Chickamauga Lake 12-10

[DHaun]

Jerdog and I got on the water about 7:30am at Chester frost and the ramp had ice on it. There was a crowd of other boats (tournament perhaps) and luckily some smart boaters had salted the ramp. Just to be safe we used my truck to back his trailer in since it was 4wd. We took the route we had planned out of Chester Frost and never got into any shallow water (thanks for the info guys). We took off towards the Nuke and decided to go into a slough to look for some skipjack...nothing, but we did score a couple crappie. After that we trolled some Redfins around the Sequoyah discharge and struck out on the striper bite. Water temp ranged from 48-52 with the warmest at the discharge, but it did not look like the plant was boiling out any warm water... We barely even marked any fish so we went further downstream to check out some gulls working some bait on the surface but the water started getting real shallow and the wind started picking up so we dropped that idea.

We went back to the slough to get out of the wind and marked a few fish stacked-up at the end of a fallen tree in 16ft. We trolled for crappie first and struck out so we went back to where we had marked fish and threw out a buoy. There we caught 5 more crappie and a largemouth. They all had to be bumped on their heads with our jigs to make them bite. They were in 10-16ft of water.

After we fished that spot out we went on downstream to a point I was informed of and fished a drop that went from 15-38ft (Thanks for pointing me in the right direction Polo-Dog). It was out of the wind a bit and had lots of small fish marked on the 20-30ft range consolidated in a very small area so I started spoon jigging and scored 2 nice shellcrackers. Took a pic of the biggest. After I lost 3 spoons to the drop we left about 1:00pm. It was cold and windy but turned out to be a pretty fun day on the water. 7 crappie (kept 1), 2 nice bluegill (Jerdog's Lunch), and 1 largemouth.

 

[polo-dog]

Wow, nice bream! Was that fish on the top of the drop or at the bottom or somewhere in between? If those big bream are there with worms you could really clean up on them. Not that sporting but great for the frying pan!

 

[DHaun]

Polo-Dog, the wind was blowing us a bit and it seemed to me that a 10 foot horizontal shift was proportional to a 15 ft vertical change like we were basically fishing a wall beneath us. There was a bit of a shelf but since the wind was blowing and we were having to chase a few of my hung spoons it was hard to stay right on it. It seemed today that the fish had to have the lure put right in their face to eat it - I estimate based on the depth finder they were holding right as it came up in the range from 30ft to 25ft, but it was in a small area hard to drop a spoon on. Again, thanks - it made a nice ending to the day to find a couple more fish! We will have to ask Jerdog how they were, especially the one in the pic, its hard to see but that was one of the thickest bream I have ever caught!

 

[polo-dog]

I know just the area that you are talking about. It seems to me that any and every species of predator would be attracted to that area to feed. It's just a classic feeding area the way I see it. Did you try for any or see any shad anywhere out there today? The rocks down there are huge and I would expect that it would be hard to keep a jigging spoon on in all of that. Was there any current at all? That spot really seems to be current dependent when I fish it. I'm glad that you had some success there. Try it again and I'll bet that you will catch a bunch more. It seems that there are certain areas along the drop where they feed or at least where I see the most fish and get the most bites whatever I'm fishing for. It's always tough when the wind is a factor and it's harder to get a feel for what's below it seems to me.

 

[JerDog]

We did not see any threadfins on the graph! We covered a lot of water and just could not locate them..We started looking for Skipjack in a creek/tributary and found nothing. That shelf did look very promising, do you find smallmouth on points like those?...looked like a lot of big rocks on the bottom.

Gonna cook up the fish tonight, I'll let ya'll know how they taste.

 

[polo-dog]

I would expect that at times there would be smallies in the area. I have caught mostly blue cats and spots. I'll bet that the b'gill was good. I may go looking for shad to cast up one day this week.

 

[JerDog]

Question for anyone who has fished the Sequoyah...the water was 48F in the back water of the creek we were in...it was 52F in the outflow of the plant....is this as warm as the water gets there? I was told this past week that TVA can not discharge water that will bring the river temp up more than 15F and monitor it carefully. Can anyone confirm that?

Also, is water pumping in from the nuke plant on a continual basis or is it turned on and off like the dams? Is there a generation schedule anywhere?

 

[jim4596]

thats true. the water has to be cool before being discharged into the lake.