Hey, Keith here.

I’m sure you know where all the hotspots are in your nearby lake.

It’s probably that drain that always seems to hold a bass or two.

Maybe that shallow flat where you remember catching a bunch of bass.

But it’s mid-summer now, and that means one thing: finding shade. 

As the sun moves across the sky, the shade moves with it.

Obviously, this changes where the bass will be.

The bank where you smashed 3 on a Buzzerk at 7:00 in the morning can be dead by noon, while a stretch you walked past at dawn has suddenly turned on.

Today I'm going to show you how to read your lake like a clock and let the shade tell you exactly where to stand.

A few weeks back I walked into one of my neighborhood lakes before the sun was fully up. 

It's a small one, maybe 10 acres, lined with cypress on the south end and a little gravel road bridge crossing the back corner.

A couple of old docks sit along near the bank.

I started on the east bank throwing a Swamp Lord, and for the first hour I couldn't do anything wrong. 

The whole east shoreline was sitting in cool shadow, and the bass were cruising that shade line like a buffet line.

I put six on the bank in forty-five minutes on that frog.

Then the sun climbed.

By about 9:30 that east bank was baking me.

The shadow had moved off the water and the bites just stopped. 

So I did what most of us do. I told myself the fish were still there and just needed convincing.

I stayed put.

I slowed down and tied on a white XPS Chatterbomb .

Then I caught nothing for an hour and a half and got a sunburn on the back of my neck for my trouble.

Around 11, I looked up from the water and actually looked around.

The east bank where I was standing was lit up like a parking lot.

But out in the middle of the pond, the only dark water left was a thin slab of shade under one of the docks and a long shadow line off the road bridge in the back corner.

The shade had moved. I just hadn't moved with it.

I walked down to that bridge, skipped a Homing Minnow into the shadow line, and caught a bass on the second cast. Then another. 

By the time the sun started dropping in the afternoon, I followed it again, this time over to the cypress trees on the south end, and finished the evening on the west bank as the shade came back across the water.

That was the day it clicked for me. I wasn't fishing a lake. I was fishing a clock.

Shade is not random. It moves on a schedule you can predict before you ever leave the house.

The sun rises in the east, climbs overhead by midday, and sets in the west.

That means the shade marches across your pond in the same pattern every single day.

Once you know the pattern, you always know where the cool, dark, fish-holding water is going to be.

Here's how a typical summer day runs on a pond clock:

Finding the shade is half the job. The other half is knowing where in the shade the fish actually sit.

Bass are opportunistic.

They don't bury in the dead center of a shadow as often as they hold right on the shade line, the seam where dark water meets bright water.

That edge is the ambush point. A bass sits in the cool dark where prey can't see it, then crushes anything that wanders out of the shade into the light.

A few things that put more of those fish on the bank: