"There are lots of docks and grassy shorelines here that will hold fish ready and willing to take surface plugs. In April you can stay in the shallows all day and catch but sometimes you have to go a bit deeper to catch the big ones."

If a late-season cold front blows through, or the big fish simply aren't biting shallow, anglers should look for the first breakline and concentrate their efforts there.

"If I wasn't catching any larger fish I would back off to at least the first breakline in 11 to 13 feet. Work the boat out in 18 to 20 feet and fish in from there," Kirkwood said. "I would fish a split shot rig or a very lightweight Carolina rig on a watermelon, watermelon candy or green pumpkin Lake Fork Tackle Ring Fry or Magic Shad. Those colors in that lure pattern can be downright deadly for those deeper fish."

Anglers should crawl their lures slowly across the bottom, or perhaps lightly skip it. The larger fish simply don't go after a lure as quickly as the younger ones do, so anglers able to fish super-slow tend to catch the bigger bass.

Wally Dupree of Dallas, who has fished Fork for better than 10 years, believes that anglers patient enough to work either a Carolina-rigged craw worm or a jig at a snail's pace along the breakline area might just score on the bass of a lifetime.

"Fishing slow is crucial for those big fish out deep," he said. "If you have the patience for it, a jig in particular can really pay off with catching those lunker-sized fish. I have not broken the 13-pound barrier yet, but I have hit an 11-9 and seven fish over 9 pounds. Those are lunkers to me and just about everybody I know."

Frogs in particular are very popular at Fork -- more so, probably, than at any other Texas reservoir. And for good reason.

Moreover, those are the kind of fish that draw anglers to Fork by the thousands every year. Most of the pressure is from the nearby Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex -- but anglers from all around the country know Fork as a hotspot for big bass. Example: While in California last year, I spoke with some anglers on the Sacramento River about Lake Castaic, the famous West Coast lunker lake. They told me that if I lived in Texas, I shouldn't bother with Castaic; Lake Fork was the place to go, they assured me. Its reputation is that big!

"Fork has a lot of things going for it. It has lots of shad, perch, brush and grass. All of those factors -- plus the good conservation efforts of anglers and our department -- have helped to make Lake Fork the premier largemouth fishery in the country," said David Campbell with the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center and the Lone Star ShareLunker Program, which seeks donations of live bass weighing 13 pounds or greater for spawning purposes -- the idea being to give the bass stocked in Texas waters a genetic head start.