Spring fishing is as easy as one, two, three
During much of the year, bass fishermen have many choices to make when it comes to where to fish and which lures to use. In spring, when the weather is warmer and bass are spawning or preparing to spawn, the choices are fewer. We know that most of the fish will be in shallow water and that’s where we need to look for them.

Sunglasses: When fit is more important than fashion
Good fishing glasses are always important, but they are especially useful in early spring when bass are bedding or cruising the shallows. Distortion-free, polarized glasses will let you see fish, but they also will help remove any doubt that what you’re seeing in the water is really is a fish.

Fishing frogs fast
Buzzing a frog has been a great springtime technique for me, especially when the weather is just starting to get consistently warm and that first batch of spawners moves up into super-shallow water.

Drop-shotting in the dead of winter
Winter is one of my favorite times to drop-shot because the fish tend to stack up in certain places and stay there. Of course, it’s very critical that you pinpoint the locations where fish are holding. When I get to a deep, clear lake, the first places I look are rocky points, bluffs or rocky shorelines because rocks hold a little extra heat even when the water’s cold, and forage such as crawfish also are likely to be in them.

A couple Alabama rig casting tricks
A lot of people are still in the experimental stage with the Alabama rig, including me. There have been all kinds of variations that have come out since the original one, and I’ve tried a good many of them.

Follow the clues to big bass
It won’t be long before bass start moving toward the shallows and staging for the spawn. This is the time of the year when the most big bass are available to an angler because there are only a relatively few places where they will spawn. Find these places and you might catch the fish of a lifetime.

Making a pitch for practice
One of the best ways to spend your spare time in the bass-fishing offseason is to learn how to pitch a lure or cast underhand or sidearm underhand.

Lighten up your skipping load
I prefer spinning tackle for skipping lures under a dock because I can get even a lightweight worm or a Zoom Fluke a long way up under there.

Find a flat with isolated cover
At the end of the year, I like to reflect back on my tournament season and consider what worked for me. One thing I’ve noticed is that fishing flats produced some good catches for me in 2011.

Snell knot improves soft-plastic hookups
Nowadays when I’m flipping soft-plastics in heavy grass, I use a little trick that Peter Thliveros showed me. I tie the hook to my braided line with a snell knot. It doesn’t slip at all, and it changes the way your hook behaves when you set the hook on a fish. Because the line passes through the eye the way it does, the point goes up into the roof of a fish’s mouth for a more solid set. Guys like JT Kenney and Terry Scroggins are also doing this when they fish heavy cover. It’s improved my catch rate from about 50 percent to 90 percent.

Tease ’em into biting
If you’re using a suspending jerkbait, which is a great lure this time of year, you’ll notice that a lot of bass will just follow your bait without hitting it. Sometimes I’ll get 30 follows to every five bass I catch.

Lighten up on the Alabama rig
Whenever bass are feeding on schooling shad, the Alabama rig is going to be a killer – if you can get all that weight out there.

Go prepared for any problem
I carry a tool kit with me when I travel to different tournament locations, and it’s come in handy more than once.

A daily planner for fall bass
Right now, a fisherman needs to be out on the water early and plan to stay late because bass are getting in their last big feed before winter.

Recycling old jigs
I’ve started using worn-out jigs as swimbait heads. They have wide-gap hooks and come in all sizes.

Awareness is everything
The first fish of the day is the most important. It’s where you start to map out the rest of the day, and how well you interpret what’s going on then will also help determine how your fishing will go.

Matching up with forage
More often than not, you’re better off trying to match up your lure to the main forage that bass are feeding on at a particular time and place in a lake. By that I mean matching the size, color and general shape of the forage. That’s especially true wherever you have some clarity to the water.

Target points and channel swings
In most big lakes, shad are making their way toward the back ends of the big bays, coves and feeder creeks, and the bass are following them. This is a transition period with the bass not really settled down yet, and fishing can be pretty tough.

Snarl-proofing your spinning line
When you’re fishing with spinning tackle, there are few things worse than being on fish and then having a big tangle of monofilament come off your reel when you cast to them. The best way I’ve found to avoid snarls is to stretch the monofilament once I’ve put new line on my reel and before I go fishing.

Scouting with electronics
Using electronics to locate fish is a lot easier now with the modern technology that’s available. I like the Lowrance HDS-10, and the DownScan and StructureScan features are equally useful.

What’s your hurry?
Patience is a virtue to a fisherman. A lot of people lose patience when they’re fishing and leave a good spot even if they’re fairly sure that there are fish around. “The bass just aren’t biting,” or “the fish have left,” they say to themselves, and go on to the next place.

Time to think shallow again
In most Southern lakes, there’s still a lot of bass on the drops and humps out in deeper water, but the bigger fish have been moving toward the banks, no matter how hot it’s been.

When not to catch bass
When you’re practicing for a tournament on a lake or river not known for its quality fishing, sometimes making sure you don’t stick any fish is a good thing. The idea is to locate bass and try different baits to see what they want without sore-mouthing them any more than you have to.

Add some pizazz to your retrieve
When the weather and water are hot, sometimes putting a lot more action in a bait will draw more strikes. It seems like the more erratic you make it, the more it triggers reaction bites.

Keep long-cast rig ready for busting bass
Typically, schooling bass come up all of a sudden and require long casts. You need a lure that’s heavy enough to get out there and a rod and reel that will let you make long casts.