But he’s still looking for a spawn -- only this time, it’s gizzard shad spawning along rocky banks in extremely shallow water, flipping at the surface and drawing the attention of plenty of hungry cruising bass.

“If you find shad spawning, there will be bass roaming around,” Brown said. “They’ll already be off their beds and hungry, looking for shad around those rocks, where they can corral them. That’s when you take a (spinnerbait) and go to work.”

Brown checks almost every rocky point or bank he knows, and he never passes up a riprapped bank without giving it a look for shad.

“If they’re spawning, they’ll be on any rock point or riprapped bank,” he said. “They’ll be going to it. What happens is, the bass will be 2 or 3 feet off the bank, behind them, trying to corral them up against the rocks.”

Brown said that he tries to cast a handful of different lures right to the bank, retrieving them a couple of feet before reeling in and starting over. His favorites are a Fluke (bone or albino colors), a spinnerbait with three or four small willow-leaf blades, or a 1/4-ounce Rat-L-Trap.

“You cast right up on the rocks and work it off; you probably won’t have to go 5 or 6 feet before you get bit -- if they’re there,” he said. “The bass will be holding right off the banks, working on those shad. They’ll get up there roaming; you may catch a dozen fish in just a few minutes. You may get a lot of 1 1/2- to 3-pound fish, but you may also get a real bruiser fishing that way.”

The shad spawn, Brown said, may last through the last half of May and past Memorial Day into June.

For years, Memorial Day was a holiday that David Wright really looked forward to, because it typically marked the end of the slow post-spawn period for bass on High Rock, a Yadkin River reservoir that makes up the border between Rowan and Davidson counties, east of Salisbury and southwest of Lexington. That’s when Wright unloaded his tackle box and tied on medium-running crankbaits for the bass that normally ganged up on secondary points outside spawning areas, ready to feed up and recover from the rigors of reproduction.

However, the past two years, Wright said, High Rock has fished like a different lake. It’s always been a great boat-dock lake in the spring and fall, but it has been a year-round boat-dock lake since 2004.

“Bass have gotten to where they don’t like to hit a crankbait at High Rock anymore,” lamented Wright, one of the top crankbait fishermen in the country. “They stay around the piers all the time now.”

Wright believes that unusually high water levels in 2005 and 2006 have kept fish from moving out onto the lake’s signature deep structure after the spawn. That hurts Wright, who knows most of the best offshore humps, points, drops and stumpfields on the 15,900-acre reservoir.

On the other hand, it’s been a blessing for the average Joe Fisherman.