"One great thing about Kentucky Lake and Barkley is you really can't pick a bad area of either lake," said Mike Auten of Benton. "The creeks have similar configurations up and down the lakes, so what works in one creek will likely work in the next one."

An avid bass angler who has spent time guiding on Kentucky Lake and has fished both lakes extensively both in tournaments and for fun for many years, Auten anticipates good action when he fishes either lake during the spring. Exactly how he approaches the fishing any given day varies according to water levels, but the results tend to be good.

Both Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley earned "excellent" ratings for largemouth bass in the 2009 edition of the state's Fishing Forecast and Tips, which is put together annually by the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (KDFWR) and is based on extensive sampling done annually by biologists.

Kentucky Lake also earned a good rating for its smallmouth bass offerings, and while Barkley smallmouths notched only a fair rating, the forecast noted that smallmouths are common around certain habitats. The report also indicates that spring is one of the best times of the year to catch Barkley's smallmouths, and that also holds true at Kentucky Lake.

Covering a combined area of nearly 100,000 acres in Kentucky alone, Kentucky and Barkley offer a tremendous amount of opportunity for bass fishermen. Running side-by-side along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and being connected by a canal at their lower ends, the lakes are in many ways quite similar. Both are somewhat riverine but wider through their lower reaches, with numerous creeks coming in from both sides. Additionally, both run roughly south to north through Kentucky.

In ways, however, the two big lakes are distinctive. Barkley is shallower overall and offers more buttonbushes, downed trees and other woody, shallow cover. Kentucky Lake is clearer and therefore supports more aquatic vegetation. Built in 1944, Kentucky Lake is more than two decades older than neighboring Lake Barkley, and much more of its woody cover has rotted. However, the KDFWR has planted cypress trees and willows in places to restore shallow cover in Kentucky Lake.

The amount of grass in both lakes varies annually, based largely on water clarity (which varies based on seasonal rainfall). At times, the acreage of grass in the Kentucky portion of Kentucky Lake has dwindled to only a few hundred acres. During the past few years, the amount of grass has been on the increase, and the Kentucky portion now contains more than 5,000 acres of grass when the vegetation is grown out each summer. That has been a boon to the bass population, especially toward the southern end of the lake's Kentucky portion and on into Tennessee. The grass remains somewhat dormant and submerged during the spring and is more difficult to find, but the fishing can be good over the developing grassbeds.

Because Kentucky and Barkley lakes' waters are linked and their water levels go through the same ups and downs, population trends tend to be similar, according to fisheries biologist Paul Rister. They both tend to have good spawns and bad spawns during the same years. A couple of recent excellent year-classes have resulted in very high numbers of small fish in both lakes. However, the populations also contain good numbers of 18- to 20-inch bass, which are the fish that are being brought to the tournament scales on a regular basis and that have drawn national attention to the lakes' bass fisheries.