Paul Sims on fishing cold cypress

Well, I fished my last tournament of the 2009 season yesterday. It was a tough one. A front had moved in and air temps were in the high 20's at blast off. Water temps were in the mid 40's. I have a very hard time catching fish in cold weather so I went at this tournament with a little different approach than most.
I have read where you really need to slow things down in cold weather. I agree with that. I also here you need to cover a lot of water and hit as many different areas as you can until you find fish. Hmm, I don't know if that is correct thinking or not. The tournament today was held on a lake I am very familiar with, Cross Lake. I fish close to 20 tournaments a year on this lake and I know where the fish are 75% of the time. The problem is getting them to bite. I went into this tournament with a plan. I had a feeling the fish would be on certain trees today. When I say certain trees, I mean that I had 10-15 trees picked out that were in 4-6 feet of water near deeper water. I had two trees in mind that I would start off on that I was 95% sure had a fish on them. My thinking told me to throw everything in the tackle box at these two trees until I got bit. Then I would know a bait that the fish would bite.
Well, I pulled up to the first tree and I started hitting it with a black/blue jig with a blue trailer. After 5 pitches, I switched to a suspending jerk bait. After another 5 cast with the jerkbait I tried a Senko. Nothing on either of these. I then decided to go back to a jig but the second time around I picked the tiny KaRu finesse jig in a craw pattern. First pitch, WHAM!!!. I saw the line twitch and I set the hook blind. My rod just stopped as it loaded up. First fish was a fat slot fish 16 3/4 inches and about three pounds. (I forgot to mention the 14-17 slot on this lake) Well, I now had confidence in a bait. I now hit the 10-15 trees with the finesse jig and I repeated the same routine, on the same trees, ALL DAY.
At the weigh in, I found that only 4 or 5 teams weighed and the most caught was 3 fish. They were the right 3 fish though and that team won with 12 pounds. In all, I caught 11 bass on the day. Remember the slot I was telling you about? I caught 9 slot fish, 1 over that went almost 4lbs, and a 13 inch under. I just didn't catch the right fish. All in all a very good day on the lake for me. I'm guessing I could have weighed about 15lbs if not for the slot limit.