04-04-2013, 09:00 AM
The fish played an April Fools trick on us today. I took my niece's husband this AM in search of Rockfish and our luck was sort of poor. I'm blaming the fish and not the fishermen. emoBig
I knew that I should have been crappie fishing. emoFish <br /><br />Anyway, to sum up a poor Riverpark report, we didn&#39;t get started as soon as we would have liked because Sam had to go get his license this morning. So, that put us about 30 to 45 minutes behind. Then the fog was so thick that you could cut it with a knife for a little while. But we finally made it up to the dam and were the only boat up there for about an hour. <br /><br />TVA was running about 20,000 CFS and I like that flow rate for Rockfish. I guess that on our first drift, I caught a white bass up high, and then when we got about 2/3&#39;s way down to the RR trestle, I hooked up a large Rockfish that took off like a rocket and pulled drag for about the 10 seconds that it was hooked up and then pulled off. emoBang <br /><br />It was over an hour before I finally landed the only Rockfish that we caught today. It was 19&quot; long and about 5 solid pounds. It didn&#39;t have anything in its stomach, so it hadn&#39;t eaten in a while, but it was a healthy chunky fish. <br /><br />A little while later, Sam and I caught twin Smallmouth bass on back to back casts. They were about 1.5 lb or so. About an hour before we quit, I landed my pet Drum. It was pushing 8 to 10 lbs. Somewhere along the way, I managed to catch another white bass, so our total for the day was 1 Striper, 2 Smallies, 2 white bass, and 1 Drum, plus the pulloff of a big Striper. Water temp was 52 degrees according to my gauge. We used swimbaits on 1/4 and 1/2 oz sizes. I stayed with 1/4 all morning. We tried bass fishing for about 20 minutes, but that didn&#39;t pan out. We really weren&#39;t interested in trashy green fish. We wanted linesides today. emoBig emoGeezer
I knew that I should have been crappie fishing. emoFish <br /><br />Anyway, to sum up a poor Riverpark report, we didn&#39;t get started as soon as we would have liked because Sam had to go get his license this morning. So, that put us about 30 to 45 minutes behind. Then the fog was so thick that you could cut it with a knife for a little while. But we finally made it up to the dam and were the only boat up there for about an hour. <br /><br />TVA was running about 20,000 CFS and I like that flow rate for Rockfish. I guess that on our first drift, I caught a white bass up high, and then when we got about 2/3&#39;s way down to the RR trestle, I hooked up a large Rockfish that took off like a rocket and pulled drag for about the 10 seconds that it was hooked up and then pulled off. emoBang <br /><br />It was over an hour before I finally landed the only Rockfish that we caught today. It was 19&quot; long and about 5 solid pounds. It didn&#39;t have anything in its stomach, so it hadn&#39;t eaten in a while, but it was a healthy chunky fish. <br /><br />A little while later, Sam and I caught twin Smallmouth bass on back to back casts. They were about 1.5 lb or so. About an hour before we quit, I landed my pet Drum. It was pushing 8 to 10 lbs. Somewhere along the way, I managed to catch another white bass, so our total for the day was 1 Striper, 2 Smallies, 2 white bass, and 1 Drum, plus the pulloff of a big Striper. Water temp was 52 degrees according to my gauge. We used swimbaits on 1/4 and 1/2 oz sizes. I stayed with 1/4 all morning. We tried bass fishing for about 20 minutes, but that didn&#39;t pan out. We really weren&#39;t interested in trashy green fish. We wanted linesides today. emoBig emoGeezer