Thread: Chickamauga Lake crappie/catfish report 7/02/2017

Hooray! Swafford Trolling Motor of Lenoir City called me yesterday and informed me that my TM was repaired. I am going up in the morning to retrieve Crazy Ivan. However, Dr Phil called me last night and wanted to go out in the boat to scout and fish if we could without the TM. So we did. Results were fair, but frustration was above 5 on the scale of 1-10. Slight wind blowing first from the southeast then switching to the northwest would not allow us to stay on the fish that we could find on the graph.

We did manage to land 10 keepers with Dr Phil doing most of the crappie catching. He also wasted 25 minutes fighting and landing a 16 lb Blue Catfish that went home with me for the freezer. Phil had the hot lure and I wouldn't put one on. I wanted to experiment with different jigs. I caught 2 or 3 of the 10 crappie that we landed. The best lure was a Bobby Garland 3" Slab Slayer lovebug color on a 3/32 oz jig. Our fish came off shore mostly. Phil did a good job of landing that catfish with 4 lb test line and a crappie jig. When I grabbed the fish by the lower jaw with my grippers, the jig just fell out of his mouth.

I did land a small blue catfish 2-3 lbs and had a big one break my 4 lb line after a five minute fight and I had the drag set loose so breakage was less likely to happen. It did anyway. A couple of yellow bass tried to commit suicide, but we threw them back. Water temp was 78.1 mid morning and 79 when we stopped at 10:00 AM. We found some new places to fish while we were scouting a different area than we usually fish.

Good looking fillets. Sounds like a worth while trip since you found some new spots.