Fishing with my old mentor

I was greatly honored to take the man who taught me how to fish this morning on beautiful Chickamauga lake. I have fished with many good fishermen in my lifetime, but Larry McCuiston is still the best angler that I have ever been a boat with.

A little background on Larry. We were schoolmates in Spring City, Tennessee and Larry was guiding people out of Pete Smith’s boat dock while we were in early high school. He was a very knowledgeable fisherman back in his younger days.

In the 70’s when Ray Scott began the BASS pro fishing tournaments, Larry fished with them one year before going to the Red Man circuit. He finished second in the Lake Seminole tournament that year and we reminisced about the tournament this morning. He said that he fished with Roland Martin on the first day of that tournament and Larry said “I caught 10 bass that day and Roland only caught three”.

He is a very humble man now and has some physical problems as we older people tend to have, but his mind is still sharp and he can still fish any lure with anybody that you want to name. I owe him a lot for the fishing knowledge that I have. He even caught one of my pets this morning to honor my screen name. Drumking. Grin.

Now the report. Al Lindner said one time that in any given week, on any given body of water, and any given species of fish, you will have 2 great days of fishing, 3 good days and 2 poor days. Today, Larry and I caught one of the poor days.

As we were motoring to our first spot just before a beautiful sunrise, the Northeast wind was already picking up as you can tell by the pic that I will post. The fish basically had lockjaw. We did manage to catch fish to take the skunk off the boat, but little else. I rode Larry around the lake and showed him what I look for when I’m searching for crappie.

My biggest crappie was 12.5” and one about 11.5, and a single white bass. The surface temp when we stopped just before 10 was 87.3. The fish we caught were on bottom 18-25 feet deep. We marked a lot of fish, but they wanted nothing to do with us. Better days coming, I’m sure.