"I've caught a lot of big spots in my life around structure, but this fish was out in 40 feet of water," he said.

Is deep water the ticket for catching Lake Burton's trophy spots?

"Not necessarily," Holland said. "In early spring, everybody seems to go looking at deep water. Sure, big spots might be holding in deep water in February and March, but I do just the opposite. Instead of starting out in 30 feet of water, I start out in 3 to 4 feet on gravel beds on the north shores, those facing south and that have sand and rock on them. The big fish are rogues, and they travel in and out of shallow water looking for bait, especially on the points. One February, I pulled up on an old roadbed on a point, where the average depth was 4 feet. We caught four fish there that probably weighed a total of 15 pounds.

"That time of year, spots do what bass do. They eat, and that one was among a bunch of spots that were eating blueback herrings."

A lot of the points on Lake Burton also hold brush, where baitfish gather in the relative safety of the tangles of yard cuttings and Christmas trees that anglers use to create the piles. Virtually none of the brushpiles are obvious, but they are often found in the vicinity of the ends of long, shallow points and humps that are marked by shallow-water hazard buoys and poles.

"These points usually act as avenues from deep to shallow water for spots," Holland said. "You need to look for areas where the spots are going to spawn and where they have opportunity to move on and off those areas until the water temperature reaches the mark for spawning. A lot of the points on Lake Burton are very close to deep water, and they hold the right combination of rocks, gravel and sand that spots prefer for their spawning beds. I frequently find spawning spots on the points in about 6 feet of water, which drops quickly into 15 feet or more of water."

Holland has found that spots begin staging off spawning beds when the surface-water temperature reaches above 50 degrees. The temperature can range as high as 60 degrees when the fish are feeding most actively, but just a small change in temperature can kick spots into active feeding patterns that aren't too hard to figure out.

"At 52 to 54 degrees, spots begin to move onto the spawning areas," he notes. "Two to 3 degrees' change is often enough of a variation to make fish active. It doesn't have to be a dramatic warm-up, like 10 degrees or so. When the fish warm up just a little bit, they're looking to eat, and they're not looking for little bitty baitfish. I think that's why they key on the bluebacks."

Three to four years ago, Holland realized blueback herring had grown into Burton's dominant baitfish. He and Wright frequently found swirling schools of thousands of herrings when they fished together, and the big spots they began catching around the same time seemed to confirm that fact.

The growth rate for spotted bass just seemed to explode, he added. "And when we would hook a spot that was feeding on herring, other fish swimming with the hooked fish would try to get the lure out of the mouth of the hooked fish!"

"Certainly, Lake Burton's spotted bass shifted their diet to the blueback herring," Raburn confirmed. "As a result, we have seen an increase in the longevity of the spots, their growth rate and the size of their population. More food in the form of these massive schools of bluebacks simply means better living conditions for the spotted bass, which in Lake Burton live 10 to 12 years.