Photo by Ron Sinfelt.

It’s tough not to open this look at Kansas’ 2007 bass fishing prospects by suggesting that history has repeated itself. At face value, it really does appear that drought conditions around the state, particularly in western Kansas, have taken some fisheries back to their lowest days, literally and figuratively.

But when you look closer, you see that things actually may already have gone beyond what happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- at least at some lakes.

"Some of our western reservoirs are right back where they were in the early ’90s," reported Doug Nygren, of Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks. "Kanopolis and Glen Elder in particular are suffering significant effects from the current drought."

KDWP fisheries management specialist Kyle Austin works with Nygren in the agency’s Pratt headquarters. He used a term that really brings home the point about how tough things are out west.

"Many of our western waters are pretty much at dead pool," he said. "Only Mother Nature can fill them again. The fish are there -- bass, and other game species -- but they are suffering. What water is there warms up like bath water when we get into the late spring and summer months."

It’s been almost 20 years since rain suddenly disappeared from Kansas’ routine weather reports for much of the state. Drought conditions didn’t affect only western Kansas back then, either. Many impoundments around the state, large and small, suffered.

I remember a late-season visit years ago to Osage State Fishing Lake, just south of Topeka. It was so low that when my smallish aluminum modified-V bass boat finally slid off the trailer, only the front wheels of my 4x4 were left on the concrete boat ramp. I had to use 4-wheel-drive low both to get up off the ramp and to load the boat. That was after a day of fishing that was one of the best I’d ever enjoyed at Osage.

As Austin mentioned, the fish are still there when lakes get terribly low from drought. And by the time fishing buddy Jim Givens and I visited Osage, the water temperature had moderated quite a bit. Bass were active; heck, they were aggressive! We caught dozens, and I managed to fool a huge walleye on the fire tiger Storm ThunderStick I was throwing. Talk about a memorable fishing trip!

You can enjoy trips like that this season, too, especially on lakes that are significantly low. But the good news is short-term -- short-lived. Unless some of these impoundments start getting lots of water soon, things will only get worse.

That’s especially true out west. As Austin noted, the state was able to acquire significant water rights to one of those western reservoirs, Cedar Bluff, during the late-1980s, early-’90s drought. When rain returned, beginning in 1992 and 1993, and those western impoundments refilled, Cedar Bluff turned into the jewel of Kansas bass fishing.