Alley's approach is to circle the bulrushes and work the edges with a hard-plastic jerkbait like the Bomber Long A or Rapala X-Rap. Gold with a black back is a good color for these. Or try a 7 1/2- to 10-inch June-bug-colored Culprit worm rigged Texas-style on a 1/4-ounce Carolina rig with an 18-inch leader. This bait isn't fished in a standard manner, but swum slowly and steadily.

If the outside edge doesn't produce, Alley moves in and pitches or flips a Culprit worm into the reeds. If no action results, he's not finished. He then moves progressively outward and to the water surrounding the reeds.

"You may find a school of bass holding more than 50 yards off the cover," he said. "And if you find them on a specific point -- like upwind or downwind -- it's a good bet that bass on other reed patches are positioned in the same way."

When prospecting short-growing hydrilla and milfoil, the same lures work well, but some anglers have experienced good success using a high-speed retrieve with a 3/4-ounce Rat-L-Trap in gold chrome or bleeding shiner.

Once the fish move into the canals, the tactics change.

"The canals are cut deep," Alley warned. "But they have a taper to their sides that allows bass to fan a bed. When they're not actually on the bed, they can stack up right in the middle of the canal."

A deadly tactic used by many guides is to slowly move down the center of the canal on the trolling motor, while trailing a live shiner under a cork 50 feet behind the boat.

The customer mans that rod, while the guide scans the bank for bedding fish. When one is found, it can be sight-fished with soft-plastics, but the trailing shiner often catches more and bigger bass.

If live bait isn't an option, anglers can do well running a crankbait down the center of the canal ahead of the boat while they look for shoreline beds.

With canals, the key point is that most of the fish will be in the deeper mid-section, and anglers who devote all their attention to the banks miss many of them.

LAKE ISTOKPOGA
There's a lot of water to sort through to find bass on this big South Florida lake, but anglers can narrow their search this month.

"The first spawn of the year will happen in January, and the first place the bass will spawn is in canals," said veteran guide Dick Loupe. "If they haven't already gone into the canals, you can find them staging on offshore cover outside the canals' mouths."

On Istokpoga, the key areas for canals are on the mid-eastern side where the Istokpoga Canal flows from the lake and into the Kissimmee River; the southeast corner in the Sunvale area; and in the northeast corner where Arbuckle Creek enters the lake.

Early in the month, expect to find bass staging on cover in the vicinity of these canal mouths and along the cuts and channels leading into them.

Just what cover will they hold on? Loupe zeros in on one type.

"There's enough offshore hydrilla in the lake to make it the top cover for the bass to stage on," he offered.

"I'm going to start looking at those patches in six to eight feet of water outside of those canal mouths. You'll get bass roaming along the thinner outer areas during the morning and evening, and then slipping back under the crowned-out surface mats during the middle of the day.