Photo by Ron Sinfelt

Most bass fishermen look longingly in their rearview mirrors as spring turns into summer. Going down the bank, fishing visible cover, casting to fish that are shallow and hungry -- it's just so elementary.

But when the water warms up and those same fish move out into deeper areas of your favorite reservoir, things get a little dicey for a lot of anglers. They have to use their depthfinders, which a lot of them don't understand or don't trust. Many of them don't understand how fish relate to those humps and ditches and dropoffs they see on their LCD screens. Some of them throw out marker buoys as casting targets to mark something they think is down there.

And after all, they just don't bite as well during the summer, do they?

Well, in a word, yes, they do. At least some places.

Take, for example, three wonderful reservoirs in the Piedmont region of North Carolina: Buggs Island (Kerr) Lake, Jordan Lake and High Rock Lake. None of them are tremendously deep reservoirs. All of them are fed by a lot of very nice, large creeks. None of them would ever be considered "clear" by any stretch of the imagination. All of them have a very strong rung at the bottom of the food-chain ladder: great populations of baitfish.

And for some glorious reason, all of those features (and some others) cause or allow bass to bite on those three reservoirs when the weather is pushing 90 degrees and more pages on the calendar have been throw away than are remaining.

At least three fishermen in North Carolina appreciate this phenomenon. David Wright is a retired teacher who has been winning bass tournaments across North Carolina since the high school students he taught up until a few years ago were in diapers. A native of Lexington, he's one of the crankbait mafia that put nearby High Rock Lake on the map as one of North Carolina's best summertime fisheries.

Phil Cable of Holly Springs used to tournament fish. One afternoon in 1992, he made a name for himself almost overnight when he lifted a 14-pound, 6-ounce Jordan Lake bass over the gunwales of his bass boat. That lake-record fish was the kick off for a great two or three years of tournament fishing that Cable abruptly ended in the late 1990s when he quit fishing for cash and opened a guiding business.

And Joel Richardson of Kernersville has Wright and Cable covered on both sides. He's been a tournament fisherman almost since he was old enough to get his driver's license. He won enough money to buy a little cottage on the banks of his favorite lake -- Buggs Island -- where he could guide whenever he wasn't off at Lake Okeechobee or Lake Sinclair or the Louisiana delta trying to cash a big check against the Rick Clunns and Kevin Van Dams of the world. He knows and appreciates that the bass-fishing season doesn't end at Buggs Island when the water drops out of the bushes and fish take up residence somewhere other than the base of a flooded gum tree.

Wright said that a number of different factors go into High Rock being a great lake during the summer. "All around," he said, "the fishing is better at High Rock during the summer than the rest of the year. There are not many lakes that can compare with it in July and August. When it gets real hot, they don't bite that way at many other lakes.

"It's an easy place to fish in the summer. There are always some shallow fish around boat docks, especially if the water (level) isn't down more than a foot or so, and you can catch 'em shallow at High Rock a lot of times better that you can catch 'em out. You can catch 'em out to 9 or 10 feet deep, and you can also catch 'em around docks."