Watts Bar Crappie

Scott, Ethan, Ian, and I went crappie fishing on Watts Bar today. We launched out of Bell Cove and fished Angler's Cove. We fished with grubs (smoke, shad, and chartreuse), with floats about 3 to 4' deep. The map below shows where we caught the crappie in the order of our progression. We caught a couple of keepers off spots #1 and #2 within the first few minutes of starting the day. Spot #3 was the real hot spot of the day - we probably caught 5 or 6 keepers of the pylons of this dock. It has great depth (~6') and numerous double pylons, so it's like a monstrous stake bed. Spot #4 was a downed tree that held a few fish and spot #5 marks where Scott caught the big fish of the day (on a shad rap) trolling across the open water heading back out of the cove. Spot #6 is the one to remember, it is about 10 new bamboo brush piles that someone placed about 25 yards from the dock shown in the map below. We caught a few crappie here, but when the lake is up 3 - 5' these will not be visible but will definitely be worth checking out for bass and crappie. Over all we kept 11 crappie, and fried them up this evening.

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

Springtime White Bass

I went up the Emory River this afternoon to check and see if the white bass were making their spring run up the river to spawn. I started about 1:00 p.m. and drove the boat as far as I could up the river to the shoals (~1 mile up from the launch at Flour Mill Flats). I used 1/8 ounce lead head with a mister twister chartreuse grub double rigged. I hit several spots picking up one white bass every now and then, but never finding good numbers of fish stacked up in one area. By 2:30 p.m. I had 10, but still couldn't find any concentrations of fish. I figured they just weren't up the river in large numbers yet and was considering loading up and heading down to Watts Bar to crappie fish. As I was firing up and heading down river to the ramp, I saw one more spot I thought I would give a try - it was a stretch of sandy shoreline with down timber. I picked up a nice fish right away, then another, then another, before I knew it I had 30 fish off two down trees in 20' of shoreline. The boat was in about 10' of water and I was casting all the way up to the bank slowly bringing it back. The graph was showing a pretty sharp drop off from ~4.5' to 10' with a great concentration of fish on the drop. Over the next two hours I proceeded to catch fish pretty much constantly, many two at a time. Many of the fish were males, discharging sperm all over my boat, and the others were females stuffed with eggs - its obvious these fish are in the height of their spawn.  I kept the best 4 white bass (14 - 16") for our next fish fry. Kimberly had just gotten home from a spring break cruise with Alex's family so I had to leave earlier than I normally would but I wound up with at total of 101 white bass for the day. I guess they have decided to make their spring run...