CT Fall Fishing is Slow - Spider Jigs Working

Wed, Oct 1, 2008

CT fall fishing is upon us and largemouth and smallmouth bass fishing has been slow at best lately. I have seen reports of people working hard for every bass they catch, with most success being found using spider jigs, tubes, and jig and pig around structure in 5-8ft of water. I wasn’t planning on fishing for bass this week, since we were supposed to be heading 20 miles off Montauk to go shark fishing on Monday, but with 5-7ft seas from Hurricane Kyle in the Atlantic we decided not to go. With fishing on my mind we chose to hit Cedar Lake for the morning / early afternoon bite.

We got out on the water around 7:30am and started fishing shallow structure with everything from texas rigged senkos to spinnerbaits with no luck. After finding nothing in the shallows we went across the lake to fish deeper water and structure. Brian stuck with a senko and I switched over to a black and blue spider grub (technically it was the chompers hula grub). We both fished around the docks and pontoon boats (the ones that are still in the water) with minimal luck.

We both persevered with our respective baits and fished for about an hour with nothing more than a couple nibbles, until we got to some deeper docks on the north west shore of the lake. Just as I was commenting that I should be getting fish on spider grubs this time of year, I hooked up with a 2 pound largemouth. The next cast resulted in a 2.5lb largemouth. Having thought I found a pattern we continued fishing the deep water docks, and managed to find another 6 or seven fish including 2 smallmouth. Brian ended up landing only a smallmouth and 1 largemouth on the senko, despite his 5 hours of hard work casting and skipping his bait under the docks.

Largest fish of the day was only about 3lbs, and they were few and far between, but hopefully once our weather pattern settles down and the rain stops we will see some better fall fishing. If anyone is having success with other baits this time of the year let me know via the comments section below!