Building block bass

With three grandkids we have an extra room that's for now the toy room. In there they have a set of wooden blocks. There are four blocks that have no numbers just colors. Black on one end, white on the other and two reds and two blues on each block. Don't ask me, a dollar store set I guess. Anyways the kids, as kids will do, have invented a game with these blocks. They toss them on the floor and one kid is red and one blue. If your red and a red color with either black or white gets you a point. Like wise blue with either black or white gets the blue player a point. Basically they are looking for patterns in the random outcome of the toss. Which is the way we are taught to bass fish. Maybe rocks of a certain size are a variable, current is another, a riffle another, a pool another, etc. Find a fish and then find a spot with the same set of variables and your likely to find another fish. After all things like riffles, pools, current, rock, woody debris, they repeat themselves over and over hundreds if not thousands of times over the course of a hundred mile long river.
So out of the blue, red, black and white set of variables which am I searching for? The green one! The one that's completely unlike anything else on the entire length of the stream. A pipe pouring water into the stream, a broken dam, a concrete wing dam, something, anything that's completely totally unique. After all I'm a big believer in the idea that the biggest fish takes the best spot. Smallmouth bass aren't sociable in an ice cream social sort of way. Instead it's an organized crime sort of society. Where the little guys have to make do with the leftovers and crumbs the big guys don't want. So if I can find that one of a kind great spot I feel I have the best chance at catching the best fish. I'm the anti-pattern fisherman, just interested in that one unique fish.
So how do we find that one of a kind spot? The process usually starts in midwinter around Christmas.
Sometime after glorious fall smallmouth fishing and bow hunting for deer when not much is going on. I might drag myself out and try for saugeyes. Or I might just look outside and wander over to the computer and plop down. Here I'll log on to Bing or maybe FreeTopoMaps.com and find whatever stretch of stream I'm looking trying to learn. I'll zoom in as much as I can and still get a clear image and just crawl up the river. Looking at everything trying to find something, anything that doesn't fit. Maybe a huge pile of rubble dumped in to control erosion, a short channel cut up to a factory, who knows, it might be something that I can't even tell what it is at the time. After I've crawled over the whole stream I'll have a short list of stream stretches I want to investigate further. Maybe by playing on Google I can put in the name of a factory and the river and keywords like outflow or pipe and figure out what something is. This is the fun part where you do the detective work you just wont do in spring when the fishing is good. You might find online a history of the stream with the location of old water mills a hundred years ago that send you back to the maps all over again. Eventually a short list emerges of places you have to investigate on foot.
Before I do that though the list goes back to the computer. I try to find maps that list access points, canoe launches, parks, anything close to my chosen spot that let's people get to it without much trouble. Which is bad. This might not knock the spot off the list if it's unique enough but it sure won't help. Smallmouth bass in rivers are homebodies and just don't move up and down the stream except to overwinter. If the spots too easy to get to and fish a bass might not get the precious time needed to become a trophy.
Next I'll find the EPA study on my river. Every river has EPA studies done on it. If you can't find them that doesn't mean they don't exist, they do somewhere. Call or email your states EPA and ask.
The study on each stream has appendices which include the electroshocking data buried in them somewhere. These studies break the river down into three or four mile sections. Which is important because each piece of stream is different with a slightly different mix of prey fish. Maybe something like spotfin shiners instead of emerald shiners or big numbers of darters and no central stonerollers. While these studies are never the last word on lure selection they give me a place to start.
From there Ill log on to ODNR's species guide index. The Ohio site covers all the normal species you will find anywhere in the Midwest and my go to site even in neighboring states. The ODNR site shows you a good photo of each species you have found in the EPA studies. And possibly even more importantly it will give you habitat and behavior information. It's no use trying to imitate a darter if your fishing a big pool like eddy.
If I've made it sound like all the spots I'm looking for are manmade that's not the case. Often it will be an extreme right angle turn in miles of straight water. A point that looks like it has been blown out by a flood. These kinds of points often scatter a line of rubble downstream that hold nice fish. The key is to find a spot unlike any other no matter how it got there. My philosophy is more of the homerun hitter swinging for the fences. If I check out ten spots five may be duds, three okay and two might be great. But I might just catch a trophy. The pattern fisherman will probably catch many more fish. Just many more smaller fish most of the time...