My experience with the pondweeds, like Illinois or Sago, is to pitch a pegged Texas rigged worm. I get a lot of bass in the plants in Florida, propbanly because I see bluegill bedding in them as well.
For fishing Cattails I look for something different in the stand. Weeds blown-in, Cattails fallen over, etc. Pitching worms into anything laying sideways in the stand is often productive for me from FL to NC. Bulrush is a better habitat for bass and aquatic life because it offers the same vertical habitat but doesn't have the high cellulose contain, therefore making Bulrush an easier plant for grazers to digest.
In eelgrass I use an inconvinetional drop-shot setup rigged on 20lb line and an 8" trick worm. It works amazing. The weight comes thru the grass easily but the worm stay above it.
In FL, we seem to get all the "new" exotic plants so we have to learn to fish them all. I'm glad to share a few of the little tricks to effectively get bass out of acres of plants.
