A Perfect March Day on Chickamauga
On Tuesday I hit the water guiding Keith Buddemeyer from Spring Hill and Ben Pitts from Flintville. Long-line trolling, it was a very slow start for us. Lots of short fish and just a few keepers. But a little later, a friend of mine clued me in on a productive section of creek.
Slowly but surely we started catching a good number of keepers. I always tell folks that when you're trolling, "It's a marathon, not a sprint." When my friend had to leave, she gave us her nine fish. We finished out our limit of 45 keepers at 1:47 pm. We probably caught 100 throwbacks and yellow bass. We kept trolling and culled a few smaller crappie. We caught several more ten-inchers but we really weren't checking unless it was an obvious cull fish.
After doing that a while, I asked the guys if they wanted to try casting some jigs under floats just to do something different. Of course they were all in. I warned them, "Let there be no misunderstandings... I really don't do this a lot." We fished three or four different areas with very poor results. Just a few bluegill, yellow bass and one keeper crappie.
Then I told them "last spot," sort of like "Last Call" at the bar. The wind was howling by now as we started down one particular bank. Nimrod caught a good keeper and I hit "Spotlock" on the trusty i-Pilot Minn Kota Trolling Motor. We sat there in the howling wind, with only minor adjustments up and down a 40-yard stretch of bank and hammered crappie on jigs under floats.
We were throwing everything back at this point, but I'm sure we caught 40 or 50 fish of six assorted species in an hour-and-a-half. We figured we caught at least 15 or 20 more good keeper crappie. It was the hottest spot I've ever been on fishing jigs under floats. What a blast! Although it was killing Keith and Ben to sit there and catch nice keepin' crappie and have to throw them back. #goodproblemtohave
Strangest occurence of the day (maybe the year) ... trolling along midday Keith said, "Look at that!" A drake mallard came out of the trees and landed in the creek. Keith said when he saw it, it looked like it had come out of a tree, or maybe hit a tree. We watched him try to get up and fly, and then flop around... and then he rolled over stone cold dead. I trolled out and we picked him up. He was dead as a doornail, but didn't have a mark him... but was "shore 'nuff dead!" Weird!
Keith and Ben left with 45 crappie (one TARP), a blue cat and a few big yellow bass. But I'm sure that we caught at least four limits, and maybe five? That means life is good and gettin' better everyday.
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