Edges also occur within a weedbed, so become familiar with species or categories of vegetation where you fish. A vast cabbage-covered flat may contain colonies of coontail. These clumps of denser plants often concentrate bass. The same situation occurs when patches of wild rice, bulrushes, or dollar bonnets grow within a vast bed of water lilies. Blindly fishing the whole bed may provide slow action, but focusing on the edge-within-an-edge can yield incredible catches.

STRUCTURE EDGES

Topnotch reservoir anglers naturally seek edges when they're looking for bass. Because reservoirs usually are dammed rivers, one key edge is the old river channel itself. The turns it makes offer holding and feeding habitat for black bass. Fish instinctively hold where chances of encountering prey are higher, and such channel edges offer them the opportunity to regularly attack schools of shad that pass through open water, grazing on plankton.

In many reservoirs, several major feeders flow into the impoundment. These junctions create more edges. The many small tributaries feeding those waters further break up the aquatic landscape and provide habitat for bass. As is the case in vegetation, edges that occur within these edge areas further increase the likelihood of encountering a large group of bass.

Look for features like a stump row along the former creek bank that provides a spot to hold next to. Largemouths, in particular, hold alongside vertical objects, anything different. Throw two apples and a banana into a fish tank and the bass will sit by the banana.

Smallmouth bass favor larger objects like boulders, but more likely than largemouths will roam several feet out from a large cover object. They also tend to move offshore and suspend, or hold along vertical walls and bluff banks. Spotted bass, too, relate more generally to objects on structure and wander about base areas more widely than largemouths. Still, edge areas often comprise their home base.

Creek channels are easy to detect with sonar, but some underwater edges are harder to find. Look for changes in bottom type, rock slides into a gravelly creek bottom or patches of clean sand surrounded by soft sediment. Fine-tuning sonar can help indicate these spots.

CURRENT EDGES

Five of the seven species of black bass are "river bass" that originally flourished in flowing water. And all species frequently occur in creeks and rivers. But though black bass occupy current, they avoid fast flows that are more amenable to trout, suckers, walleyes, and other more cylindrically shaped fishes.

The nature of bass dictates that they occupy the lower reaches of rivers or hold in areas where still water meets the river channel -- oxbows, backwater lakes, and side channels. Largemouth bass, in particular, may spend much of the year in backwater areas.

Smallmouths spawn in slack water but remain in current for much of the rest of the year. But smallmouths seek edges where current is broken by shoreline cover, boulders, riffles, river bends, and manmade dikes, docks, bridges, and wing dams.

Smallmouths and other river bass seem instinctively capable of finding the seam where fast water meets slack water. Here they can hold close to current while using little energy to maintain their position. As baitfish move past, smallmouths can shoot out and nab one. And when current dislodges invertebrates or disorients a surface swimmer, it tumbles or washes past the bass' holding spot to provide an easy meal.

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