It may be one of the best-kept angling secrets in Florida, but some of the finest bassin' action of the year occurs between mid-November and New Years Day.

And it's not hard to figure out why.

Once summer's searing heat fades for the year, bass get a little more serious about feeding. That's especially true since many of those fish will begin their annual spawn in weeks or, at the outside, a couple of months. They require a fat reserve to see them through the process. Mother Nature also provides for that situation via abundant forage in the form of young-of-the-year baitfish that are now reaching more than "snack" size.

Cooling fall waters, abundant forage, and the upcoming spawning season mean actively feeding bass. That's good news for bass anglers.

Even better is the fact that bass stage for the pre-spawn in easily definable areas of any lake. While they may have been scattered during the heat of the summer, now they tend to concentrate on specific types of structure that any angler can find.

It's a recipe for some fast fall action, and about the only thing that can throw a temporary wrench into the gears is an early-winter cold front. Sunshine State anglers can expect one or two of those between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But unlike the "killer" cold fronts that plague us after January, these are normally short-lived in their effects. A short pre-Christmas freeze may put the bass off their feed for a day or so, but they quickly bounce back.

That is the norm for fall bassin' in Florida. But this year, anglers also have to deal with water levels that may not be what is expected.

The hurricanes of 2003 and 2004 altered the landscape of a number of Florida lakes. They also altered the philosophy of the water managers.

Many lakes in Florida were drawn down to their winter pool levels in May! That, according to the water managers, was to allow for the precipitation expected during a busy 2006 hurricane season.

In some cases, that benefited anglers, while in other cases, it temporarily inconvenienced them this past summer. Just how that affects the fall angling picture is playing out right now, based on what rainfall hurricanes actually delivered.

LAKE OKEECHOBEE
The press has not treated the Big O kindly by during the last two years, and deservedly so. A combination of two severe hurricane years that raised the lake's level to unprecedented heights, combined with what some term serious mismanagement, came very close to killing America's second-largest lake.

Excessively high water levels -- which some blame on the influence of Everglades area sugar farmers who wanted to assure certain water levels for their crops -- allowed wind and waves to rip out virtually all the vegetation in the lake.

Regardless of the cause, once the natural filtering and buffering affect of the native vegetation was gone, the lake turned into the kind of pea soup mess that brought on images of Lake Apopka -- a Central Florida body of water reportedly killed by questionable handling of agricultural run-off and water-level fluctuations.

But once the local press highlighted the plight of the 780-square-mile lake, things changed.

"Our lake level was at 17.5 feet during the worst of the high-water levels," said Don Gusfler, who manages Scott Martin's Anglers Marina in Clewiston. "And that was a mass of mud. That water level had been dropped to 12 feet as of July, and the water managers have done their best to hold it there."