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Two TARP crappie day on Chickamauga 3/08/2019
To coin a saying by my good friend, Al Slater aka Fat Albert or Al Father, “There we wuz”. It as a raw and rainy morning on the Chick, but when Dr Phillip called me at 8 AM, it wasn’t raining and after looking at the radar map, we thought that we had a two hour window before the showers started up so we thought, “heck, let’s go fishing for a couple of hours”.
That seemed like like a good plan but after getting to the Wolftever ramp to launch, we got involved with a couple of bass fishermen from North Carolina who are in town for the upcoming bass tournament and it was their first time on the lake, so we chatted for a while, telling them the places to watch while driving the boat so that they wouldn get grounded.
While we were chatting the guys up, it began to sprinkle so we hurried up and launched our boat and ran to the first dock that I chose to fish. Phil caught a short crappie on the first cast and then I caught a TARP Black crappie on my second cast. (14.5”) and my digital scales was bouncing between 2.0 and 1:15 ounces. It was a pig. Grin
We tried other docks but only caught shorts and the rain picked up pretty hard and the wind began to blow from the north direction and it got cold. So we were heading to one last dock to fish on the way back to the ramp and as we were running in the river, I was thinking of trying a bluff even though the current was over 160,000 cfs, but I knew of a very small eddy and a ledge where the crappie stack up when the water is running hard like it is now.
i wasn’t going to go fish the bluff, but Phil suggested that we try it. I told him that he was reading my mind. So we did and are we ever glad that we did. From 11:20 until 11:45, the crappie turned on and I ended up catching another TARP Black crappie (14”), and a few more nice chunky keepers. I also hooked up a big fish of a different species that I battled on my ultralight 4 lb test line for 2-3 minutes in that current before it pulled loose. I have a “boat rule” that says if you hook a fish and it gets off before you can see it to identify it, then it has to be a Drum. Lolol.
It was a tricky presentation to catch those fish on the bluff, but I caught them using a 1/24 oz jighead with a Paradise Stump Bug from Bonehead tackle. I was reminded by CUonthelake who fish’s with me a lot of one of my favorite sayings. Don’t fall in love with a favorite bait or it will break your heart like your first girlfriend at one time or another. Casting into the eddy current that was sweeping the jig slowly toward the downstream current and just at the edge of the ledge was the secret to catching these fish.
With the water changing constantly, it made for difficult fishing but my spot lock on the Terrova performed beautifully. Surface temp 49.2 degrees.
