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Chickamauga Lake report: 6/21/2016
First day of summer and I thought that I would make a crappie report. It's about time that I got back to crappie fishing more than I have been doing. It is hard to leave the big Striped Bass alone when they still want to play a little bit. Grin.
I asked Dr Phil and his son in law, Adam, to help me put out some crappie hotels before daylight this AM and I promised them to take them crappie fishing afterward. I had 5 bamboo hotels ready to plant, and they were a breeze to put out. We put 3 in one spot and 2 in another spot and were finished with that project at 5:52 AM. So on to fishing. We fished vertical structure (bluff) early, then the American Fish tree, and ended up at a bridge piling to catch 24 keepers and many more shorts. We didn't measure any of the bigger ones, but I'm guessing 12" or slightly more. We had a lot of 11" fish and near twelve inch.
We caught fish on nearly every color that we tried, but the hottest lure color was a Full Moon Bobby Garland Baby Shad on a 1/24 and also 1/16 oz jig heads. Blue Ghost caught a couple of the bigger fish. Blue Thunder, Bluegrass in the Panfish Assassin 2", Chartreuse Pepper caught a few as well. As you can tell, we switched colors often to see if any one color was preferred. The secret to catching this AM was to fish deep and slow and be very alert to the subtle bites that we were getting. Crappie this time of year don't hammer the lures like they do when they are protecting their nests.
Fish were stacked from 15-25 feet deep and more. I forgot to look at the water temp, but the last time that I was on the lake in this area, it was 85 degrees. It felt like bath water. We ran into Bassert and Benny Hull just before we finished for the morning at 9:00 AM. Benny was doing a crappie show with Pat. He shot some video of us as we talked to them, but I'm not sure if we make the cut or not. LOL
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