Yes, we do have a lot of wood and that's exactly where bass love to hold in winter. I wonder whether those standing trees give off some heat. You'd think they would pick some sunlit water or rock bluffs first, but maybe it's because the shad and panfish tend to bury up in the woods in winter. Anyway, I fish jigs, spoons, spinner jigs, etc straight down under the bow transducer, watching for fish activity around the lure. If I don't see lines forming from fish movement I move along. When a nice bass, or really any fish species is hooked down there, they somehow know to wind around as many trees and branches as they can find. I end up tearing fish off, but don't break line. I pull up branches, breaking them off the trees. The bass don't mind the braid, but hardly a crappie will fall for it. Those rascals are the top pros at line winding around trees.
I have come to believe that even with bowed braid it's still the most sensitive for detecting bites. It might take an extra minute to straighten out compared to fluoro, but then with fluoro sinking faster it gets into trouble faster. I suppose it boils down to personal preference. I do use a fluoro leader quite often if the water is really clear. Some folks question the logic there. If using a lighter leader wouldn't you just break off there? I think the war of bringing a bass up out of the woods is one of multiple staged battles. The nearest line bend around a tree is where most of the line pressure is happening. Then a little deeper there's turn #2 , etc., but really just one sharp bend in the line. Each turn of line around wood adds a lot of stress on any line. Eventually some of those twists undo and you have a clear shot at the fish. Until the pressure of wood bends is removed, the main pressure on the leader is between the turn and the hook, so that mainline needs to be able to take a beating. But in those western waters, definitely I'd be using fluoro.
Way back I noticed there at BM we'd cover a subject very thoroughly and a month or two later the same stuff got written up for the magazine, but by then the information came well into a bass season or even after it had passed. If we had the archives we could prove that. We had a similar problem in the group us original members first met online. The owner had a real problem with issuing his weekly tips using a lot of word for word phrasing we wrote first, never giving credit. Hmmm. Maybe that's why they wiped out the.....evidence?
Jim