Redear on Barkley or Kentucky help
A friend and I are making the 2+ hour trip to either Kentucky or Barkley lake on Sunday to try something I have never tried before, and that is fishing for Redear.
How is the fishing right now? If anyone can give me some tips I would appreciate it greatly. We have one spot on Barkley to try, but other than that, we are going in pretty blind. I planned on fishing with popeyes and pieces of nightcrawler or meal worms.
Is it necessary to fish with 4lb test, or could I get away with using 6-8lb test?
Thanks for any replies!
shocking results and redear
Quote:
Originally Posted by
redearhoosier
I think the redear were making a rush to spawn around April 23rd. When the TVA sucked the lakes down 2ft in 24 hours, that ruined the first attempt for them to spawn. They finally spawned on the May full moon pretty good. They absolutely should be spawning this week, it's the new moon of May.
The department shocked ky and barkley from the week of the 23 to about May 12th. This is part of our routine surveying for black bass, however we also frequently observe redear and bluegill. We saw plenty of redear up shallow early when they raised the lake to summer pool. These fish were in the bushes in their usual spots. We did not electrofish during the low water (3' drop) because the conditions were outside of our sampling design. When the water jumped up again, we expected to see abundant redear and bluegill up shallow, but that wasnt really the case. The fish we saw were extremely concentrated together in large spawning areas near emergent vegetation such as mustard flowers. We saw very few in the bushes themselves, but did pick up a few. We collected a small sample of fish for growth analysis and found that our redear (unsurprisingly) still have really good growth rates compared to other waters in the state. The growth rates observed this year were much higher than previous samples. As most of you know they eat snails and small mussels as adults, so there isnt much diet overlap with Silver, Grass, or Bighead carp except at the larval stage. Black carp however have the potential to compete more directly with the redear as they are known to consume similar prey, but fortunately we dont have a large established population yet. If any bowfishermen happen to come across one of these black carp, please call the department and let us know. They look very similar to grass carp, but the website below provides a good description of how to tell the difference.
Asian Carp > RESOURCES > Outreach Materials
Good luck with the redear! As usual, they are out there, just hard to find!