Lonnie Stanley Quotations

The water temperature up here was 57 degrees over the weekend. That's just about bedding water. The fish here don't know what to do. And with the cold weather settling in this weekend, they will probably go deep again, until it warms up.

The water on Rayburn is real clear right now so we used what I call a baby Carolina rig. It's scaled down from a regular-sized rig. I used a light 3/8-ounce weight with two red beads. It's a killer on big bass in clear water.

There are also a few big fish being caught deep with cranks, but the best bite for the most fish is in about 3 feet of water.

Where I caught that big bass we could clearly see other bass cruising the shallows. That tells me that they are moving up and getting ready to bed. In fact, we saw several beds in about 5 feet of water. Everybody is getting excited about the spawn. We'll probably have bass on the beds by this weekend. But the real push of spawning bass won't come for another 10 days or so.

The weather couldn't get much worse than what we had last Saturday. We were running up the lake and at one point I couldn't even see in front of the boat. We had to shut her down and fish an area we hadn't planned on working.

All that pressure is not good for any lake, but based on what I've seen the past couple of weeks big Sam is clicking on all cylinders. If you know where to go the big bass are there to be caught.

We had some fish located, but we could only reach a couple of the areas due to the high wind and rough water.