Devils Kitchen is located in Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge and a $2 user fee is charged. The fee allows you to fish on the nearby 1,000-acre Little Grassy Lake. Grassy also has 10-horsepower motor restrictions. It is considerably easier to fish, although it is not as clear as the Kitchen. Try a Nashiki-pattern Lucky Craft Pointer if you fish this lake in the next couple of weeks.

For more information, call the Marion Chamber of Commerce at (618) 997-6211.

CEDAR LAKE
The city of Carbondale's water source is located south of town with the nether reaches tickling the Shawnee National Forest.

Cedar is one of the most aesthetic lakes in the state and home to double-digit bass. However, the big ones don't come easy -- or frequently.

There are a couple of ways to pad the odds of lunker luck in your favor. Both center on time spent on the water. Although you'll catch plenty of buck bass when probing visible structure along the shoreline, the really big bass spend most of their time relating to brushpiles and cedar trees away from shore.

For locating this structure, your electronics is only part of the success matrix. Knowing the exact orientation of a cedar tree on the lake's bottom is a definite edge, as you can retrieve that 7-inch pumpkinseed, purple or red shad Texas-rigged worm through the branches with less chance of hanging up.

Like Devils Kitchen, many of the bigger bass from this 1,750-acre lake are fooled at night. Locals say April and December are the best months to tangle with a trophy here, but Cedar is way too big to probe effectively in a day or two.

A good strategy for your first few outings is to take a boat ride, keeping one eye on the electronics and plugging in promising waypoints for future fishing as you tour the lake.

After several of these cruises, you will have enough waypoints to make a milk run from spot to spot, learning the most effective way to orient the boat in the process.

Local anglers who have paid their dues in this regard are extremely cautious when probing their honeyholes.

Northern Illinois anglers have no concept of a spot so good that you don't want to fish it if there is another boat within a half mile or at least give the impression that you're doing some serious fishing.