Joined
·
5,365 Posts
Found "The Spot"...
10 minute drive from my house... We were alone all day, free reign.
Got to the little gravel road, turned down it and drove under some trees. Found the "trailhead" (loose use of the term) and walked down.
The trail forks in two directions... The right path leads to the big slow wide area just above the dam. The left path leads down, down to the spillway and tailwater.
We started above the dam and had some great success fishing weightless crawlers with no bobber or weight. Fish came fast and furious, mostly 7-9 inch gills, shellcrackers, and hybrids.
Most of these fish were thicker than any other panfish we have caught so far in Tennessee... The 6 inchers here would outweigh the 8 incher we've caught elsewhere. Big fat f***ers.
Buck started doing something interesting. He stood up on a log and started "cane-poling" for some fish. He caught 5 in less than as many minutes and ALL were green sunfish! Pretty neat... I didn't teach him that.
Next, we tried the spillway below the dam. This is when it got interesting. The sheer beauty of this place was awesome... It's hard to get a sense of perspective from these pix, but the face of the dam is about 50-60 feet tall.
Buck started in at the creek, rolling his crawler under some rocks and hooked up with this little fella:
And shortly thereafter, THIS guy came out from under a big flat stone and grabbed the worm.
He was safely removed from the hook and released.
We continued catching fish, about 50-60 between the two of us.
We filled a stringer and when we ran out of crawlers, we left.
Our view of the creek below the spillway on the way out:
One of two sinks of death we cleaned today. This was the fullest, the other had 13 fish in it.
Also caught a curious guy... This one has the body markings of a shellcracker, but resembles a gill in almost every other way. Hybrid maybe?
Anyway, an excellent day. So cool to find a place with this beauty and this much "fruitful" fishing.
In the spillway, we saw something jump that SCARED THE **** OUT OF US....
It was red as fire and at least 36" long. I have no idea what it was, but it was nice, quiet, we were just minding our business, watching the water come over the spillway, and then this monster jumped out of the water splashing like a watermelon dropped from 20 feet... I don't have any idea what it was, but it was FREAKY....
That's all. Enjoy the fish porn and the nice scenery.
10 minute drive from my house... We were alone all day, free reign.
Got to the little gravel road, turned down it and drove under some trees. Found the "trailhead" (loose use of the term) and walked down.

The trail forks in two directions... The right path leads to the big slow wide area just above the dam. The left path leads down, down to the spillway and tailwater.



We started above the dam and had some great success fishing weightless crawlers with no bobber or weight. Fish came fast and furious, mostly 7-9 inch gills, shellcrackers, and hybrids.



Most of these fish were thicker than any other panfish we have caught so far in Tennessee... The 6 inchers here would outweigh the 8 incher we've caught elsewhere. Big fat f***ers.
Buck started doing something interesting. He stood up on a log and started "cane-poling" for some fish. He caught 5 in less than as many minutes and ALL were green sunfish! Pretty neat... I didn't teach him that.


Next, we tried the spillway below the dam. This is when it got interesting. The sheer beauty of this place was awesome... It's hard to get a sense of perspective from these pix, but the face of the dam is about 50-60 feet tall.



Buck started in at the creek, rolling his crawler under some rocks and hooked up with this little fella:

And shortly thereafter, THIS guy came out from under a big flat stone and grabbed the worm.

He was safely removed from the hook and released.
We continued catching fish, about 50-60 between the two of us.

We filled a stringer and when we ran out of crawlers, we left.
Our view of the creek below the spillway on the way out:

One of two sinks of death we cleaned today. This was the fullest, the other had 13 fish in it.

Also caught a curious guy... This one has the body markings of a shellcracker, but resembles a gill in almost every other way. Hybrid maybe?

Anyway, an excellent day. So cool to find a place with this beauty and this much "fruitful" fishing.
In the spillway, we saw something jump that SCARED THE **** OUT OF US....
It was red as fire and at least 36" long. I have no idea what it was, but it was nice, quiet, we were just minding our business, watching the water come over the spillway, and then this monster jumped out of the water splashing like a watermelon dropped from 20 feet... I don't have any idea what it was, but it was FREAKY....
That's all. Enjoy the fish porn and the nice scenery.