polo-dog
Well-known member
Fished Chickamauga from about 8:45 to 1pm. Had decided to go back and catch a big blue cat on the main river but had to get some bait first. All the bait that was in the slough where I caught it yest was either gone or had gone deep. Went to a couple of other spots and spent a lot of time ~1 1/2 hours trying to find shad, never did. Lots of small bait of some kind near the surface in the grass but not shad. Went over to the slough that was packed with bait yest and cast over some emerald shiners and kept them. Looked a while longer but decided that I was going to strike out on shad. Went to the river and TVA had killed it. No flow, zero, zip, nada. No fish movement either. Lots of bait and other fish suspended over 40-50 feet of water about 25 feet down but no takers. I really thought that I was going to totally strike out. Started to explore the area with my trolling motor keeping the bait bouncing the bottom. Felt lots of good big rocks. Spent about an hour and a half doing that. Finally decided to try the sweet spot where the fish were yesterday and started hooking up with little spotted bass. The whole time before they started biting there were no fish hugging the bottom but at about 12:15 the fish were on the bottom and started biting. It was about the same time that the boat races were finishing and at about 12:45 the water finally started to move. I only had a few baits but ended up catching about 15 spots and one small flathead cat. The switch just turned on and they were on the hook one right after the other. I ended up cutting the last few baits in half to maximize the catch and they still bit. I don't know if the flow really started at 12:15 or that for some reason they just moved up on the area but they were totally off and then were totally on. I found some really good stuff on the bottom while bottom bouncing that I couldn't have found with current so I guess it worked out. Most of the bait that I saw on the graph early in the day was deep. The water was back up to about 1 1/2 to 2 ft below summer pool. I would have expected fish to be shallow. I think that the flow issue was the bigger issue and the dropping water temp. Hard to figure sometimes.
