Thread: Short trip to Watts Bar tailwaters, then Chickamauga crappie. 4/11/19

I won’t bore you too much with a Striper quick trip to Watts Bar this morning, but I’ll concentrate more on the crappie fishing that I did when we got back to Chickamauga.

Dr Phil only had a couple of hours to Fish and we only fished 1.5 hours, but did catch 4 double digit sized Stripers and they all looked to be from the same year class. One 10, 11, 12, and finally a 13 pounder. All fish caught on Sassy Sally Sexy Shads in the 3.5 inch size and glued onto the Shad head jigs that I pour up and powder paint. Head color this am just happened to be white.

Phil had business to take care of, so when we got back to Chattanooga which is about a 50 minute drive from Watts Bar dam, I didn’t want to quit fishing, so I had Phil drop me off at Wolftever creek ramp and I did a lone crappie trip for about 2 plus hours.

I ran to the flat where Caleb and I had located fish last week, marked a couple of schools with buoys and proceeded to fish. It was flat calm for about two casts. Then I noticed the wind picking up. I had looked at the weather report and saw that it was predicted to pick up late morning. It got brutal in a hurry.

The lake was white capping in a lot in a lot of areas that were not protected from the wind and I was on my way to check out a bluff area that would have given me some protection, but decided just before I got there to check out the American Fish trees that we put out a couple of years ago.

I’m glad that I did even though the trees are in open water off shore and not protected from that wind and the gusts that would sometimes give the white cap waves. I found one of the trees that looked like it had fish on it, threw a buoy and was maneuvering the boat to get into position to fish it when I found another brush pile that I didn’t know was there and it was loaded with crappie. It was about 20 yards from the American Fish trees.

After throwing another buoy to mark those fish, I eased the boat into position, nose into the wind, and set the Minn Kota Terrova on spot lock very near my buoy. Using the dock shooting technique for making a cast into the wind, and holding the rod low, was able to get the jig about 15 feet past the cover and let the jig pendulum down to the fish. I had a ball. The fish were very eager and I caught about 25 from that brush with 13 being Keepers. I decided to quit fishing, so after putting up the TM, I eased back over the cover and noticed that I hadn’t even put a dent in the numbers of fish that were holding to that brush. I only took one pic of crappie.

Originally Posted by Pantastic

Did you ever attempt to retrieve and move that fish tree you were talking about a while back?

No Gene, I never did. It is in a good location for pre and post spawn crappie until the water gets too warm, but the fish have deep water nearby and I never see anyone fishing in this area. Grin.