Thread: Report: Chickamauga Lake crappie 7/19/2015

Dr Phillip Gawthrop and I made it out for a 1/2 day of crappie fishing this AM. Water temp was around mid 80's when we started. We fished both docks and off shore structure. Most of our keepers came on the off shore structure. We found a big school of crappie that were sitting around a big stump on a 15-25 foot drop. We worked around this spot after dropping our marker and caught fish from just about every angle. The biggest that I measured was 12.5" Not necessarily the longest fish either.

We were using 1/16 oz jig heads and Bobby Garland plastics and today, the fish hit every color that we threw. They didn't seem to prefer one color over another. Days like today makes crappie fishing a little easier since you don't have to fine tune the color that the fish want. I know that we caught fish on May Bug Minnow Minders, Mo-Glo Blue Ghost, 2" Crystal Shad, and 2" Love Bug Slab Slayers. There was virtually no or very little wind. Water was glassy calm a lot of the time. Before we quit fishing though, a little cloud came over and dumped a little rain on us. Not enough to get the rain suits out. There was no current early, but there did seem to be a pick up in current just before we stopped fishing. That big stump that the fish were staging on had about a dozen of our jigs decorating it up for Christmas. Grin.

Our total catch this 1/2 day. Off the water by 11:15. 18 keepers, 5 short crappie, 3 Spotted bass, and 2 yellow bass. Doc kept 17 crappie. We released the last keeper because it needed to put on a little more weight. Fun trip.

Nice catch. Good to let the last one go. Good karma.