Photo by Ron Sinfelt

During the winter, a common sight in Missouri is a covered bass boat sitting alone and forlorn in a driveway. Take a trip out Highway 7 from Warsaw and you'll see all the boats in dry storage out by Truman Lake. As you pass over the Grand Glaize Bridge at Osage Beach, Lake of the Ozarks looks dark, gray and forbidding, with whitecaps and miles of deserted water. Truman, with its undeveloped shoreline, looks positively desolate. Even on nice, sunny days, the lakes look windy and formidable.

Sure it's cold: It's wintertime in the Midwest, But even if the fishermen have gone on sabbatical for the next five to eight weeks, the bass in our favorite lakes don't have that luxury. If you want to experience some of the best fishing of the year, invest in some good foul-weather gear and get out there with them. While your buddies are home on the couch, you can be out creating some world-class bass fishing memories.

Another advantage to midwinter bass fishing is that you can pinpoint bass patterns now, and then follow their movements into the pre-spawn and beyond. That will give you a huge head start when the rest of the state's bass fishing fraternity comes out of hibernation in late February. Here's a quick look at the winter bass fishing scene on some of our most popular waters.

LAKE OF THE OZARKS
From Memorial Day through Labor Day, Lake of the Ozarks is one of the busiest, most festive places in the Midwest. People come from all over the state to revel in the party-cove atmosphere, creating a veritable traffic jam of speedboats, party barges, personal watercraft and all other manner of pleasure craft. Trying to fish this lake in the summer is a high-impact workout that tests tempers and patience.

In the winter, as noted earlier, it's a different scene altogether. You'd think anglers would take advantage of their opportunities, but few are eager to brave the wind, rain, snow, sleet and cold. Those who do find unpressured bass that are surprisingly active and aggressive. Although LOZ is famous for its spring fishing, some say that it's even better in the winter, when conditions are most favorable to fishermen.

With its hundreds of boat docks, anglers naturally concentrate on these highly visible structures throughout the year. While docks can still be very productive in the winter, you'll actually find the best fishing offshore, on main lake points and secondary points in major tributaries. Bass concentrate over deep structure because these features attract shad and funnel current. If you can find that magic combination, bass are pretty easy to find and pattern.

One of the most desirable situations at LOZ during the winter is when the floodgates are open at Truman Dam, at the head of LOZ, and at Bagnell Dam, at the tail. This creates flow-through current, and stains the water, driving big bass out of deep water onto shallow flats and high onto the points. Anglers who've been fortunate enough to be on the water during these conditions have reported some of the biggest limits and some of the biggest individual fish of the year.