DUSTIN CONNELL: Keeping up with the baitfish is key

Mercury pro combines old-school knowledge with electronics savvy to find populations of baitfish and bass

The past few years have been dominated by forward-facing sonar; it’s no secret that’s been the thing everyone has wanted to talk about, good or bad. Just mentioning it or showing it on video stirs up plenty of comments.

Regardless of your opinion on how prominently the technology should be featured in tournament competition, it’s tough to deny its power as a learning tool. For me, one of the things I’ve learned most about in recent years is baitfish and bass migration. Those suckers move fast and often, and there is no rule of thumb for what they “should” do — except that the bass will always be where the baitfish are.

Keeping up with schools of baitfish is vitally important for my fishing in the fall and early winter. But it’s something that can help you the rest of the year, too — both of my Bass Pro Tour wins in 2024 came because I was able to find a school of bait, and thus bass, that had moved somewhere no one else thought to look. The more time I’ve spent with forward-facing sonar, the more I realize how little we knew about baitfish before it came along. My electronics help speed things up to find bait-chasing bass, for sure, but it also takes some old-school thinking about wind, birds and water clarity to use them to their fullest.

Go to the creeks? Not so fast

For all my life, we’ve been told to follow the shad migration to the backs of creeks if we want to catch bass in the fall. That’s still a way to catch fish, but my Lowrance ActiveTarget has shown me things that have changed my thinking.

While some fish absolutely go shallow, there’s plenty more that still live on the main lake and don’t migrate anywhere. You don’t have to head to the creeks, because the shad may be in main-lake pockets, ditches or creek mouths. Also, not all bass and shad will be doing the same thing.

In the past, those fish in the backs of creeks were simply the easiest to find. But now, it’s never been easier to locate baitfish in open water. Traditionally, we had to watch for birds or surface activity. Those are still great clues, but if you don’t see any activity, you can still find the baitfish just by panning around until you spot them. And while it’s pretty obvious when you see a bunch of birds on a bank that there’s baitfish somewhere nearby, my electronics are still key to finding out what depth they’re at and how the bass are relating to them.

This time of year, I will fish where the bait is and not waste my time anywhere else. I’m also not using baits that don’t imitate shad — I hardly ever throw something that looks like a crawfish in the fall. It’s all about shad for me. I’ll most often be throwing a spinnerbait if the water’s dirty, and if it’s clear, it will be a jerkbait like the Rapala PXR Mavrik.

Here today, gone tomorrow

Another eye-opening insight from forward-facing sonar is how much bass will move daily. It’s pretty common knowledge that smallmouth and spotted bass will become nomadic following schools of baitfish, but it happens plenty with largemouth, too. I saw this firsthand at our first tournament of the year on Toledo Bend in February.

In practice, two days before the first competition day, I saw piles of bass in a few pockets in a creek — the place was loaded. Then, they were all gone on the first day of the tournament. The wind had shifted and blown all those shad out of there, and the bass followed. Without forward-facing sonar, I might have just assumed they weren’t biting and fished there for a while, but I could instantly see it all right on my screen. The place was a ghost town, so I searched for where they went until I found them again.

In a situation like that, it’s not just electronics that help me find those fish again, but knowing which way the wind had been blowing. I’m always paying attention to wind direction because of how susceptible baitfish are to it. Water clarity is another factor that can significantly impact shad migration. Paying attention to the little differences in color throughout a fishery can give you the clues you need to find a big concentration of baitfish.

Find the bait, find the bass — it sounds so simple. Thanks to modern electronics, mastering that ability is easier than ever before. It takes a balance of paying attention to the conditions, knowing how baitfish are likely to be affected and then using technology to confirm all that information.