Photo by Chris Ginn

There are those bass fishermen around who can’t accept that the weather gets cold, even as far below the Mason-Dixon line as North Carolina. That can’t accept that in front of the fireplace is where you’re supposed to spend Saturday afternoons in January. That never winterize their boats because they never put them up for the winter. That buy snowmobile suits and full-face motorcycle helmets and gloves that would keep Nanook of the North warm on the polar ice cap.

All for the few fleeting moments it takes to feel a bass on the other end of your line, to set the hook, to reel it in, then to release it back into water that’s so cold it’s freezing in the line guides on your rod.

Ah, yes, for those wonderful souls that have their priorities in order, this guide to winter bass fishing in North Carolina is for you.

Phil Cable understands your pain. So do Stanley Correll and Kevin Chandler. The three veteran North Carolina fishermen all work as guides, so they are paid to be on the water when conditions are less than wonderful. But they’d probably be there anyway.

And being in that position, there’s no doubt that they’ve learned that figuring out how to catch bass when the mercury is closer to the bottom of the thermometer than the top is somewhat akin to making lemonade. After all, the lemons are there; you might as well do something with them.

“I mean, just because it’s cold, that doesn’t mean you can’t catch fish,” said Correll, who operates Catawba Lakes Guide Service out of his home in Granite Falls. “It can be hit or miss, but you can have some good days.”

Correll’s “good days” are spent on Lake James, a 6,510-acre reservoir near the headwaters of the Catawba and Linville rivers west of Morganton. He targets the lake’s impressive population of smallmouth bass, and he said they’re often catchable in the winter, even if you have to look as deep as 70 or 80 feet.

Cable operates Phil Cable’s Big Bass Guide Service on reservoirs around his home in Holly Springs, south of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. In the winter, he concentrates on 4,100-acre Shearon Harris Lake, the smallest of the major lakes around the Research Triangle area and probably the easiest one to fish in the winter.

And Chandler has near his home in New London one of North Carolina’s better cold-weather bass fisheries: 5,355-acre Badin Lake on the Yadkin River chain near the Davidson County town of Denton.

“Badin can be a great lake in cold weather, and January and February are our two coldest months,” Chandler said (704/463-7265). “I’ve absolutely killed them in January, and if you can hit a little bit of a warming trend, the fishing can be fantastic.”

Indian summer days aren’t necessary; Badin has had the reputation of being a great winter bass lake. It’s deep and clear -- the deepest and clearest reservoir on the Yadkin River system -- and like most of the reservoirs on the Yadkin and Pee Dee, it’s tremendously fertile and absolutely full of forage fish. Badin has never had the reputation for producing great numbers of bass like High Rock Lake about 15 miles upstream, but it has always been regarded as the best big-bass lake on the chain.