5 Best Fall Bass Fishing Lures for Every Water Condition

Fall bass fishing is a bit of a learning curve. Most anglers start out fishing in the mid to late spring and through the summer, and when the turnover hits, they pack their rods up for the year. 

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably decided to get a little more serious and enjoy the fast-biting action of fall. That, or you’re a seasoned pro who wants to get some new tips before heading out on the water. 

Well, we have our five favorite fall bass lures to share with you today to make sure you can get all the bites you can before the winter hardship kicks in. We personally use these lures every year, and they’re great for any water conditions. 

1: The Whopper Plopper

Prop baits work extremely well in the fall. As such, we couldn’t make this list of best lures for the fall without listing the most famous prop bait of them all. 

The legendary Whopper Plopper is a must-have part of your fall bass fishing arsenal. 

The Whopper Plopper is a segmented torpedo-shaped lure with a tail-like propeller at the end. When you buzz it across the water, that tail kicks water like crazy, and the bait has a predictable side-to-side movement. 

This is far more intense action than your usual topwater frog, popper, or similar lure, but it’s surprisingly good for stealth setups. Especially when it hits the water with a soft thud, it doesn’t start that high-intensity splashing until you’ve reeled it in a bit and picked up speed. 

This drives bass crazy, and you’ll get massive blowups on your Whopper Plopper if you can position it correctly and use it at the right time. 

Typically, this is best in low-light situations during the fall. If you can get on the water right as the first rays of sunlight are hitting it, that’s a good time to pull out your Whopper Plopper. The same is true right before the last rays of sunlight disappear over the horizon. If there’s an overcast that is keeping things a bit dim, you can have a lot of success. 

During those periods, we like to cast it upstream in a river and into the wind in a lake and buzz it back to us. Especially if we can line it up along the side of a long weed line. That Whopper Plopper will drag the big bass out from the weeds every time. 

Now, it is important to remember that Whopper Plopper is a name-brand product. There are lots of prop baits on the market that are almost exactly like it, and they can fill this same role in your tackle box. 

We would recommend using a bit of caution with other prop baits, though. They don’t all have the same action, and they’re not all made to the same standards. We’ve seen plenty of knock-offs bend at the middle segment or snap off entirely with just a few fish on the hook. 

Also, we highly recommend the original Whopper Plopper. The smaller models can sometimes take too long to start kicking, and we’ve noticed that they produce more short bites than the full-size models. This might have to do with hook spacing differences, but we do know that we’ve had better hook-ups with the bigger Ploppers. 

2: Lipless Crankbaits

We usually recommend traditional crankbaits with large plastic bills when we mention cranks, but fall fishing is one time when we 100% recommend going lipless. 

Specifically, we prefer the 6^th Sense Quake Thud lipless crankbait in an orange and red craw pattern. We’ve had a lot of success with it, and we’re sure you will, too. 

The lipless crank excels in fall conditions because it is highly versatile. You can fish it anywhere in the water column, and you can even shift its position in the column in the middle of a retrieval pattern. All you have to do to control the depth is let it sink to your desired depth, and to raise it, you lift the rod tip while you reel. 

That’s a useful feature when you aren’t sure where the bass are in the column, or if you’re retrieving over multiple types of lake features.

For example, if you cast beyond a drop off, you can let it fall deep into the water, and as you approach that drop off point, you can lift it up to meet any bass that are hunting in the area. Then you can run it near the bottom in the shallower parts of the banks. You have all the control you could need to fish near the top, middle, or bottom of the water column. 

This also keeps you from having to tie on a new lure to try new things. You want to keep a lure in the water at all times, and minimizing re-ties is key. 

A lipless crank also has a more subtle action than a standard crankbait. It knocks around and rattles, but it’s not as pronounced. This is a major advantage in colder water. 

When the water’s temp drops, the bait fish get very sluggish. By using a more subtle lure, you mimic those sluggish bait fish more accurately. You can also make that action even more subtle by simply slowing down your retrieval pattern. 

The reason we like to use a craw pattern is that craws are a major part of a bass’s diet in the fall. That’s when craws are largest, and the bass tear them up during their pre-winter feeding frenzy. If you buzz your lipless crank around the bottom of the column in shallow water, it looks a lot like a crawfish on the move, and bass love it. 

Lipless crank baits aren’t without their faults, though. 

Since they can sink to any depth, it’s very easy to let them drop all the way to the bottom, and since a lot of bottoms are snag havens, the double treble hooks will get you deeply snagged left and right. 

