Fishing the Jumps

[polo-dog]

Has anyone been seeing any jumps yet this season? Usually the water has to warm up a bit but soon we should be seing them on the surface out on the main lake and in Harrison bay. Those are the places that I usually see them. Sometimes it's stripe and sometimes it's bass. Sometimes the bass are under the stripe so if you can work the water 5-10 ft under the surfacing school you can hook up with the larger of the two species.

 

[fisherwayne]

Late Sat afternoon I was out on Chickamauga in and out of rain. They were jumpin all around. I tried several things but finally started catching them on a white rooster tail. They were largemouths, but small, real small. I'm not sure if the bass were bustin the shad or the shad was bustin these small bass!

 

[polo-dog]

Was out on the lake yesterday from 10am to a little after 11 and there was some movement on top but no sustained activity that I would call a "jump". Hopefully I'll be out for a while in the AM and will see some. The water temp this afternoon in the creek was 85 degrees. Well up from about a week and a half ago. I would expect the fish to be moving deeper and to cooler water soon with some "jumps" over deep water at certain times of the day.

 

[polo-dog]

Fished in the AM in Harrison bay over a creek channel bend and there were bait fish stacked at the 8-12 foot depth over the whole area. There were fish surfacing all over the area, about an acre in size. It was an incredibly large school of baitfish. The water had just been drawn down about a foot and a half and I don't know if that affected them or not. I saw bass, stripes and skipjacks. I was throwing a chug bug to surfacing fish and caught a few. I only fished for a couple of hours-8-10am and only was on the channel bend for an hour. I threw a few subsurface baits but didn't get any that way. I did get a few strikes on a plastic worm but they didn't hold on, may have been small fish. There were a couple of big surface movements but I only caught small fish. The fog was just burning off when I got home from work so I figure that I missed the biggest part of the bite. I did look for a sweet spot and did find a rock pile in about fifteen feet near the creek channel but most of the fish were over 30 to 35 ft of water. It was great to find this big a group of baitfish and I figured that given some more time I could have found a place in the 10 to 15 ft range where the bass would stack up. I will find that spot the next time I get out.