High Rock has always been considered an excellent lake for plastic worms, in part because it's shallow, is loaded with boat docks and stays stained much of the year, which keeps fish relatively shallow.

The Catawba River system has a couple of real stars -- Lake Wylie and Lake Hickory.

Lake Hickory is one of the most productive reservoirs on the Catawba chain. Like High Rock, it's a fairly shallow reservoir, frequently stained, with a tremendous forage base of shad and blueback herring. Like High Rock, it has a lot of shoreline cover in the form of boat docks, and there are a lot of brushpiles on the bottom -- some placed by crappie fishermen, some by bass fishermen.

Most of Lake Hickory's largemouths will come off one or the other of those kinds of cover. The lake can be very good late in the winter, especially in Gunpowder Creek, a tributary with very sharp drops that will hold coldwater fish.

Lake Wylie, southwest of Charlotte, is the Catawba's answer to High Rock -- about the same size, shallow and stained. It is a great winter and spring lake, extremely productive, with a lot of boat docks and the same kinds of good offshore drops and humps as High Rock. Like High Rock, it is a lake that turns out a great number of 2 1/2- to 4-pound fish, but not as many real lunkers.

It is much better than High Rock during periods of cold weather; it normally turns on in late February and fishes "shallow" until around Memorial Day.

Lake Rhodhiss is a potential bass-fishing monster, but the 3,515-acre lake between Hickory and Morganton doesn't get a lot of fishing pressure, because many fishermen regard it as difficult to fish because of its riverine nature and the heavy current that usually has to be fought.

As far as mountain reservoirs are concerned, Lake James, Fontana Lake and Lake Santeetlah are the crown jewels for largemouth fishermen. Lake James has excellent largemouth bass fishing on its more stained Catawba River arm, though it gets most of its notice for the great smallmouth fishing in its Linville River arm.

Fontana, the biggest and most fertile of the high-mountain lakes in the western corner of the state, is also better known for its smallmouths, but the largemouth fishing is just as good, especially in the spring when bass get on the banks and in the backs of pockets.

Lake Santeetlah is another reservoir where smallmouth fishing is good, but largemouths have done very well in past years. There is no lack of cover in the lake; during the 1990s, local bass clubs sunk thousands of brushpiles and laydown trees along the banks of the lake, putting a great deal of cover in the 5- to 12-foot-deep range. Plastic worms and crankbaits are tops there, and summer fishing is actually as good as any other season.

Two of the state's "sleepers" are coming out from under the covers because of the spotted bass.

W. Kerr Scott Reservoir in Wilkes County is never going to be spoken of in the same breath with Jordan Lake or Buggs Island or Lake Wylie, but spotted bass and the reservoir's peculiar trait of being an excellent cold-weather fishery have moved it up on a lot of bass fishermen's wish lists.

The commission stocked spotted bass in the 1,470-acre lake in Wilkes County in the 1980s, but until the late 1990s, biologists never thought the chunky little fish were doing much.

They changed their method of sampling, however, when it became clear that normal electrofishing equipment was only picking up a bunch of little fish. Netting studies and creel surveys indicated that the spots were a lot bigger and more numerous than originally thought.