Photo by Ron Sinfelt.

Officially, winter doesn't come to an end until March 21. But for bass fishermen, the first stirrings of spring probably show up when the water temperature starts to creep upward after bottoming out in the dead of winter.

It's the time when bass pro Marty Stone said you'll catch your "prettiest" fish of the year, those chunky specimens with dark backs, well-marked lateral lines and distended white bellies.

"You think those fish got fat just by feeding up in the fall?" Stone asked rhetorically. "No way. The biggest misconception about bass is that they don't feed in the winter when the water is cold.

"But if you think when it is you catch the prettiest fish you catch all year -- it's around the first of March. And those fish didn't all of the sudden get fat. They didn't get that way just by feeding up in the fall. They feed all the time, and in the winter, they just feed more efficiently."

So to catch late-winter bass as the spring approaches, Stone believes that fishermen need a more efficient approach that not only factors in the mood of the bass and the places they'll be living, but baits and techniques that will match them.

"Everybody would like to catch 'em burning a spinnerbait next to a laydown in the back of a cove, but that isn't gonna happen," said Stone, who was runner-up in the BASS Angler of the Year standings in 2005. "Sure, they're slow, but they're able to feed the whole winter because the bait is slow, too."

Stone fishes across the entire Southeast in his comings and goings on the tournament trail, and he's come to believe that there are certain places where you'll more readily find bass that are just starting to stir after a winter spent in the deeper recesses of reservoirs and rivers. And he believes that one technique is the best.

"The only thing that a bass is concerned with is being comfortable and feeding," Stone said. "The water quality this time of the year is usually good, because we haven't gotten our spring rains and had all that runoff, so the water is usually nice and clear, and what do you think that bass is going to relate to? He's going to relate to food."

Like bass, Stone said that baitfish make a late-winter move out of deep water as the temperature first starts to moderate. That move will be to places where deep water and shallow water are in close proximity -- places with big, well-defined dropoffs that allow a fisherman to position his boat in deeper water and cast into quite shallow water. Bass might not be relating to one kind of structure or cover, but they'll be around that bait.

"They set up where they can feed all the time," he said, "and the baitfish will normally relate to nice neat corners or points or saddles" -- places where they can migrate shallow or deep and find a comfortable depth of water as late-winter cold fronts and warm fronts pass through.

Stone said that it's quite common to find late-winter bass suspended over deep water, but relating to baitfish that have made a move toward the shallows. He targets depths between 5 and 15 feet as a rule, and he believes that just as important as figuring out the kinds of places where baitfish and bass will live is picking the best bait for the job at hand and presenting it in a way that will cater to the slower metabolism of a late-winter largemouth.