In my 27 years experience guiding, I've found that 60 to 70 degrees is the absolute best water temperature for fishing. In the Fall, it usually gets in that prime range near the first or second week of October. This year, we are 2-3 weeks behind on the cool down. Despite all the fronts in the past few weeks, the water temp is still 73 degrees. So we still have the best fishing ahead of us. Most of the tournaments are over and hunting season is upon us. So, there isn't many boats on the lake even though it's prime fishing season. It's time to come to Lake Fork! The lake is still less than a foot low, the water is clear, crowds are thin, the vegetation is still green, and the fish are feeding up for the winter.
Yesterday, we had quite the assortment of fish. We caught largemouths primarily on Carolina rig, drop shots, weighless senkos, and spoons. I think we could have got bit on most any bait. But my clients wanted to keep fish, so we primarily targeted those fish. The yellow bass finally started stacking up in good numbers on the humps. We fished for them about an hour and got about 30 on my smaller homemade spoons. Later, my client threw one of my 1oz lead spoons in about 15 feet and caught an 8 pounder about 60 feet from the boat. What an awesome sight seeing a fish like that try to shake a 1 oz spoon from that distance! Fortunately, Mike kept her on and she didn't shake again until she was in the net. See the pics on my facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/LakeForkFishingGuide
We also fished for crappie for a couple of hours and caught a few keepers in the trees on black/chartreuse jigs in 20ft. Personally, I find the yellow bass as good as crappie and much easier to catch and clean. So, even though most of them are small, they add up fast when they're bunched up on the humps. Surprisingly, I haven't come across very many white bass this season. I bet we got 15 yellows to every white bass. It appears that the lake is getting thinned out of them. If that's the case, it will be good for the future of largemouths. But I only cover a small portion of the lake. I may see 15 whites to every yellow bass next week.
I mentioned this last time, but I will repeat it: My favorite way to fish in the Fall is to graph fish on the humps and fish with drop-shot worms and my homemade spoons and tailspinners. The dropshot and tailspinner catch almost exclusively largemouth bass. Wheras, my homemade spoons will usually catch at least 5 species every day. Most full-days I end up fishing shallow around some type of vegetation at some point of the day. But we almost always end up catching our biggest fish on the humps where we catch all the different species on spoons. So I'm often hesitant to leave the deep water.
See full report at http://www.bassfishing.org/report.php

Thanks for the report. It is very helpful. Planning a low budget trip to Fork in November. Hoping for a deep crank bite.

Nice report

I️ get your emails Richie. Thanks.