"To me, the late winter and early spring is the time to fish a jerkbait," Stone said, referring to the long, slender, minnow-shaped lures with multiple sets of treble hooks that have become a staple in the tackle boxes of bass fishermen over the past 10 years. "You need at least a foot-and-a-half of visibility to have a great jerkbait bite, and since the water is still clear, you've got it in most places. And you can fish a jerkbait slowly, and that's the most natural way that a bass is going to feed. Plus, it's a big bait, and it's easier for a bass to gain weight when he thinks he's eating a big bait rather than a small one -- like me eating a quarter-pounder instead of a single French fry.

"You're catching fish that are suspended; on warm, sunny days, they'll move up toward the surface as the water warms up, and on cloudy days, they may move a little deeper in the water column. And at this time of year, it's rare for fish to move down to feed; they're looking up. If you've got something to draw them up with, you can bring a fish a long, long way to bite.

"The boys from the Ozarks, from Table Rock and Bull Shoals, they're the ones who really perfected the technique of slow-jerking a jerkbait, and to me, that's one of the best ways to catch a big stringer of fish at this time of the year."

Stone looks for corners, secondary points that are just off major creek channels, or saddles -- high spots on underwater structure -- marking his map to give him a lot of different options.

"You might have a northeast wind one day and catch 'em on one side of the lake, then the next day the wind might move south, and the places you caught 'em before won't be as good," he said. "But what you do is fish a lot of points and corners and saddles -- you just hop from point to point to point, and when you finally catch 'em, then you can start to figure out exactly what kinds of places they're on, as far as structure and cover and depth."

Stone favors a 7-foot medium-action American Rodsmiths bait-casting rod, fitted with a Browning Midas reel with a 5-to-1 gear ratio that almost forces him to fish slowly. He spools on 10-pound XPS fluorocarbon line and makes extremely long casts with a Lucky Craft Slender Pointer 97 or 112 jerkbait.

"The real key is jerking that bait down to where you can attract the fish," Stone said. "I'll turn the reel between two and four times, and I'll jerk it down two more times, and on a long cast, I can usually get a bait down 6 to 8 feet. After I get it there, I'll leave it for a minimum of a four-count, and it won't be a real fast 'one-two-three-four' but a real slow 'one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two' kind of count. I'll keep it down there a long time -- but when I get to 15, even I can't stand to wait anymore."

He'll jerk the bait down two more times and wait, then two more times, then usually retrieve and make his next cast. It may not sound like he's covering much water, but in actuality, he is.

"When you pull up on a point fishing like this, you're not making a cast every 5 feet like you would with a spinnerbait, you're making a cast for about every 40 feet of bank because if there's one on a point, and you get it within 15 or 20 feet of him, he'll get on it. I know I've called fish up from 15 feet deep over 30 feet of water. I saw 'em on the depthfinder and knew they were there and caught 'em -- but you have to jerk it down and let it sit there for a while.

"You're looking to make long, long casts so you can reach 5 feet of water, because starting it out shallow, that puts it where the baitfish are and it makes it much more natural.