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Ft Loudoun report: 4/30/2016*
Yesterday, Dr Phillip Gawthrop and I fished in the East Tennessee Crappie Club classic on Ft Loudoun lake. We had never fished the lake before and only scouted for 2 hours a few days ago. We formulated a plan, that went out the window at the boat ramp when we saw that a high school bass club was having a tournament from the Concord ramp and finding out that at least 2 other bass tournaments were going out from different ramps, one of them being where we had planned to fish, we quickly changed our plans.
We launched shortly after 7 AM and all the crappie members were not allowed to begin fishing until 7:30, so we decided to just idle around the very large area near the Concord boat ramp. That turned out to be a very good plan. As we were idling around waiting on the start time for our tournament, we marked brush and fish in a few places. When it was time to begin the tournament, all other competitors took off for distant places. We stayed put and had the area ll to ourselves, but for a couple of high school bass anglers and they were beating the shoreline like 99% of bass fishermen do. We stayed off shore on the brushpiles.
Right off the bat, Dr Phil caught a nice 12" fish and then another that was 13". In about 10 minutes more, he caught one 13.5" and we decided right then and there not to leave the area. Our pattern for the day was to idle around looking for brush and fish. When we marked fish, we threw a marker and fished them. Sometimes we would catch a keeper or two and then have to move on. We ended up with 9 keepers, culled out two smallest and finished 8th out of 17 boats. Not bad for not knowing the lake like everyone else.
We never got the boat on plane all day and didn't burn a quart of gasoline. Grin. A storm got us off the water with 1.5 hours left to fish, so we just put the boat on trailer and sat in the truck until weigh in. We had 4 fish over 12" and 3 over 13", all spawned out white crappie. Our 7 fish weighed 6.39 lbs, good for 8th place.
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