Winter is coming. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s an inescapable astronomical fact. What it means — the impact — varies by latitude. If you just trembled from a vision of the road to the boat ramp bumper-to-bumper with snowbirds, you are dismissed. Enjoy your “winter.”

Against the Dying of the Light

Up north, the days are shedding daylight at an increasing pace, the edge is off the heat, and remaining boatable days will start the countdown to zero in locales where they pull the docks and lock the gates. But many great days on the water remain, especially for fishermen.

Some of the best time to be on the water comes after the boats start seriously thinning in September.


Cooler Water Temps

After the back-to-school shift in mid-August, the next big gear shifter comes as the water gets too cold for skiers, wake boarders, jet skiers and paddleboarders. The place-to-yourself feeling comes back. The best autumn weather, the days of distilled intensity, are the most pleasant of the year, and some of the best time to be on the water comes after the boats start seriously thinning in September or so, give or take by latitude and elevation.

Pretty soon the season is winding out the same way it cranked up: the hardcore, fanatic and lifer anglers fished it in and they’ll fish it out.

(OK, throw in some duck hunters.)


Fall Carnage

Like the weather, late season fishing tends to also be a matter of distilled intensity, bursts of action in an increasingly empty angling calendar. Most anglers think of fall as trophy time, not numbers time. Everybody is well-fed and fat, and the biggest fish, having made themselves scarce through the bright heat of the summer, are once again on the prowl in more vulnerable ways. In the case of fall salmon runs, the fish are in fact as big as they are going to get.

Most anglers think of fall as trophy time.

The problem, from a boating perspective, is that it all tends to get a little less do-able the later it gets, with the window of time worth being on the water shorter, and the water colder, and the tests of endurance greater. As one angler once said to one disgruntled domestic partner, “If you think I’m having fun out there…”


Think Ahead, Think It Through

If you’re planning to keep your boat on the water as far into the season as you can, you want to start thinking ahead. Cold, like pain, can be difficult to remember accurately. 

Yeah, it was bad, but was it really that bad?  you find yourself saying. I dunno … some cold weather would feel pretty good right about now.

The first 40-degree morning at the boat ramp may adjust your perspective on that.

Cold weather amplifies everything that goes wrong. A July night on the side of the highway with fried bearings will at least be warm and short.

If you’ve had a good and busy summer with a lot of trips to the water and are keeping it going as long as you can — and especially if you’re cooking up some sort of “last big run” — the turning of the seasons is a good time to give the trailer the once-over. Check hubs, lighting, tire pressure and tire tread and sidewalls — all the things you should do regularly but tend to fall out of the habit of doing in the rhythm of regular runs to the water all summer long. 


Cold Weather Maintenance

There’s a routine for winter maintenance — what you want to do when your rig is going into extended cold weather storage. That’s not necessary if your boat is only going to be off the water while you wait out a cold front. 

But some of those cold fronts prior to the inevitable big season-ender can interrupt the season with severe temperatures, cold enough that water freezing up is going to be a concern if your boat sits in an unheated garage and particularly if it lives outdoors. 

The most important thing to do between launches is to get water drained from your outboard.

The most important thing to do between launches is to get water drained from your outboard. That’s easy enough to do; your outboard is designed to drain completely when in the tilt-down position, and you’re already supposed to be draining it at the ramp anyway as part of your post-load/pre-road routine to prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species. Just return your motor to the lowered position when you park it to let gravity give any remaining water the chance to drain.

An October cold front is unlikely to turn a 30-gallon livewell into an ice cube, at least anywhere south of Lake of the Woods, maybe Flin Flon, but bilge pumps, pumps and lines associated with livewells, and any other water lines aboard, are vulnerable to freeze damage and should be drained if the boat will sit through temps below freezing. Hit the switch on all pumps for a few seconds to be sure all water has been expelled.


Bundle Up

Personal gear — the clothing that keeps you warm and dry, comfortable enough to have fun on the water and maintain your focus and control of your boat when running under power — takes on a bigger importance as the cold weather starts to creep back in. If you are going to fish into the foulest weather safe to be out in, dress the part. Good deck boots, bibs, rain jackets, hats, gloves and base layers will add up to comfort that keeps you on the water longer.

