One lone crappie but nice gills 12/26/18

[drumking]

I was really needing a fishing fix when CUonthelake texted me last night with a request to panfish in the afternoon today. She only had 2 hours to fish before needing to go catch a conference call. But a productive 2 hours of Bluegill fishing we had with a couple more bonus species thrown in for good measure.

We fished noon until 2 pm. Landed were 4 yellow bass, one lone crappie and 30-40 Bluegills. I kept 9 gills that measured a minimum of 8.5” to a hair over 9”. Good eating for sure.

We were fishing the Riverpark area and the water temp was 49 degrees. The wind was NNE and slight less than 5mph. We were sitting behind the jetty that is out of the 77,000 + cfs that is flowing. 8 floodgates open below the Chickamauga dam. There was a little current flowing out toward the swift water today that I hadn’t noticed before.

There were a few boats up there in that little area, but they finally all left but one guy in a blue boat and he seemed to be trolling for crappie there. Candi and I got lucky and got on a hot area and let my Terrova spot lock do its thing.

Our setup today was a collarless #6 jig with a purple/pink trout magnet and a Chartreuse powerbait crappie nibble on it. We have a pic for that. We were in about 18 feet of water and the fish appeared on the graph to be a couple of feet off the bottom. The purple/pink outfished the mealworm gold that was so hot on our last trip down there. So much so that after I got a big lead on Candi, she finally put one on and then began to keep up with or outcatch me. Lolol. A very nice fun short trip.