For bass pro Pete Pond, the word “transition” sums up what Barnett bassin’ is all about this month. Photo by Robert H. Cleveland Jr.

For John Alford, it was a deep-diving crankbait fished along the edge of the river channel drop.

The late Dwight Cranford found his answer in brute strength, ripping a lipless crankbait through the roots and stems of lily pads.

Alfred Williams used a plastic frog skipped across the top of the lily pads.

What these anglers and their varied tactics have in common was winning charity bass tournaments on Ross Barnett Reservoir on the first weekend of May -- in the case of Williams, five Have-A-Heart Classic titles.

This story wouldn’t be long enough to tell all the ways in which the Have-A-Heart and, later, the Fallen Firefighter tournaments have been won in the past 25 years on Barnett, but those three examples are proof positive that you can catch big fish on the 33,000-area lake in many different ways this month.

“I can’t remember all of the different ways that people won those tournaments, but I do recall a bunch of them, and all of them involve one key ingredient -- fishing for the big sow bass post-spawn,” said bass pro Pete Ponds. “That’s the key to fishing Barnett anytime in May: knowing what the bass are doing in each part of the lake after finishing up the spawn.

“You can divide the lake into four or five distinct areas, and the patterns for catching May bass could be different when it comes to the lures, but the post-spawn pattern will factor into it.”

The first weekend of May is still reserved for the lake’s biggest bass tournament of the year. It used to be the Have-A-Heart, which benefited the American Heart Association; now it’s the Fallen Firefighter team event, which has built a monument in Jackson commemorating firemen lost in the line of duty, as well as now helping other charities.

Those events have also served as providing fishermen with a glimpse of what post-spawn bass are doing.

These are typically the most difficult tournaments to prepare for, because fish are in a state of transition in the weeks prior to the events. Former Have-A-Heart tournament director Larry Lowery won the 1998 edition when he stumbled across a pattern the morning of the event.

Rising water conditions following heavy rains had pushed the post-spawn bass back into one of the upper river region’s best spawning areas, Clear Water Woods. “But the lake had started falling again and there’s a point there leading back to the channel that leads to the river,” he recalled. “I went right to that point, and sure enough, the current was pulling hard over that point. I threw a spinnerbait all day -- and they wore the paint off it they hit it so hard!”

In Pete Ponds’ view, that example backs up his post-spawn argument. “Even though he might not have fished it on a true post-spawn pattern, the fact that the fish he caught were bass in transition from spawning area to summer homes, put those fish in an area that led them to that point with current,” he said. “Give Larry credit for figuring that out.”

It was the same kind of thinking that led to Alford’s lunker a year or two earlier.

The fish that he’d located a week prior to the tournament had moved -- which is what transition’s all about. During that particularly warm May, the fish had moved out farther than normal.