By Mike Iaconelli

In the northern United States, mild fall weather can dissipate quickly. Well before Halloween, anglers may have to dredge up bass from deep water.
On many lakes, the colder weather forces us into a mid-fall pattern, a time when fish have left the shallows and are retreating along their structural highways.
Before finding this season’s best places to fish, it’s important to remember the difference between cover and structure. Cover is some physical object separate from the actual bottom contour, while structure includes the breaks, drops and humps that make up the bottom.
Think of structure as the highways that bass use to migrate from one place to another. Think of cover as the rest stops and restaurants along the roadside. The presence of cover on some type of structure is considered a “sweet spot.”
During mid-fall, you need to find the sweet spots to catch bass. Since finding them is more than half the battle, how does an angler go about it? The equation is this: homework + on-the-water fine-tuning = sweet spots.
For your homework, you need to study maps. The vast majority of deep-water structure I’ve found was first spotted on a map. Contour maps provide the information needed to narrow the search.
For mid-fall, I’m looking for areas between spring’s spawning flats and the deep-water vertical break areas of winter. The structure breaks that connect these two areas are the bass’s migration highway. To be successful at this time, you need to figure out where on the highway the bass have settled. Find these highways on your contour map and then proceed to look for the sweet spots.
Fine-tuning involves casing the area I’ve already discovered on the map. To do this, I’ll fast idle and zigzag through the zone keeping my eye on the sonar. When I find something I like, I’ll toss out a marker and then begin to circle the area to mark its boundaries, throwing out additional markers along the way.
With an area marked out, it’s time to cast around this possible sweet spot. For this, I like to use a search bait such as a crankbait, Carolina rig or jig. The search bait needs to stay in contact with the bottom while I further fine-tune the location of the cover. The message the search bait sends up the rod is critical to this success. With it I can feel that isolated pile of brush, hump of rocks or the place where structure changes in some way.
Structure with hard cover on it such as shell or rock is best during this mid-fall frame. Structure with vertical breaks will come more into play as fall lengthens.
Remember that a thin echo line on your sonar represents a hard bottom, while a thicker line represents a softer bottom. In mid-fall, look for the thin lines.
Even though I’m feeling out the bottom with the search lure, I’m also hoping to catch a bass because this will tell me the fish really like the sweet spot I’ve found. If I catch a bass, I’ll mark the spot on my GPS unit and will immediately jot down some notes on my map, including the GPS number, depth, water temperature, clarity and direction of the wind.
During the mid-fall pattern in Northern waters, you will face both active feeding fish and inactive fish. Typically, there is a difference in the way they relate to these sweet spots. Aggressive feeding often takes place during periods of low light or in a low-pressure system. At these times, fish will move farther from the cover along the highway structure. During periods of high pressure or under other adverse conditions, bass tend to hold deeper and also tighter to cover.
The great thing about all this is that sweet spots on hard structure tend to produce year after year. Once you map out and locate the best producing spots on a map, you can return season after season. In the meantime, continue to do your homework and fine-tuning with the aim of locating more of these
great locations.

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