Fishing in August and much of September can be a humbling experience if you continue to fish the way you would in early summer. While there are always exceptions, the days of catching fish roaming the shallows are over until fall arrives. For the next 60 or so days, you’ll need to understand (or remember) the basics of dog day fishing to succeed on most area lakes/reservoirs. Let’s set the scene with what’s going on in most lakes around Virginia currently.
The water is almost has hot as the air at times. You can expect water temperatures in the upper 80s and low 90s with air temps approaching 100 degrees on some days. While the days are getting shorter, substantial cooling won’t occur until mid-September, so you are stuck with hot water for a while yet.
Aquatic weeds like milfoil and hydrilla are growing heartily to a peak at some point in early October. This can be helpful.
Young-of-the-year shad, alewives and herring are schooled and doing their absolute best to avoid being discovered by game fish.
Speaking of game fish, the largemouth that live in our lakes are often schooled deep now for most of the day. That doesn’t mean they won’t venture shallow at times when conditions are right. Paying attention with all the tools you have will help you crack the daily code on this behavior.
Since the water is hot, bass do need to feed often and heavily to maintain body mass. This is why bass fishing during the dog days of summer can actually be good, if you know what to do.
We asked long time Lake Anna guide C.C. McCotter about how he produces for clients during the late summer, and he shared some tactics and strategies.
“For me on Lake Anna, it’s about finding the baitfish. If you can do that, then you have the key to unlock the front door of the puzzle room for the day,” he noted.
At some point during the summer, McCotter notes bass will go from mostly being deep to roaming and following bait like herring and shad. With the advent of forward-facing sonar, he says following the bait trail and seeing fish is much easier.
“We used to look for fish chasing bait, herons, terns, gulls, whatever we could discern above the water. Not though, my Humminbird MEGA Live shows me where the bait is and if there are bass nearby. We still use all the old ways to find schools of fish, but the real time sonar has assisted greatly in rolling a pattern throughout regions of the lake.”
On Anna McCotter will target bass on herring wherever he sees red… red next to blue, that is on his Humminbird LakeMaster VX map of Lake Anna. He adjusts his Humminbird Helix 10 to show depths of 15’ or less as red and when these areas show up next to a number of close contour lines that indicate a drop off, he will often find bass feeding on herring.
“This is a great pattern to use mid and down lake from mid-June into late August depending on the year. There are times when almost every place I stop at has a few fish willing to bite.”
For this pattern, McCotter will utilize a combination of FFS, a soft plastic jerkbait (Fitt Nottafluke) and a minnow/jighead lure. Sometimes, he can also use a topwater bait matched to the baitfish profile on the spot. Good choices include poppers, wake baits and tail prop baits.
“You sometimes just use the topwaters to rile up the school, then use the jerkbait and minnow to cash in,” the 30-year veteran guide noted. “You want to make your bait resemble a herring that has strayed from the school. If you see fish following but not biting, speed up your retrieve and see if that triggers a bite.”
Key to successfully not spooking a school you are working is boat positioning and long casts. For that McCotter relies on his Minn Kota Ulterra Quest and Berkley X9 10-pound line that permits him to cast long distances with lighter lures and still have a strong hookset.
McCotter says if you find bass around herring but don’t see any sign of them feeding, it may be that they are feeding near the bottom. For this common summer scenario, McCotter will use a size 7 Berkley Frittside crankbait. He says the run true out of the package, are available in many colors that look like herring or shad, come with good hooks and have just the right pitch and yaw to entice summer bass.
“You want to crank the bait down to seven or so feet with your rod tip at 10 o’clock so you don’t bog down in the typical bottom weed growth in most lakes yet come through the zone where the bass are feeding.”
Another lure McCotter says anglers tend to have seasonal memory loss on is a belly spinner. These age-old, simple lures resemble baitfish and are easily visible on FFS. He says schools of summer bass feeding on shad tend to hit a belly spinner readily. He uses a ¼-oz. white version with a willow leave blade.
When the Lake Anna resident determines Anna bass have switched over to feeding on young-of-the-year herring or shad he knows it’s time to change lures.
“When you have bass feeding on one to two-inch baits you cannot fish what you normally fish. It’s time to try small A-rigs like a YUM-brella Flash Mob Jr. rigged with straight tail minnows on 1/8-oz. jigheads, poppers, smaller soft plastic jerkbaits, drop shots, small swimbaits and baits like the Riser or Strike King Evader. These bass are often very size particular so don’t mess around with bigger baits if you aren’t getting bit.”
Other tactics to utilize during the dog days of summer include heading into cooler headwaters of lakes. Tributaries eventually become flowing creeks and this water is cooler than the main lake – often significantly. McCotter has run into these zones on Anna during July and August and found flowing, cooler water and a totally different kind of fish to catch.
“These are more like river fish. They are positioned on something like a stump, log or grass clump and can require multiple pitches with a creature bait, spinnerbait or soft plastic jerkbait depending on the water clarity.”
As noted above submerged aquatic vegetation can offer productive summer fishing conditions. The oxygen-rich water and shade around weeds like milfoil and hydrilla can be like an oasis for hot water fish.
When fish begin to relate to submerged weeds on lakes like Anna, Gaston, Buggs is anyone’s guess, but normally it occurs in late summer – September and lasts through the fall.
If baitfish are also present around the grassbeds, you have the recipe for excellent summer fishing no matter how hot. Fish the edges and “rooms” in the beds. Before grass gets halfway to the surface, crankbaits and vibrating jigs and be effective.
Young gun angler Logan Buttolph also fishes Anna, but does travel fish as part of the Clemson University College Fishing Team. He likes to run and gun on dog day fishing trips.
“A strategy I like to utilize during this time period is a run and gun style of fishing with FFS. FFS has made offshore fishing easier than ever but with that comes more angling pressure so the fish get smarter and in turn harder to catch. How I approach this is with a really fast style of fishing we call run and gun. Basically I try to run to as many places as I can in a day. I can pull up to a point and scan it for a school with FFS in under five minutes. If I see a school I will stop and fish it, and if I dont I keep moving.”
The Doswell resident says eventually you will find a few points that have more fish on them then the others and those are the main areas you should focus on for the day.
“I will keep rotating through the points I find with fish on them and eventually will get them to bite.
“I can’t stress how important it is to run in as many areas as possible in a day, fish move so much during the summertime that you might not catch them in the same area you did a week prior. That’s why covering more water than anyone else can lead to finding schools of bass that are less pressured by other anglers, in turn catching you more fish.
“It may seem a little crazy at first but once you know what to look for you can be very successful and efficient in finding bass fast on any lake!”
