Thread: Observations: Hiwassee River/Upper Chick

Fish populations, including Crappie, can be cyclical. Keeper size fish you are talking about (12in +) are probably at least 3-4 years old. If you think back that many years were there any factors that may have affected the spawn those years? High water, low water, late cold spell, etc; poor spawning conditions can influence year class populations. Hopefully your observations are not a trend, just a lull in the cycle. I do not fish down that way, maybe DrumKing can add his observations. Good luck on finding some of those slabs.


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The past 2 years I’ve seen a drop off in size and numbers of crappie. I mainly troll crankbaits in the same area on Chickamauga. I believe it’s just a normal cycle. However, the number of well informed and electronically proficient anglers has increased significantly over the last 4 to 5 years- IMHO.
Hopefully we’ll get a few more high output years in before the Asian carp lay waste to our section of the Tennessee River.

Crappie fishing definitely runs in cycles. You can monitor the average size fish that you are catching and calculate when they will reach the size that you like to catch. Biologists say that our crappie on th Chick grow about 2-3 inches per year. So if you are catching 10” fish and we are catching a lot that size too, in another year or two they will be Slabs. Grin.

I think most crappie wont live over 5 years and they are lucky when fishermen don’t take them out when they reach the 10” size. I personally release crappie over 13” and the ones that I keep are in the 11-12” range. Perfect size fillets to eat. I heard one biologist in a TWRA meeting say that the 10” fish are the best spawners so I don’t like to take them out of the lake.

A few years ago, it was easy to catch over 100 crappie that were 5-6” long. They were the dominate class that year. This past year they reached the slab class size and we caught a ton of them. Not near as many this year as they have been taken out or died from natural causes. There are probably a very few that have reached the monster size but they are few and far between.

That at is my .02 worth and I’m sticking to it. Grin

Originally Posted by layingoff

The past 2 years I’ve seen a drop off in size and numbers of crappie. I mainly troll crankbaits in the same area on Chickamauga. I believe it’s just a normal cycle. However, the number of well informed and electronically proficient anglers has increased significantly over the last 4 to 5 years- IMHO.
Hopefully we’ll get a few more high output years in before the Asian carp lay waste to our section of the Tennessee River.

The problem is the retired RR men who are fishing when your at work. If you'd call sometime I'd give you some when where and what info!!!!!!!!