By Truman Lake standards, it had been a slow early-April morning for Jeff Hamilton and me. We’d been hammering male largemouths, some of which were comfortably over but the lake’s 15-inch minimum length, the line-stretching sows for which Truman is justifiably famous had eluded us thus far.

“Desperate times call for desperate action,” Jeff said wryly. “Just remember that if you even hint at the location of the spot I’m taking you, every member of the Truman Lake Guides Association will form a posse and track you down like a dirty dog.”

About 10 minutes later, Jeff shut off his bass boat’s outboard at the mouth of a narrow, timber-choked cove that stretched back about a half-mile from its juncture with the main channel. The slope of the cove’s banks ranged between 15 and 45 degrees, and the shore at the waterline was a mixture of gravel and broken rock. (Author’s note: I’ve led anything but a sheltered life, and I’m a hard man to intimidate. Therefore, I’m going to tell you that this cove is located west of Warsaw and east of Highway 13. So there, Jeff!)

Anyway, we started working our way down the cove’s left bank, casting Texas-rigged 6-inch soft-plastic lizards to stumps and laydowns. We hadn’t gone far when “something” tried to grab my lizard, and I responded with my famous (infamous?) super-sized hookset. Seven pounds of extremely unhappy largemouth exploded out of the water and, miraculously, came down on my side of the laydown that she’d been hiding under.

I told Jeff that I thought I’d need some help with my bass, but his affirmative reply was cut short by a grunt. “Sorry,” he said, “but I guess we’re both on our own.”

I’m not going to say how many 4- to 7-pound bass we caught in that cove; you wouldn’t believe me, anyway. Let’s just say that we could have culled quite a tournament sack and still released more bass than we kept.

Now, that stuff-of-dreams day took place several years ago, and there’s no disputing that Truman Lake has changed — some would prefer the term “matured” — in the years intervening.

For example, siltation has dramatically altered the upper ends of all of the lake’s year-round feeder creeks and rivers. Submerged channel bends aren’t as well defined as they once were, and many pre-impoundment roadbeds and field drainage ditches have disappeared entirely. From a bass angler’s perspective, siltation isn’t a good thing, but neither is it a tragedy. All the angler needs to do in order to find familiar structure types is to move farther downstream on whichever arm he’s fishing

In addition, the always difficult, sometimes impenetrable jungle of emergent standing timber has thinned to the point that virtually all of the lake is accessible to a determined angler. Uncountable tons of wood are no longer in play, having been blown onto the shoreline during periods of high water. However, even more tree trunks snapped at or a few inches below the normal lake level and sank to the bottom.

Every year, numerous newcomers and more than a few seasoned veterans are deceived by Truman’s new variety of back-breaking work — getting a heavy bass boat off a mudbar. Fortunately, virtually all such accidents can be avoided by keeping a sharp lookout — and remembering that the governor on your outboard’s fuel delivery system is a throttle, not an on/off switch.

But enough about past, present and future change above and below Truman’s surface. One thing that hasn’t changed is the lake’s bass fishery. Indeed, Truman’s largemouths may be a trifle more persnickety than their ancestors were, but the fishery still earns gold stars both for total numbers and for the percentage of trophy fish. Best of all, the period from mid-March through the end of April is one of Truman bass fishing’s prime times.

If you like to keep your bassing as uncomplicated as possible, you’ll appreciate that springtime at Truman has been called “lizard season.” At this time of the year, no other lure will produce bass more consistently than will a soft-plastic lizard; few will even come close.