Warming up to coldwater bassing success close to home

I cannot turn the clock back a month, because life doesn't work that way.

Unfortunately, I believe I blew my chances for big southern largemouth bass while I was in southwest Florida recently. I did manage to catch several smaller fish on plastic baits because one local pretender who wears the crown of area expert and sage of freshwater angling told me he was "clobbering" big bass when he used soft plastics.

So I kept my small tackle box stowed in the truck and left the spinnerbaits hang on the end of one of my casting rods.

Saltwater angling was a wasted effort because of Florida's infamous Red Tide (harmful algae bloom), and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer's Lake Okeechobee debacle (water release that created muddy conditions in the Gulf).

So here I am, back home and already probing local ponds where in past seasons I managed to locate and catch big bass and walk away a happy angler.

The ice is gone from most ponds and I can already see weeds starting to form their spring pockets.

There were a couple hundred emails waiting for me by the time I started sorting through the electronic pile on my computer.

By the way, this was the first vacation where I didn't take my laptop or tablet along. I figured this was the perfect period to free myself from my digital encumbrance.

Now to the local ponds.

I took one ¼-ounce rattling lure and one ⅜-ounce spinnerbait with me to the ponds. That was it - nothing else.

My target pond was a public water hole in western Cook County where I had previously caught a half-dozen largemouth right immediately after ice-out.

I am aware largemouth aren't usually very active until the water temperature gets close to 60 degrees. I dropped my pond thermometer in to the water and right there by an inflow the temperature was a mere 49-degrees.

I had to limber up my right casting arm by swinging a 7-foot Grandt casting rod around for a couple minutes. After the warm up, I tied the crankbait on the end of the 10-pound mono and started casting to what I saw was an opening in the emerging green weeds. I really didn't expect much action because of the cold water. Even with sunlight pounding the area I was watching, I figured I was wasting my time.

Two flashes of what looked like largemouth raced to the crankbait. One subsequently grabbed it and headed back into the weeds. And then the lure popped out of the fish's mouth. I sent the crank back to then same area but to no avail.

I walked around to a section of shoreline where it appeared the leftover weed growth was much thicker and tinged with some new greenery.

This time I sailed the spinnerbait some 50 feet to the outside edge of the growth. It was probably the flash of the spinner or just a lucky cast because a fat largemouth took a swipe at the offering and firmly hooked itself. This prize registered 3 pounds on the digital scale, and when I gently slid it back into the water I learned that the hard and steadfast rules I'd learned about early bass fishing don't always apply in every scenario.

• Contact Mike Jackson at angler88@comcast.net, catch his radio show 7-9 a.m. Sundays on WGCO 1590-AM (live-streamed at www.1590WCGO.com) and get more content at www.mikejacksonoutdoors.com.