If you are going to fish into the foulest weather safe to be out in, dress the part.


Don't Forget Your Life Jacket

Cold weather means the return to cold water and increasing risk of hypothermia if you go overboard. Getting layered up like the Michelin Man can make personal flotation feel like just a bit too much, and this is when Type V automatic inflatable vests are worth the extra expense. Your life jacket won’t do you any good if it’s not on you if you go in, and the inflatables are just easier to keep on over layers of bulky cold weather clothing when running and when fishing.  

The late season also means the end of wet-foot launching and loading, and the return of your stay-dry ramp routine. 


Great Fall Fishing

Fall fishing can be tricky, time-sensitive and subject to the whims of weather. Predators still have near-peak levels of forage available to them, and the cooling water is slowing everybody’s metabolism. A bite can come to a hard stop; the shock of a sudden cold front will scatter fish to search for stable, warmer water. Weather-wise, it doesn’t have to be great, just don’t let it be brutal, and above all let it be stable, if not warming — though some of the best fishing of the late season happens in weather that is some degree of nasty.


Great Lakes Salmon

One of the surest signs of a shift in the seasons in the Upper Midwest: Lake Michigan pier anglers starting to stick Coho and Chinook as August rolls toward summer’s last big fling on Labor Day weekend, signaling salmon starting to congregate off the mouths of west Michigan rivers. After spending four years plying the depths of the big water, the mature salmon are returning to their natal waters (or where they were stocked). Sometimes that’s not very far upriver, or even any further inland than a harbor.

Fish, including king salmon to 20 pounds and up, will stage in the drowned river mouths and harbors, waiting to move upriver. Runs peak in October, and summer-run Skamania steelhead and large migratory lake-run brown trout will mix in.


Southeastern Stripers

‘Fall carnage’ is what one East Tennessee guide calls the late season striper fishing on the big reservoirs in the eastern part of the state. Stripers are coldwater fish, and the introduced populations in southeastern reservoirs spend their summers chilling deep. 

Locals say the “stripe” aren’t what they used to be, but the locals say that everywhere. Lousy weather does a lot for a striper, and the first good taste of cold weather brings on chances at genuine 40-inchers. Shad don’t react so well to cooling temps, and stripers plow the slowed and disoriented bait. Rain and temperatures in the 50s without too much wind will set up the best opportunity to find the biggest stripers blowing up bait on the surface. 

Hybrid bass (or wipers, palmetto bass, Cherokee bass, or hybrid stripe as the white bass/striped bass hybrid is variously known), have a more extensive inland distribution than stripers, and will be doing the same thing as winter draws in as far north and west as the high plains reservoirs of Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado. In the right set-up, wipers can be found corralling bait and chowing in the shallow backs of coves even after the pheasant hunting has started.


Carpin’ (No, Seriously)

Fly fishing for carp is gaining adherents as fast as anything in the angling world and early fall might be the very best time of the year to fly fish for the big goldfish in most places. True, in the heat of summer the piggy-est of minnows can be so focused on the feedbag that you can almost wade right up to them, but the late-season behavior of carp makes them more interesting and often more catchable targets. 

As the water cools, you are more likely to encounter solitary feeders. Whether you are equipped to pole or are locating fish or a fishy stretch of shoreline and then wading, you will find more situations in which can work from fish to fish than you typically can during the summer months.

Fall carpin’ is the best of late season fair-weather fishing, like one last hit of summer.

Social behaviors of carp — all the chasing, jumping and other displaying grouped-up carp do for much for the summer — are at a minimum. The fish are no longer congregating in large pods, and you will find fewer situations in which one bad cast can empty a flat of carp when one spooked fish takes all the others with him. Water clarity is also at its best in many places, providing the best sight fishing of the year.

Fall carpin’ is the best of late season fair-weather fishing, like one last hit of summer: get on the water during the afternoons of a good warm spell, with the sun bright overhead for maximum visibility.