09-02-2012, 09:00 AM
Pete and I hit the water about 7:00 and ran up to the dam to check out the bait situation. I fumbled and bumbled around and caught a few fishable baits. But I did catch 6 LM and Spots, couple nice Whites, several Crappie and Gills. I can catch most anything with my net except bait. emoBang So after wearing out my arm for about 30 minutes we ran back downstream and found a school of Gizzards and picked-up about 30 in one throw. I managed to let go of the rope, but it was shallow there and the rope drifted right back to the boat, lol.<br /><br />So after that start we got some bait in the water and I hooked up a nice fish on first drift. Oops, lost it on the surface. Re-baited and had another nice fish take off with the bait and I missed it on the hookset. Felt the weight then nothing. That happened one more time and we went up to the boils to try drifting there.<br /><br />Only running about 6K flow, so it was a slow drift. Had one take and got a nice SM. Next drift Pete finally gets it going with a TARP smallie. Real nice dark fish. Now TVA bumped up the flow and we figured we were in tall cotton, drift after drift and nothing. They finally got up to 40K flow, and the fish never did turn on. It may have been that time of day was more important than the flow rate. I did pretty good on Sunday with a low flow, so who knows.<br />We picked up a few whites on foleys and a channel cat on a gizzard.<br /><br />Sun started to breakthrough the clouds, and started to warm up so about 11:00 we packed it in. Not quite what we wanted, but 2 nice Smallmough helps ease the pain. <br /><br />Regards, Labman