First, thank you all very much for the good words. Ha, Uncle Leo - I I do know the commonly used expression about which part of a witch's anatomy gets cold but, being a comparatively new contributing member of BR who has actually read the rules before posting, figured I'd better not use it. Were you fishing with me and something went wrong, you could be sure I wouldn't use as mild an expression as "gosh darn it!" either.
Paul, I had the great fortune back in '93 of running into a well equipped, experienced, arguably overly-focussed fisherman in the middle of the Q while I was putt-putting around in a rental boat. For a number of reasons, Dean no longer fishes Quabbin but I fished with him regularly for 10 years. Now I'm back to a 14', 8 HP aluminum rental boat without sonar or electric and pretty much follow Dean's milk run, seasonally adjusted. Early, I fish steep breaks off the edges of spawning flats. In a month or sooner I'll be on top of these flats and humps. Postspawn, I'll be working the edges again.
Since I don't have what a modern bass angler would consider "mobility," I'm very thorough after I've dropped the anchor. I may, in June, start with topwater and end up scraping a few extra fish from the bottom with a slowly swum tube. On a cloudy day they may smash a chrome crank. I grin on a day so windy my mother would worry because I was crossing thousands of acres of white capped water in search of smallies looking to annihilate my 1/2 oz. tandem spinnerbait.
To sum up, I pretty much adhere to the late, great Buck Perry's concise formula: F + L + P = S.
And I also take time out to watch the eagles soar and to try to decipher what the loons are saying to me.
WW