I was doing pretty well with a really slow twitch jerkbait technique on my local lake, unitl we got the ten day warm front. During this time, the water went from the low 40's to the low 50's and everything changed... the fish were very active (chasing bluegills in as shallow as 6 inches of water) and there was an algae bloom of some sort that was all over the place. In the last week the temps haven't been over 50 and its been snowing with night lows into the 20's. I have not been out in a week or so but I'm sure the water has cooled back down to the low to mid 40's. It seemed with all the warm weather we had that the fish we close to the spawning stage, with water temps creeping up to that magic 58 degrees. My question is do you guys think they have gone back to the staging area, suspended just outside the spawning flats or would they be doing something different now that the water has already warmed up and cooled back down. Thanks!

From my experiences here, they moved back to their winter staging patterns when the cold fronts came in. I was also catching them shallow that week and since then I have been catching them progressively deeper as the cold days dragged on. The plus side is the weather will be on the up starting today. You'll see higher temps during the day and night. As this happens I would suspect it'll almost be a "restart" and you'll see them staging shallower and shallower, back to where it was a few weeks ago. So we basically had a taste of the prespawn a few weeks ago and now that action will pick up again! Good luck and tight lines!

It seemed with all the warm weather we had that the fish we close to the spawning stage, with water temps creeping up to that magic 58 degrees.

I took the canoe to two different ponds on 3-20 and 3-21 and got readings in the high 60s on both. One of the ponds has a maximum depth of about 10', not sure about the other one, but there was a guy skinny-dipping and he didn't appear to be uncomfortable.

In NEPA the fish were definately in a winter staging pattern. I couldn't find any fish that were active in or around any spawning areas.

I'm still catching them in inches of water with jigs, creatures, worms, and spinnerbaits. Look for timber, lacking any other suitable cover. There, you'll find feeding bass.