the Midwest. Great way to get some bites especially using the dark colors.

Now, you're gonna roll around and get around an area where there's not gonna be any shad just for some reason. Maybe the conditions aren't right as far as they didn't have any algae grow in the bank. Maybe the wind's not blowing in there today. Maybe they're just a little bit behind different area of the lake and you're gonna key on those perch. And I noticed that the perch in the fall have really kind of lost their color a little bit. They've kind of just turned bland looking. They turned more yellows, more green, or more just regular old pumpkinseed brown. They've had kind of a rough year. They've kind of just changed color. I just don't see a lot of the times that they're them big, bright, beautiful colors when that water's kind of hot.

And so I've done the same thing, but I still like to utilize a jig and do it. But you can see here this is just a Okeechobee Craw color on the Freedom Jig that I pulled all the strands out of except for the green pumpkin blue. And then I put a Zoom Super Craw on there, a Super Speed Craw and it's just kind of a bland green pumpkin magic. But you can tell there I don't have any other color in that. It's really just bland.

But what I like to do this time of year is take some Spike-It. Now, you can buy it in Dip, or you can buy it in a pen. Now, this here happens to be an aerosol, it's pretty easy. And I just do that right there and you can see there that really gave that bait a good perchy profile. And if you'll look at all them little sun perch, even though they've lost their color, their tail is really bright. It's really, really chartreuse kind of an aqua blue. And I think a lot of times that gets you the bite when somebody's not doing that. And this Magic Craw color and Okeechobee color, it's got some hues in it that gives off a little bit of a blue sheen but not so bright like the chartreuses and the purples like there is in the Governor when we was throwing it back in the summertime. Those are probably the two biggest things.

Now, both these Jigs here are going to be the 5/8-ounce model. I want it as heavy as possible. If I'm fishing deeper than like 6, 8-foot, I might even go to a 3/4 ounce. I want that thing zooming by them. They're really aggressive in the fall. Those shad are really darting around, those perch are doing the same thing. I want 'em to really think it's getting away and commit to eating that bait. And that'll do a couple things for you. You can fish a little faster and you can cover more water. And then when that fish goes to eat it, he will commit to the whole bait. I mean, he'll come up there and eat that whole thing.

When it's going really slow, sometimes they'll just follow it and nip at it. So if you'll throw a little bit heavier head, it'll go ahead and get him to commit because he doesn't want it getting away because that faster fall rate.

You know, I'm gonna throw both of these on a 7'10" Denali Flipping Stick. I mean a Covert Series or the Lithium Series. One I can really crack 'em with. 20 or 25-pound Sunline Shooter. You know, High Speed Johnny Morris Reel and I'm gonna lean on them hard. This is a power technique. You can cover a lot of water. You don't have to worry about your line size because that bass is not looking at how fast that bait's going that your line size is gonna make any difference in my opinion. Somebody might argue that fact, but I just don't have any issue to think that it really does.

And it allows you to really get that fish coming your way. You know, you don't have to really worry about, you know, finessing them and you don't want to around them boat docks. You might have to throw over two cables to get to the boat float on that walkway, you know, and if he does bite, you've gotta be able to get him out of there. And so that's really a vital part of it as far as flipping in the fall.

But you can do this technique all the way until the water starts dropping down in the mid-50s. Once it gets down in the mid-50s, it's getting pretty cold. Now, you should definitely transition in something like a buzzbait into your arsenal with your two flipping jigs as the water cools and gets down in there in the 60s and in the upper 50s. Spinnerbait's gonna come into play. You're gonna start putting your flipping sticks down. But the whole key with all of these, even though we're talking about a buzzbait, a spinnerbait, a perch-colored jig, and a shad-colored jig, is that we're keying on the bait. The bait's gonna be the big player in the fall no matter where you live. If it's a herring lake or whatever it is, the application that you use to catch them may not be a flipping stick. But keep that idea of fall bait in your idea because that's what it's gonna come down to. Always be around the bait in the fall.

But hopefully, you can try some of these on your favorite setups, get something you're comfortable with, have some success, build a little bit of trust in it, and you'll be surprised as the years go by how many more fish you can catch in any given fall with this kind of tactic.