“retreating bass”

To champman or anyone who wants to contribute- i read your excellent post on the other link and wanted to see if people could expand on this feed-retreat to deep water concept. I have many “spots” on the river like this- where they come up to feed then disappear and come up again. I tend to lose them and was intrigued by champmans comments about finding the link to “home” and pulling them from there. One of my questions is- Do they change depth significantly to do this? I have always read that bass dont like to change depth much, but many of my spots are wood or rocks dropping off into deeper water and current, such as a stump or laydown/log jam in 2-3 feet with 8-10 feet nearby. If they dont change depth, they would be right in the “fast water”. If they do, then the concept makes more sense to me- look for something to hold them out of current and away from the bank. I really thought the other post was excellent (as did many others) and wanted to hear more expansion from folks on this.
Thanks.

i believe the structure that you are fishing will dictate the change in depth that the fish will move. For instance, say your fishing a wingdam, a deep outside bend one, 15 foot on the front side and say 20 foot hole on the back side, with the dam topping out 2f under the water. Now, because of the amount of water going over this dam may create some kind of unusual condition behind the dam, say a sand bar, washout onthe bank, undercut, etc. We know that they come up to feed on the dam, but recess from there. Now they need places to rest and conserve energy, and eddies are great places, but eddies can be made from things that you don’t see with the naked eye. In this instance i think they would change depths greatly(5-10 feet). Shallow dam fish and gradual sloping banks fish tend to find smaller structures to key in on, and may only change depths in inches. So structure that your fishing has a major role in what your trying to look for. As you xplained your log jam situation, sounds like those are resident fish that use it fequently and or live there. I would have to see it in person to figure it out