Lots of anglers carp about the wind; some even call it their nemesis. But at many of the reservoirs that grace the heartland, running from the northern plateau of the Ozarks and across the southern plains, the autumn winds can seldom blow too hard for ardent white bass anglers. In the eyes of these anglers, ranks of white caps often equal white bass galore.

As these reservoirs cool in the fall, a substantial number of gizzard shad begin sashaying along main-lake shorelines and points. The shad periodically invade coves, and in these coves, they meander across secondary and tertiary points, as well as gravel and clay flats and shorelines.

During fall, white bass regularly forage upon 2- and 3-inch shad. Consequently, white bass location often is determined by the shad. Unbeknownst to many fishermen, white bass also consume shiners and invertebrates. Therefore, shad aren't always the key to white bass whereabouts in fall, and this dietary idiosyncrasy confounds some anglers.

A few anglers across the years, however, have been aware of the white bass' penchant for invertebrates, and these astute fishermen have tangled with legions of white bass by using lures that replicate an invertebrate. Guido Hibdon of Gravois Mills, Missouri, and Harold Ensley of Overland Park, Kansas, discovered back in the 1960s that at night the white bass at the Gravois Arm of Lake of the Ozarks exhibited a hankering for a small black chenille-and-marabou jig. Throughout the late 1960s, Hibdon and Ensley spent many late October nights plying gravel and rocky points with that diminutive black jig, and they caught and released untold numbers of white bass. This also is a potent lure and method to employ at other reservoirs along the Ozarks border, such as Stockton Lake, Missouri, and Grand Lake, Oklahoma; it's especially fruitful when the wind fails to blow during daylight hours.

Like shad, white bass are pelagic creatures. That propensity to roam can make them tricky to find. They might be roaming wind-blown main-lake points for five days in a row. Then out of the blue, they move inside large coves and gambol about secondary points or a 200-yard stretch of a gravel shoreline.

Day in, day out, the preponderance of autumn white bass are caught on relatively flat points and nearby shorelines. There are days, however, when they frequent steep points and adjacent bluffs. In addition, small congregations of white bass at the Lake of the Ozarks, which has become cluttered with boat docks during the past two decades, have begun to haunt the docks that are pummeled by waves in November.

The traditional autumn white bass lair at Lake of the Ozarks is a wind-blown flat point. The weeks from late October into early December yield the best catches, but a party of two knowledgeable Lake of the Ozarks anglers rarely catch more than eight white bass at a wind-blown point; four white bass per point is the normal catch. So the key to catching and releasing more than 100 white bass a day at Lake of the Ozarks is to fish more than 30 wind-blown points. Since the lake is graced with thousands of points, most avid run-and-gun white bass anglers can thoroughly fish four large points in an hour.