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Crappie and Catfish with Candi 7/25/2017
Candi and I hit the water at daylight again this morning in search of big crappie. We were moderately successful. Quality fish were there, but numbers were not. We only landed 12 today. Plus a couple of Blue catfish and a couple of yellow bass and Candi had a small largemouth bass pull off at the side of the boat. What made this trip memorable for us was on our initial cast this morning, after locating the fish, we caught a pair of really good crappie. I had a 14.0" Black crappie and Candi had a 13.25" Black crappie, both on our very first cast of the morning. I love it when a plan comes together. We caught a couple more nice crappie there over the next 20 minutes or so and had a bass pull off at the boat, then off to the next spot on our milk run. Grin.
TVA was running 25,845 CFS when we started fishing and the water temp was 84.3 again. It was 86.3 when we finished about 9:40. I think the extra current turned the bluecats on too. We each caught one in the 3-4 lb range. All fish released today to get bigger. I don't need any fish and Candi only keeps a couple occasionally when she wants to eat them without freezing the fillets. All our fish are coming from 20+ depth of water and we are using 1/16 and 3/32 oz jigs. We are fishing the main river channel drops and looking for schools of fish over cover like stumps or brush.
I am going to give a little more detail on what I am looking for and how we determine where to begin to fish for the summer time hot water deep crappie. I never use minnows. That is cheating. Grin. Please all you "minner" fishermen, don't get offended. I'm joking. About 5-6 years ago after I had taught so many people how to shoot docks, the docks were getting hammered so much that it became hard to find very many catchable fish, so I decided that I needed to learn how to fish off shore structure and mainly the Tennessee River channel.
So here is what Candi and I did this morning and this is typical of the way that I look for and scout for new places to fish. I study maps a lot and the places that I concentrate my search are places that intersect the main river channel. Buck Perry calls the old river channels a delta structure and he said that it is the best structure in any given body of water to locate and catch fish. These places can be ditches, branch channels that meander from a cove to the main river channel, or major creek channel intersections. I also look along the bends in the river channel for maybe 100 yards or so after the channel straightens out. So far, I haven't look along long straight areas of the main channel, but you know that fish have to use these places as they travel around more than we would like for them to move. Grin.
We found a ditch and I threw a marker on the drop off. Then I set my graph to side scan and eased along the deeper side of the drop off about 3 mph and ran the ditch up and down looking for crappie. When we found the first school this morning, I threw another marker and then checked the current flow and the wind direction and determined where I needed to spot lock my Terrova I-Pilot. When Crazy Ivan settled out, we made our first casts and caught the two biggest crappie of the morning our our initial casts. I love to catch fish on the first cast. Some people think it is bad luck to do that, but I say phooey on that thought.
Another structure that we fished this morning was a bluff that has a 5-6 foot wide shelf that is 12-15 feet deep with over 40 feet of water within 10 yards of the bluff. Again, judge the current, wind, etc and position the boat and made our casts accordingly and caught a couple more very nice sized crappie. Again, all fish released. I wish everyone would release the 14" crappie and let them grow. I'm still trying to catch a 3 lb crappie out of Chickamauga and that is a very hard thing to do. I have a 2 lb 10 oz fish for my largest crappie on the Chick.
Our lures this morning were Bobby Garland Black Night 2" Baby Shads and 2.25 inch Minnow Mind'Rs in Cicada color while we had low light. After sunup and it got brighter, we went to lighter colored lures. Lightning Bug, Outlaw Special and a Bass Assassin Pro Tiny 2" Limetreuse Glow worked as well. I hope this info helps the newer crappie anglers increase their knowledge and ability to locate and catch crappie. It isn't that hard and many of these off shore crappie never see a lure except at spawning season. Grin.
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