"They'll get in the thickest tree you can find," Rook said. "I always catch them flippin'. A big plastic worm or an 8-inch lizard has worked really well."

On cloudy days, Rook added, bass might move into shallower water, where you can catch them with moving baits. That's when it can get really fun.

"On an overcast day, they'll get in 3 to 4 foot of water, and you can catch them on spinnerbaits," he added. "I jacked them one day on a square-billed crankbait."

That was on a day when the fish had abandoned the deep trees. Rook said he used his trolling motor to cross a cove, and he threw the crankbait just for something to do until he got to the next clump of trees. He never made it.

"It was post-spawn, and I'd been catching them out around those trees in the middle of those pockets," Rook recalled. "I wasn't catching all that much, but as I crossed that pocket, I threw that crankbait out there and caught a 5-pounder. And then I caught another one. I just started hitting anything out from the pads that was 3 to 4 feet deep."

Rook said he caught 30 bass that day, many of which were between 3 to 5 pounds. The biggest weighed about 8 pounds.

"That's fairly common down there," Rook said. "I've seen days when I could catch 30 bass, and 20-plus were over 4 pounds. I just throw a shad color or something in bream color about 90 percent of the time. That day I was throwing white with a real light gray back. I throw them on 17- to 20-pound fluorocarbon. I'm not trying to run it real deep. I want it to run about 5 feet."

The frustrating thing about Lake Monticello, and fishing for Florida bass in general, is that you can have a day like that, and then go back the next day and catch nothing. If the sun is out, they'll be back against the trees in depths of about 8 feet.

Kevin Short, a Bassmaster Elite Series pro from Mayflower, has a slightly different approach. Like Rook, he said bass in June will suspend among flooded timber at Lake Monticello, but he likes to catch them with topwater lures.

"Down there, the topwater bite in June is unbelievable," Short said. "You can also catch them with big crankbaits off points, but it's also a really good time to fish at night with big worms off creek channel points."

Short likes to use a big cigar-shaped plug, like a Zara Spook, in any kind of shad-imitating color. He looks for a place where a creek channel swings against a timbered point. The best points are within a couple hundred yards of a spawning flat.

"That lake is small enough where fish are not going to move far, a quarter-mile at most, because they don't have to," Short said.