John Alford took this bass from a hyacinth edge near the cypress trees at Little Eagle Lake. Photo by Robert H. Cleveland Jr.

With only about a jillion cypress trees, knees, logs and blowdowns to choose from, I picked the obvious one for us to start our fishing trip -- the first one we came to on the upper end on Little Eagle Lake.

"Can't hit them all if we don't hit the first one," I told my partner, John Alford of Brandon. "So we might as well start right here."

Alford flipped over the trolling motor and started easing our 18-foot aluminum bass boat up to the timber, all the while watching the front depthfinder. The water was deeper than it appeared -- 10 feet -- which didn't give us a lot of confidence.

It was early May, and the water temperature was still in the upper 70s and lower 80s at sunrise, which was just breaking to the east. The orange glow on the horizon made a spectacular show within the moss-laden cypress swamp that is this old oxbow.

"They shouldn't be this deep," Alford said. "We've got to get to shallower cover."

I agreed, but suggested that we fish our way into shallow water by first eliminating the deep stuff. After all, we had all day, and one led off by that beautiful spring morning.

With that, Alford flipped his 1/2-ounce jig and blue-rubber frog chunk past the right side of the tree. The line started falling as the heavy lure worked its way to the bottom. It never made it.

Both simultaneously seeing Alford's line curl up, he and I realized that something had stopped his offering's descent. Before I could holler, he had reeled up the slack and was setting the hook.

"Got him!" Alford said. "And it's got some size. Get the net."

A few seconds later, I was lifting a 5-pound largemouth over the side of the Tracker and handing the net to Alford.

"Not a bad start, big guy," he said. "Not bad at all."

That there was no more surprise or celebration than that is indicative of oxbow bass fishing in Mississippi: Do it enough, and you come to expect such success.

Our only surprise was that we'd caught one in deep water in May. That was atypical of late-spring oxbow fishing, and the more conventional order of things reasserted itself as the day continued: Of the 23 bass we caught that morning, the other 22 came in less than 5 feet of water, with most coming in less then 3. Eight of the fish were at least 15 inches, the biggest a fat, chunky 24-inch specimen weighing 7 1/2 pounds. All of the bigger fish came from horizontal cover -- either fallen trees coming off the bank or logs long enough that their bases were on the bottom of the lake, their tops exposed either at or above the waterline.

The biggest fish came on a slow-rolled 1-ounce single-blade spinnerbait in a submerged treetop, a form of cover plentiful in oxbows like Little Eagle. I was reeling the lure back along the trunk and then letting it fall through the limbs of the top. It was fluttering down when the 7 1/2-pound largemouth inhaled it.