Thread: Kentucky and Barkley stakebeds, angler input needed

Originally Posted by bandchaser

Don't be puzzled, if they do parts of my ideas and ramblings it will benefit us all. Just too much water time to just spill the beans everywhere. I am not trying to offend anyone, or portray that I am better than anyone, so please don't take it that way. He didn't specify how to respond, so I responded how I wanted to just as everyone else is doing it how they feel they want to.

But, I will say this. Alot of my recommendations did focus on depths that we consider mid-range depths. Also, having a mix of brush and stakebeds.

Originally Posted by Amartinbio

When you say 4 - 10' deep, do you mean at summer pool 359' elevation? Some of the complaints I've heard over the years basically stated that most of our attractors were too shallow to fish until the water was up. From a biological standpoint it makes sense to have variety, but we are considering some deeper stuff. Part of the issue is marking the deeper sites. If they aren't deep enough to be unmarked we need a buoy or extremely tall white pole (these arent insurmountable problems, just giving a little background on our limitations). None of our sites are truly unmarked since the gps coordinates are provided on our website Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Lakes with Fish Attractors We also gave all of our fish attractor locations to the major mapping companies :navionics, lakemaster, lowrance, as well as garmin (not sure whether garmin will integrate them yet)

As for bottom type, mud bottoms are obviously easier to place stakes and they stakes tend to stay in place longer, so over the years many of the original sites have been moved to areas with softer bottoms. It's more difficult to place them in sand or pea gravel, but not impossible. We are also considering some prefabricated stake bed grids for areas with hard bottoms.

When will you all be doing this?

Originally Posted by perchjerker108

Adam, 1st want to say our KY DFWR is one of the best for fish attractors. Spend past 12 years in SC, and they DO NOT put much or any effort in fish attractors. You have 30X times the fish attractors in KY lake versus the attractors in the entire Santee Cooper lake system(Marion and Moultrie). Now, I agree with MRDUX, 4-10' MINIMUM depth even at draw down projections would be the best. I know this would put some in 15-16' feet at full pull, but these could be used year round.

Now, something 'Outside the box' for Bluegill and Redear attractors. I fished Santee for several years for Bluegill. Had a hard time finding consistent locations for the bluegill except for about 5 or 6 personal docks on the lake. I fished under these docks and absolutely killed the Bluegill and Shell Crackers, but never hug up in any brush. So, We had a major drought a few years at Santee, lake was 8 feet down, which for this system, reduced the lake water area about 35%. I went out and checked my 'Special' docks. Since the lake was down 8', I wanted to see why these fish were under these specific docks. What I found was the dock owner had bought these Blue plastic swimming pools, about 6' in diameter (kind you see at Walmart) and had placed them under their dock. Also, looked like they had put about a 3"layer Pea Gravel inside these swimming pools. Now, I then knew why ALL of these dock were hot spots for me. I would STOP fishing after 10 fish per dock, but I assure you I could have caught 4 times this at each dock if I kept fishing what I eventually referred to the 'Swimming pool' pattern. Looks like this works well for drawdowns on the lake. The lip on the pool edges keep sand/dirt from silting over the Pea Gravel. One dock owner had a 150ft dock (bank to end)ranging from 0-15 ft of water and had 20 of these pools under the various sections of his dock.

So, Please consider something like this as an attractor for the Bluegill, Redear people. Man, I know it was a sure bet for me at Santee when I found these little blue swimming pools with pea gravel in them.

That's very interesting. I spent a year working for SCDNR in florence and I definitely agree with your opinion of SC's habitat and fish attractor work. I have considered something like the attractors you're talking about in the past. Those types of gravel beds are typically used in small lakes and ponds to increase recruitment by providing a suitable spawning habitat for sunfish. My feeling on our big lakes is that those types of attractors might not be as useful as they are on marion and moultrie due to our current areas with pea gravel and other hard substrate. I am formulating a small scale study which could look at the effects on sportfish recruitment by using that type of habitat in certain coves and then evaluating any changes in recruitment with larval fish sampling, but its still in the very very early phases.

There are a few reasons that we and other managers throughout the state install fish attractors. (1.) to make it easier for anglers to enjoy the resource (2.) to increase the harvest of sportfish to maintain higher growth rates. improving growth rates is the major reason in our state's smaller impoundments where fish often overpopulate and stunt. Fish habitat on the other hand is typically used to increase recruitment or survival of sportfish. I honestly dont know which category those gravel beds would fall under, but its something we are looking at.

Originally Posted by ccollins

When will you all be doing this?

Which part? Our typical schedule is to place stake beds from about july 15th -august 30. This varies from year to year. We use the wintertime to place our deepwater brush. Spring and fall are designated for fish sampling and other activities.

10'-12' fow @winter pool would be great also.

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I've had good luck catching the big shellcrackers around bamboo that's been put out by people. I'm planning on saturating several areas on Barkley this winter with bamboo. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to devise these attractors but I've got several ideas in mind.

In 2013 and 2014, we caught some big redear out in front of several of the state stake beds. Everyone thinks May is redear prime time, and it is, but April is a great redear month too.