“The bass have changed their habits -- but there are still quite a few quality fish to be caught at High Rock,” said Wright, who has fished the Wal-Mart BFL All-American and Bassmaster Weekend Series championship on numerous occasions. “Boat docks used to be a place where you could catch fish, but never big fish. The past two years, that’s where they’ve been. I don’t think High Rock has changed much as far as how many fish you catch -- just how.”

Wright said that early May is the peak of the spawn at High Rock, but catching spawning fish is not easy -- at least not sight-fishing for them. High Rock is typically very stained, almost dingy in the spring, catching runoff from 80 upstream miles of the Yadkin River. “You catch spawning fish at High Rock, but you don’t see them (first),” he said.

For years, Wright said, High Rock rarely reached full pool, even in the spring, because Yadkin Inc., which operates an aluminum smelting plant two reservoirs downstream at the town of Badin, kept the wheels running through the High Rock Dam hydroelectric plant, producing electricity. But the past two years, the water level has been abnormally high in the spring and stayed there the rest of the year.

“If you go back 10 years and check the water levels, you’d see that the past two years have been the highest levels ever,” Wright said. “The lake used to stay down 4 or 5 feet all the time, and the bass would pull out on all kinds of different cover.

“If you look at the lake, from zero to 5 feet deep, there’s no cover left -- except for boat docks. You go out into 10 feet of water and you start finding all kinds of cover -- but with the water up, they don’t need to be that deep.

“You look at a boat dock, and you think, What else does a bass need? They’ve got a place to hide, shade, cover, shallow and deep water. Nothing else.”

So, faced with catching bass in May, Wright has tended the past two years to go with the crowd, attacking the lake’s boat docks -- which number literally in the thousands. High Rock having one of the most developed shorelines of any lake in North Carolina, nearly every one of the lake’s major tributary creeks are dotted with piers and docks.

It becomes a matter of finding a “pattern” that’s working -- figuring out what kind of docks are holding the most fish at any given time, and where those docks are located. Beyond that, it’s a matter of catching them.

“When you find fish on boat docks, you have to go to the right ones,” said Wright, a retired high-school business teacher. “Where you fish depends on the water clarity. If the water is dingy, I’ll go to Flat Swamp (creek). If it’s clear, I want to be in Second (creek).”

Wright said that most fishermen who are proficient at taking apart docks will be flipping jigs around pilings, ladders, crossbeams -- anything that’s in the water that will hold fish, including brushpiles that many dock owners have sunk around their piers to attract crappie.