By the middle of October, Lake Winnipesaukee belongs to the people who live there. The summer boats are on trailers, the rental docks are stacked on the shore, and the lake is seventy square miles of flat gray water with the hills on fire around it. It is also, if you believe the handful of guides who stay on through the color, the best smallmouth fishing of the year. The lake turns over in October, the warm water on top finally cooling enough to mix with the cold below, and when that happens the smallmouth leave the shallows where they spent the summer and stack up on the deep rock humps in thirty and forty feet of water, fat and feeding and in no mood to be subtle.
I fished it with a guide named Hollis out of Meredith, in a bass boat with more electronics than the car I drove up in. The method was the drop shot, a weight on the bottom and a small plastic worm hanging a foot above it, which is a finesse technique in the sense that you are being very polite to a fish that is about to hit the bait like a hockey check. Hollis found the fish on the sonar, which showed the hump as a bump and the bass as a loose cloud of arcs above it, and then he parked the boat over them with the trolling motor and told me to drop straight down and wait.
Waiting on a drop shot is a discipline. You do not jig it. You hold the rod still and shake the line just enough that the worm quivers, and the bite, when it comes, is not a hit so much as a feeling that the bottom has moved. The first one did exactly that. I lifted and the rod bent over and a smallmouth of four pounds came up through forty feet of water and jumped twice beside the boat anyway, out of principle. Winnipesaukee smallmouth are dark backed and bronze sided, and the October ones are so fat around the middle they look like they were inflated.
We hit four humps through the day and every one of them held fish. By two in the afternoon we had boated nineteen smallmouth, six of them over four pounds and one that touched five on the boat scale, which on Winnipesaukee is a fish people stop talking to you about. Every one went back. The wind came up out of the northwest around three and put a chop on the lake that turned the sonar screen to static, and Hollis said that was the lake telling us the day was over, and he had learned not to argue with it.
At the ramp I asked how he knew which humps held fish. He said he had fished the lake for thirty years and the humps had not moved. The fish, he said, were the only ones who had not figured that out.
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