It's a warm spring day, and you have a strong need to chase largemouth bass. If you live in the Des Moines urban area, you can be catching bucketmouths within an hour of leaving home at dozens of lakes scattered around central and south-central Iowa. Here are six of the best hotspots for bass, according to fisheries biologists and top local bass anglers, and how and when to fish them.

WEST LAKE OSCEOLA
West Lake Osceola is almost a sure thing for largemouth bass. An easy 30-minute drive down Interstate 35 gets you to West Lake (as it's commonly called), which is on the northwest corner of Osceola, visible on the west side of the interstate.

"West Lake is a gem," said Gary Sobotka, Iowa Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist. "It's got bass in a wide range of sizes, and it's got a lot of different habitat that makes it interesting to fish. It's a great place to go to catch bass."

Semi-pro tournament bass angler Brandon Kuehl of West Des Moines agrees. "You'll see bass from 1 to 6 pounds, with a lot of them in the 2- to 4-pound range," said Kuehl. "West Lake is a 'no-wake' lake, and a lot of guys don't have the patience to cruise to the far end. The farther you get from the boat ramp, the less pressure the bass have seen. But you can take bass just about anywhere on the lake if you do it right."

West Lake is roughly U-shaped, with its ends pointing north and its midsection oriented east-west. That east-west midsection has a lot of minor points and small coves that face south, and those features draw Kuehl's attention in the spring.

"That south-facing shoreline warms up first, and the bass move up onto those shallow points and back into those sheltered south-facing coves," he said. "If they're just starting to move up, they'll stay in the 10- to 12-foot range until there's some warm water, then they'll move into 2 to 6 feet of water.

"If I'm fishing points, I let the wind tell me which way to fish. They tend to face into the wind and wave action, so if the wind is blowing into a point, I cast parallel to the point and bring it from deep water up onto the point. If the wind is blowing across the point, I'll cast into the wind, at a right angle to the point, and bring it up onto the point from the side."

Because West Lake gets so much fishing pressure, Kuehl advocates a slower strategy. "If you're going to fish the shoreline of any lake that gets as much pressure as West Lake, slow down and use a finesse approach," he suggested. "Depending on the time of year, maybe a jig and pig, maybe a plastic worm, maybe a suspending crankbait. I've had really good luck in heavily fished lakes throwing a suspending crankbait, working it really slow and letting it sit before I twitch it. The slower presentation is something the bass along shorelines don't see a lot.

"Fish off the other side of the boat. There's a lot of bass, generally bigger bass, on deeper structure that doesn't get fished as heavily as shoreline structure. If you work the dropoffs from points, old roadbeds, old creek channels or any submerged brushpiles in 6 to 12 feet of water, you'll be surprised at the number of bass -- bigger bass -- you're going to find."

LAKE AHQUABI
IDNR district fisheries supervisor Dick McWilliams says that "serious" bass anglers often overlook Lake Ahquabi, south of Indianola on Highway 69 and only 15 minutes from Des Moines.