Almost September. Kids back in school. Football on TV. Hungry fish in the water. Many people think of spring as the best time of the year to fish, but there are a few species that become much more active in autumn. Here are four favorites.

Brown Trout.
While rainbow trout and cutthroat trout and bass and many other popular game fish spawn in the spring, fall is the egg-laying time for the widely-distributed brown trout, which makes them much more aggressive and willing to eat, even in the middle of the day. While this also puts added responsibility on the angler to make sure and avoid walking on spawning beds, it does mean that you can often trick a brown this time of year that you couldn’t have fooled back in June. Look for undercut banks or other kinds of cover where these predatory trout love to hide.

Striped Bass.
The annual fall striper migration in the Northeast makes its way some 1,500 miles from Maine to the Carolinas, and draws some of the most fanatical fishermen on the planet. With much of the fishing taking place at night, in awful weather conditions, you need to have a high level of interest and dedication to dive into this subculture of the sport. But the payoff of a monster fish stretching to 40 or more inches–especially if that fish is taken on a flyrod–should be enough to keep anyone interested.

Steelhead.
On the opposite coast from the striper fishermen, anglers from Southeast Alaska to northern California will soon be preparing to hit their favorite Northwest rivers to pursue this ocean-going rainbow trout. While a few West Coast streams have steelhead in them every month of the year, fall is the time when most of the bigger steelhead (from spending more time in the ocean) are headed upstream to spawn, especially in steelheading hotspots like British Columbia, Western Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

False Albacore.
These speedy little tuna start showing up off the Carolina coast in early October, with the meat of “The blitz”–as it is often called–usually coming in November. The “Crystal Coast” around Morehead City, North Carolina is known to be a favorite of flyfishers, particularly since Beaufort Inlet tends to have favorable sea and wind conditions, as well as plenty of baitfish on the surface, which draw in the albies.