We brought our boat to a slow idle and glued his eyes to the depth finder. As the whirling strobe light signal rose from 35 feet to a shallow 12, he carefully dropped a marker float over the side. Guiding the fishing platform in an erratic, zigzag path, my fishing partner continued to place markers along the shallow protrusion until, finally, there were a dozen bobbing in the morning sunlight. Surveying his efforts, I noted that he had outlined a long, arcing structure feature running from near a gravel shoreline to just past the mouth of the large cove we had entered.

"Jim," he said, "the markers are lying along an old roadbed that runs off the side of that gravel hill and out to the trace of the submerged river channel. This area, prior to flooding, was a low swamp and the roadbed was built out to a ferryboat landing on the riverbank. Bass are usually on it in schools."

With those comments, Bob cast a plastic worm out between the first two markers. I chose to go with a jig and eel but, before I could even get the lure wet, my partner was calling for the net. "He hit it on the drop," stated Bob. "That is a good indication that we may have a school here."

Netting the scrappy two-pound largemouth, I removed the hook and prepared to release the fish. "Wait," said Bob. "Put him in the livewell for the moment. If we do have a school of bass down there, he may run back to it and spook them. We'll release them all when we're finished fishing here."

For the next two hours, we caught bass after bass off that hidden roadbed, with the action stopping right after Bob took a beautiful eight-pound lunker.