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Chickamauga crappie 101019
The schools are on fall break so my high school teaching buddy was off and wanted to catch some crappie after two poor days of bass fishing on Guntersville lake. We obliged him. Grin.
Gary kept 19 keepers and we released 6 others that were exactly 10” long and legal, but we wanted them to grow up some. Our first stop was an offshore big rock with some brush and we both caught a keeper on our first cast of the day. An omen of good things to come.
Then onto a dock in the creek that produced several keepers and a few short fish as well. When we left that dock, we had 16 keepers and was going to make a run down the river, but as I got the boat on plane, I noticed a waypoint that I had on my graph but never have fished. So I slowed down to check it out and it had the biggest school of crappie on it that I have seen in quite a while.
Needless to say, I threw a buoy and we set Crazy Ivan on spot lock and proceeded to fish. We caught 9 more fish there and we noticed that the NW wind that had been gently blowing, suddenly stopped completely. Then within 2 minutes or so, Crazy Ivan began slowly turning in the opposite direction as a gentle wind began blowing from the south. This was at 10:45 am. We fished a few more minutes and decided to quit for the day. Gary is going to smoke a deer tenderloin for me this afternoon and wanted time to get it done before dinner. I’m so looking forward to that.
Surface temp was 77.6 in the river and 76.9 in the creek. Flow was 6,000 the first hour, then picked up quite a bit. Foggy morning for a good while before the sun burned it off. Lake level is 2 feet below summer level as TVA is taking the lake down to winter level.
Lures of choice were Panfish Assassins in 1.5” Crystal Shad, Albino Shad, and Gary fished with a Bobby Garland Blue Ghost on the last stop and it was productive.
