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Shellcracker fishing 5/11/23
I probably should have posted this on the panfish forum, but I thought that since I haven’t posted in quite a while, people may want to know what I have been up to. Grin.
As my yearly custom is, when the crappie are spawning and the springtime crappie fishermen fill up the boat ramps to overflowing, I shift gears and do a lot of tailwater fishing below dams for Stripers, White Bass, Walleyes, Spotted bass and Smallmouth bass. That is what I have been doing for the past month or more.
We have had good success on most trips, but the wind on a few trips made it nearly impossible to fish on structures that I like to fish when I am targeting Smallmouth and Spotted bass. TVA slowed the water flow so low at times that we quit going to Watts Bar dam to fish for Stripers and Walleyes. But we had a great year before they slow the flow so that they could raise WB and Chickamauga to summer level. We just got to summer level on the Chick. I promise to get back to crappie fishing and posting more in June.
Now this Redear report. I have been checking on them for nearly 3-4 weeks to see when they would go on beds. They almost went on beds during the last part of April when the surface temp reached 73 over the beds that I normally fish. I caught a few that day, then old man weather decided that we needed 7-8 days of temps in the low 40’s and in two days, the surface went from 73 to 66 and the crackers disappeared.
Today, the bigger ones showed up. I won’t keep one less than 8” and almost decided to go chase white bass when I stumbled upon these bigger fish. When we got on them, I was practically sitting on top of the beds. I learned so much today that I didn’t know before about Shellcracker fishing.
My boat, sitting in 2.5-3 feet of water directly over the beds and even with my TM on spot lock, it didn’t spook the fish. I was amazed. I fish with a five foot ultralight rod and 2 lb test hi-vis line and a 1/48 oz jig with small plastic lures. Several fish that I caught this morning would come out from under my boat and I would watch them take the jig. Can anyone say fun fun fun thing to do. Grin.
You won’t believe the plastic either. Yesterday, I was catching them on. Southern pro 1.5” black tiny worm. They ate it up. This morning to my chagrin, I only had two of them left. First fish of the morning broke my line and my son in law who fished with me today hooked a nice one that pulled off at the boat and there went our black worms.
I almost panicked. Not really, I just started thinking about all the lures that I have in my boat and I remembered that I had some 1.5 inch black crawfish with a silver glitter to them. I pulled the claws off them and divided the two sections and put one section on my rod and put the other on Scottie’s rod. I added a power bait nibble to them and the Shellcrackers were jumping in the boat.
We were on them just a short time and the wind suddenly got up and was blowing in a rain storm so we just quit and ran to the ramp. We had 3 over 10” and about 6-7 over 9” and only two that measured 8” which is my minimum. We tossed several smaller crackers and gills back to grow up.
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