It was great to hear from so many people with decades of experience from the last post. It seems that most of us started the same way, walking around the edge of a pond or river with a relative. The trouble started when we got our first boat, and then just kept banging the shore line because that's where we came from, and, hey, you caught a bunch up on the bank last April. Last summer, June, July, and August, was the best big bass summer I had in decades. Most of this happened on my little local lake. I dropped in here one day to see if anyone else was having a good year, and found nothing but complaints. Admittedly, the shoreline on this lake is spectacular; fallen and standing timber everywhere. It's like a magnet. I came to discover that I was the only one fishing in 15 - 30 feet and ignoring the shoreline. I can remember a ways back when anything over ten feet was just not a consideration. I had no idea what was happening out there! I couldn't "SEE" anything! What was I supposed to cast at?!?! Fortunately, I had great teachers who started me down the right path, and it is a path. I think it takes some years to become proficient at deep water fishing because there is a lot to take into account when you can't "SEE" your quarry or the places your quarry hides. It's an educated guess and it takes a while to get an education. I'm going to assume that somewhere along the way everyone who has been at this as a passion for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, has acquired a good deal of knowledge about deep water bass fishing, so I thought it might be fun to hear about how you became deep water educated and a few tips you might have we can all learn from. Youngsters are welcome. Knowledge is age blind. My first piece of advice is to learn about the life cycle of the bass and his food. This will help convince you the bass are down there and give you confidence you are not wasting your time. It will help you to "be the bass". Second, time on the water X 10. Take the time each trip to spend trying to implement a deep water attack, life cycle considered, even if unsuccessful. Go fishing by yourself if necessary. Time on the water X 10. Eventually, it will all come together. So, tell us what you will about how you came to be deep water savvy!

Deep water spooning and jigging...

Wayne P. wrote on Feb 13^th, 2010 at 5:40pm:

X2 - I memorized his book as a teenager, which taught me well about what structure really is. Most fishermen think that a stump is structure! And even the Lowrance online sonar tutorial alludes to that - sadly. If everyone just got Buck Perry's book and studied it, they could not help but become better fishermen.

"Depth & speed control". Everything else is window dressing.

Nice Catt, Boy people would kill to fish with most of them! You were lucky to have them!
  As for deep water, I guide at night in S.E. Wisconsin.I love fishing deep water day or night. But I like bassin in the dark  over daylight ( summer ). I know for a fact numbers may go down but size goes way up! Whem fishing at night I fish from 10 to 30 ft.! There is so much to learn and such little time!

Back in 50's bass fishing was close from Oct 1st and opened May 1st, thus the winter cold water, fall transition and pre spawn bass fishing was unknown.
I knew bass where deep because we caught them accidentally lead lining flutter type trout spoons, which was a problem because the bass could not swim back down with air bladders over inflated.
Before Buck Perry, Jason Lucas wrote about jigging spoons and weighted lures to catch deep summer bass. Perry's spoon plugging methods opened up structure fishing and changed bass fishing.
The fish finder "flasher" was the first affordable tool for the average bass fisherman to locate deep structure, followed by Lowrance's paper graph. Several brand of "flashers were available in the early 60's, the bass fishing paper graph came out in the early 70's.
Deep is relative to where you live and fish. Deeper than 40 feet, bass have a major problem with air bladders and our sport needs to resolve that problem.
Fizzing isn't the answer. Recreational fisherman can simply lower the bass back down using a torpedo sinker rig. Tournament fisherman must weigh in the bass.
WRB

Buck Perry is the man! I started fishing with my dad on a small natural lake and we did okay pounding the banks.
Then one day I saw something that changed my life. A boat was trolling and every 5 minutes he would pull in a bass or pike, all good size. I happened to chat with him  at the ramp and he had a limit of 5lb+ bass and 34-38" northerns. (No catch and release back then). He was a devout spoonplugger. He gave me the little booklet that is still available today and a spoonplugger was born. I could not find any spoonplugs in the area, but used Bombers, Waterdogs, Hellbenders and later Bagley DB3's. My local tackle shop eventually started stocking Spoonplugs and I had my first run-in with the bait monkey. I still troll big spoonpugs for Musky, but not for bass too much anymore. With todays deep-diving crankbaits and jigs, worms, carolina rigs etc, I find it more fun to cast for them. I still like to fish the shallow slop and cover like docks, laydowns etc, but for consistency, stay deeper.

stratos 375 wrote on Feb 14^th, 2010 at 7:09pm:

I agree with everything you said! And I too am getting to want to fish the slop ( Or the cheese ) most of the time! But I guide at night and they pay for the biggins. So the deep water is were it is at. And don't get me wrong I love to fish deep water bass.I do think if you can catch bass in deep water, you now have the skill to catch bass anywere on a lake!

There seems to be a disconnect between fishing deep water and bank pounding. For the vast majority of bass anglers positioning the boat a cast away from the bank is the what over 90% of all bass anglers fish, who have a boat. The shore anglers don't have a lot of choices and can only cast out away from the bank at some angle. This reduces the bass water to about 30 yards around the perimeter of the lake.
Some lakes have a lot of bass located on similar cover, structure and depth as you are catching the bass along the bank. You simply need to look out over your shoulder away from the bank. The best example of what I'm talking about is follow a long tapering point out into deeper water. Fish this deeper water like you do the bank, except you can't see the shoreline line, you fish the break line.
Take a look at a good topo map and will may find shallower water surrounded by deep water. If this shallower water has cover or structure that attracts bait, the bass will be there, just like they are near the bank. It's really not fishing "deep" water, it's fishing where the bass are located.
During the winter the warmest water may be deep, then that where the bass will be the majority of the time, some may come up to feed shallower, but bass rarely travel very far to go from deep to shallow. During the hot summer days the bass tend to go deeper to find cooler water and move up shallower at night. The shallower at night doesn't always mean the bank, it can also be those outside areas with shallower water surrounding them. The bank fisherman can't walk out to those deeper water areas, boat fisherman can and should learn to look out over their shoulder.
WRB