That’s remedied by learning how to time your drop properly, and you’ll get better at choosing good spots for it the more you use the lure. 

Since the lipless crank is so versatile, we like to use this fall bass fishing lure when we aren’t sure what part of the column the bass are in, or we want to try several methods without re-tying our lures left and right. 

3: Jigs

Jigs seem to make their way onto basically every best lure list, and that’s for a very good reason. They’re exceptional all year long. You just have to know how to use them right. 

In the fall, jigs excel at targeting bass that are feeding on the bottom. We have a ton of jigs that we love, and we recommend grabbing a variety from Strike King, BassMooch, Big Bite, and any other company you love. Tackle Warehouse has a massive selection for you to browse. 

Bass don’t tend to go too deep during the fall, but a jig can still be used to fish the bottom of the shallows effectively. That’s where you’ll want to cast throughout fall. Find weed lines along the banks, fish around the boat docks, and similar areas where bass can hide, and cast around those spots. 

A lot of the time, you want to use a jig slowly. That can be useful in the fall if you’re fishing on a particularly cold day, but the bass are usually very aggressive in the fall as long as the temp isn’t too low.

So, consider using a swim jig or a bladed jig and buzzing it through the water along hotspots. This gives you the benefits of using a jig, but it presents the lure much more erratically and faster. When the bass are being aggressive, that helps out a lot. 

Another surefire way to snag some big bass in the fall is to dress a football jig up like a craw. Get a football jig and a matching craw trailer. A craw trailer is essentially a craw-shaped soft plastic, but the tail is cut off so it can lie flat against the head of the jig. 

Craws are a delicacy for bass in the fall, and a jig replicates a craw’s movements very well. By adding the profile of a craw to it, you make the presentation more realistic, and you do a great job of matching the fall hatch. 

Our favorite colors for the craw combo are red and black, orange and brown, or black and blue, depending on the water conditions. 

A jig is one of the best fall bass lures that you can trust when the bite slows down, the water is a little colder than usual, and you’re in a high-pressure spot. As a bonus, almost all of them are designed to be weedless. So, you don’t have to worry about snags while fishing around all the dying lake flora or limbs that are falling off the trees into the water. 

4: Swimbaits

During the fall season, bass are primarily focused on eating as many bait fish as possible to fatten up for winter. So, using a lure that imitates a bait fish realistically is one of the best things you can do to catch fall bass. 

A swimbait does an amazing job at imitating a bait fish. Even a simple paddle tail bait provides a decent shad silhouette, and the tail action is realistic. If you upgrade to the more realistic options on the market, you can get an even better presentation out of the lure. 

When picking your swimbait, don’t just pick the hottest thing out at the moment. To choose the best fall bass fishing lures, consider the bait fish that live in the water you’re fishing in and pick a high-quality bait that mimics that bait fish.

You want to match the hatch and blend your lure into the schools of bait fish that are swimming around in the shallows. Cast anywhere you can see schools, and if you can’t see them due to water conditions, you can always trust wind break points, coves, and weed lines. 

A good thing about using swim baits is that you can adjust your retrieval pattern to approach the bass in a variety of ways. If they’re really snapping at lures hard, you can buzz that bait back to you quickly. If they’re lethargic, you can mix in pops and pauses. You can even reel it in slowly and around the top and then dead stick it for a free-fall to the bottom.  Try different approaches depending on how the bass are behaving. 

5: Spinner Baits

Finally, a good old-fashioned spinner bait is going to do extremely well in the fall. The bass are in overdrive, preparing for the winter, and a quickly retrieved spinner bait looks like a fast-moving bait fish. It makes for the perfect snack in a bass’s eyes. 

There’s nothing difficult about using these. Just cast it out and buzz it back, but try not to get it covered in algae and gunk. 

We like to use combos that match the hatch in our local waters, and you should try the same. 

Strike King makes high-quality spinner baits, and there are lots of other great brands making them. The best part is that they’re so simple that the brand you choose isn’t really all that important. Just remember that you get what you pay for, and super cheap options might fall apart quickly. 

Add These Lures to Your Tackle Box for a Fast-Action Fall

Fall is a great time to get on the water and try to catch your personal best. The bass are plump from rapid feeding, and they’re extremely active as long as the temp doesn’t dip too low. 

If you grab a few of each of these fall bass lures in different colors, you’ll have a solid arsenal to approach any water conditions throughout the entire season. 

If you want to know more about using any of them, your friends at Bass Forecast have guides covering that, too. 

To find the best spots for catching bass in the fall, download the Bass Forecast app today!