Photo by Ron Sinfelt.

It was a perfect fishing Saturday. The sun was bright, and the air was cool. Coralville Reservoir's crappies would surely be hungry and husky this September day.

I fish from a small rowboat, so I normally avoid Coralville and its legions of roaring powerboats. Some toss up wakes big enough to swamp my tiny boat, and they always make fishing frustrating. But this was a Hawkeye football afternoon, and I knew the vast bulk of speedboaters would be watching the game.

I had the big lake nearly to myself that perfect fall afternoon, but there was a problem: I couldn't find the crappies! They weren't in their normal mid-autumn staging areas. All the honeyholes were empty.

In desperation I switched to an old tactic taught me by my dad, also a rowboat angler. I rigged one rod with a simple hook and fathead minnow. The other rod had a medium weight twistertail jig. As I slowly rowed, they ran at different depths. From time to time I changed my rowing cadence to let the lines work different depths, and altered oar pulls to make the boat zigzag down the lake. Trolling this way made it likely that sooner or later at least one of my baits would pass in front of fish.

It worked! A half-mile down the reservoir my rod arched as a husky fish bulled its way toward Iowa City. An alluring part of fishing the big reservoir is the mystery generated every time a fish hits. It could be one of many species; at the other end of my line could be a white or black crappie, largemouth, channel cat, relatively rare mooneye, or one of several other species. This fish was a bulldog fighter that bored down. It was obviously bigger than any crappie I'd pulled from the lake.

I suspected a catfish until I was able to work it close to the boat and catch the silvery glint of its side reflecting the fall sun. Parallel lines on a white background could only mean two fish: a white bass or a wiper. The mystery was soon solved as I worked the 15-inch white bass close enough to hoist into the boat.

White bass are one of the most mysterious of Iowa's commonly caught fish. They are not well known, and are usually unpredictable. Perhaps that's because they're one of our few pelagic fish. Bass, bluegills, crappies and even trout are homebodies, predictable; when not making seasonal movements from deep-water wintering areas to summer habitat, they stake out turf and stay there, so the big largemouth that lurks near a stump in May is likely to still be there two months later. Find the right structure, and you've found bass, crappies and many other species.

Not so the wandering white bass and its huskier hybrid cousin, the wiper. Both are "pelagic," meaning that instead of relating to structure, they wander through the water column of big lakes and rivers, cruising, usually in schools, through hundreds of acres of water. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Most well-known pelagic species such as salmon, tuna and bluefish roam the oceans. Voracious, and constantly on the move, they spend their lives trailing mammoth schools of minnows, eating as they swim. Powerful athletes, pelagic fish constantly exercise. You don't catch tuna, blues or salmon -- you battle them.

Iowa lacks an ocean and the powerful pelagic game fish that live there, but we have white bass and wipers, close relatives of the powerful striped bass of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Although smaller than the ocean swimmers, pound for pound white bass are just as powerful, and they're common in Iowa's large lakes and reservoirs and in its rivers. Not as common as white bass, wipers, a white bass/striper hybrid, also swim in some Iowa waters and can top 12 pounds! Their small cousin, the yellow bass, is also found in some Iowa waters.

I'll never forget the first white bass I caught. Living in Kansas, I took an evening trip to Kanopolis Reservoir. As the sun dropped below the prairie behind me, fish churned the surface just beyond casting range. I could see silvery shad jumping into the air in a futile effort to avoid the massacre below; maddeningly, the school stayed just out of range of my light lures. But I had a secret weapon: Deep in my tackle box was a rarely used Kastmaster, a dense, heavy lure that'll outcast just about anything. It splashed into the school, and a bass immediately snapped it; minutes later a 3-pounder was in my hand. I caught a few more before the school moved beyond casting range.

"White bass are a hit-or-miss fish," said Iowa angler Dave Novak. "You don't catch any or you catch a bunch of them."

Finding the school makes all the difference, and in an Iowa river or reservoir, that school could be a few feet or a few miles away.

Steve Krotz, manager of the fishing department at Cedar Rapids GOT outdoors store, spends his life in only two places -- in the store talking with anglers or out on the water fishing.

"There's great white bass fishing in Lake Macbride, Pleasant Creek, Coralville, and the Iowa and Cedar Rivers, but not too many people fish for them," he said. "Probably because they're hard to find."