Finding ciscoes can help you catch more giant walleye, lake trout, pike, bass and muskies this fall. Here’s how

LET IT HANG

By now, the latest secret is out about catching cisco-crunching smallmouth bass, thanks to Kenora, Ontario’s Jeff Gustafson winning the prestigious 2023 Bassmaster Classic. Hanging a four-inch cisco-impersonating, fluke-style bait—super-glued to a 3/8-ounce Nishine Smelthead jig—is as simple and as deadly as it gets.

About the only thing that will shock you is how many of the vicious strikes arrive at the side of the boat in the form of a giant walleye or mammoth northern pike instead. The fish just can’t tolerate seeing a lonesome solitary cisco above their heads, suspended in the middle of the water column. Watch your lure on the sonar screen and you’ll see a mark appear below it, then streak up and annihilate it.

But wait, it can get even better. Let’s go back to that scenario where the water thermometer told us the bottom of the thermocline—the cisco layer—was 38 feet down. This time, slide over to a nearby 45-foot hump and dangle the same fluke-style cisco bait over the top of it.

You can even use your electric trolling motor, set on a low speed, to slowly stroll the bait off the edge, over 50, 60, even 70 or more feet of open water. Just be sure you’ve got a good grip on your rod because the lake trout hiding in ambush in the shadows below will try to rip it from your hand. This tactic is so exciting and effective, I rarely troll for lakers anymore.

What we’re doing here is calling up cold-water predators such as lake trout and whitefish to the base of the thermocline to attack our cisco-masquerading baits. At the same time, we’re pulling down the warm-water plunderers to the top of the roughly 15-foot-thick band of water, where a disproportionate amount of the predators’ favourite food is concentrated.

BONUS TIP: ROOM TO GROW

The preferred water temperature for the growth and survival of many fish species changes as they mature and grow bigger. Large walleye and northern pike, for example, seek out deeper, colder water to reduce their metabolism and devote more energy to the production of eggs. They achieve this by moving more closely to the thermocline, where they can prey heavily, often specializing on ciscoes. It’s an outrageously brilliant adaptation.