Say you grew up in reservoir country and became a pro bass fisherman. What's one of the hardest things you'd have to learn? How to fish natural lakes, says Kansas' Brent Chapman.

In the following 2-part tip, Chapman details the five biggest things he's had to learn in order to fish natural lakes successfully.

1. Fish Location

"The biggest and hardest thing for me to learn was fish location in natural lakes," Chapman says. "Reservoirs were dammed over some type of river, so they have a channel through them. Most natural lakes don't.

"In a reservoir, everything is based around the channel -- either the creeks or the main channel. It's totally different on a natural lake. Take Lake St. Clair (Mich.)," he says. "It's a big odd-shaped bowl. It doesn't really have any distinct features that stand out. But a reservoir does.

"Here's an example. On a reservoir like Table Rock (Mo.), a drop is where it goes from 5 feet to 20 feet. But on a natural lake like St. Clair, someone might tell you that bass are biting on the drop. Well, a drop there is where it's 7 feet deep for 200 yards and then slopes to 9 feet. It was hard for me to realize that at first."

2. Vegetation

"One of the biggest things fish relate to in natural lakes is vegetation," Chapman says. "A good example of that is Lake Okeechobee (Fla.)," which is regarded as a natural lake even with the man-made rim canal.

"Okeechobee doesn't have any old river channels through it, so the features you pay attention to are the different types of vegetation. The fish might be relating to bullrushes, eelgrass, hydrilla, lily pads -- you really learn to key on the right type of vegetation."

3. Crowds

On natural lakes, reservoir anglers also have to get used to looking for the crowds -- of anglers and bass, Chapman says.

Re: the former, "that's not what I do," he says. "I don't drive around to see where everybody's fishing and fish there. But take Lake Okeechobee. Every time I've been there, it seems like certain areas of the lake are where the majority of the fish are, like the north shore. And the area might be only 2 miles long by a mile wide."

He notes that even though you know what works in that area, "you can run 5 miles down the lake, fish something exactly like it and never get a bite. It seems like in natural lakes, the fish ball up a lot more. So everywhere you go to catch fish, you have to be around other boats."

In other words, natural lakes seem to have areas that hold large schools of fish. "It's that way at Erie, St, Clair, Champlain or any of them," Chapman says. "But in a reservoir you can get on a pattern -- like the back of a creek on the last channel swing -- and you can pull out a map, run to the same place and usually run that pattern."

- End of part 1 (of 2) -