Here's the weekend Scenic City Fishing Report.
No clients ... the plan Saturday was to shoot a story for the Tennessee Wild Side TV show on the HUGE bass everyone is catching on Chickamauga Lake this year. Me and Barry Cross were going to shadow a couple of the CBA anglers and shoot video at the weigh-in where TWRA was taking DNA samples again.
BUT, Barry came early so we could sample some crappie. Barry picked a good day to come down from his home in Columbia. Me and Barry RIPPED 'em in Harrison Bay. I think it was one of the fastest 2-man limits of crappie I've ever caught. We started about 8 am and by 9:30 we were culling fish. Seemed as if fish were ganged up in about a 2 or 300 yard circle... if we got out of the circle it went dead. But turn around and head back through the "Crappie Circle of Death" and it was game on!
Water was 20 feet deep.. fish were clearly ganged up around large schools of bait. Mark bait on depth finder and five seconds later... one, two, three rods down. I'm guessing we were catching about 60% keepers. I normally troll six rods, but this morning I could never get the 6th rod out. I've had fast & furious action when I was catching little bitty fish... but I've never had that much action when most of the fish were keepers. It was crazy.
Barry and I got tired of culling a little after 10, I'd guess we'd caught 40 keepers by then... so we went off to try and catch a bass before we started working on our Wild Side story.
That was a dismal failure. I really must stick to what I know... a man has got to know his limitations.
SUNDAY AM
I woke up pre-dawn and really got to wondering if any stripers wanted to play on Easter. Headed for the Chickamauga Dam tailwaters... they were running 34,000 cfs by the time I got there. I tried striper stuff for a while, but there was just too much flow to fish effectively.
Moved into slack water below spill gates to cast for crappie. Not a nibble casting, so of course I had to try trolling. Trolled a circle beneath spill gates... recorded my track so I was making the exact same circle everytime. There was one spot where everytime I came over it, I caught a really big white crappie. Three times in a row, finally 4th time around, and 4th big white crappie, I marked a specific waypoint. i-Pilot allowed me to go to the exact spot where I began to fan cast for 45 minutes and never caught a fish. Go figure?
Had a couple of shiners left so I made one drift for smallmouth and of course caught a 5 lb. blue cat. Back home for Easter Sunday by 10 am.
Just for good measure... I've also attached a photo of the MONSTER bass weighed in by Randy Pippen at CBA. It's the biggest bass ever caught/weighed in a CBA since it began 36 years ago. 11.34 pounds. Read more here: http://www.nooga.com/160795/historic-fi ... ass-event/
Life is good and gettin' better every day (especially if you're Randy Pippen).
No clients ... the plan Saturday was to shoot a story for the Tennessee Wild Side TV show on the HUGE bass everyone is catching on Chickamauga Lake this year. Me and Barry Cross were going to shadow a couple of the CBA anglers and shoot video at the weigh-in where TWRA was taking DNA samples again.
BUT, Barry came early so we could sample some crappie. Barry picked a good day to come down from his home in Columbia. Me and Barry RIPPED 'em in Harrison Bay. I think it was one of the fastest 2-man limits of crappie I've ever caught. We started about 8 am and by 9:30 we were culling fish. Seemed as if fish were ganged up in about a 2 or 300 yard circle... if we got out of the circle it went dead. But turn around and head back through the "Crappie Circle of Death" and it was game on!
Water was 20 feet deep.. fish were clearly ganged up around large schools of bait. Mark bait on depth finder and five seconds later... one, two, three rods down. I'm guessing we were catching about 60% keepers. I normally troll six rods, but this morning I could never get the 6th rod out. I've had fast & furious action when I was catching little bitty fish... but I've never had that much action when most of the fish were keepers. It was crazy.
Barry and I got tired of culling a little after 10, I'd guess we'd caught 40 keepers by then... so we went off to try and catch a bass before we started working on our Wild Side story.
That was a dismal failure. I really must stick to what I know... a man has got to know his limitations.
SUNDAY AM
I woke up pre-dawn and really got to wondering if any stripers wanted to play on Easter. Headed for the Chickamauga Dam tailwaters... they were running 34,000 cfs by the time I got there. I tried striper stuff for a while, but there was just too much flow to fish effectively.
Moved into slack water below spill gates to cast for crappie. Not a nibble casting, so of course I had to try trolling. Trolled a circle beneath spill gates... recorded my track so I was making the exact same circle everytime. There was one spot where everytime I came over it, I caught a really big white crappie. Three times in a row, finally 4th time around, and 4th big white crappie, I marked a specific waypoint. i-Pilot allowed me to go to the exact spot where I began to fan cast for 45 minutes and never caught a fish. Go figure?
Had a couple of shiners left so I made one drift for smallmouth and of course caught a 5 lb. blue cat. Back home for Easter Sunday by 10 am.
Just for good measure... I've also attached a photo of the MONSTER bass weighed in by Randy Pippen at CBA. It's the biggest bass ever caught/weighed in a CBA since it began 36 years ago. 11.34 pounds. Read more here: http://www.nooga.com/160795/historic-fi ... ass-event/
Life is good and gettin' better every day (especially if you're Randy Pippen).
