08-26-2009, 09:00 AM
After a miserable practice last week on Nickajack we decided that we'd tough it out on Chickamauga. Things started to look ok when my first cast with a 1/2 football head jig on our "magic" spot produced a chunky 3lber. Unfortunately, he was all alone and we realized it was going to be a tough day for us. A short while later I caught a small keeper, again on a football head jig. Both of these fish were in less than 2 feet of water. We moved up river to find a similar looking area and started getting quite a few bites. I lost a good 3lber, basically because I'm lame and right afterwards Damon lost it's twin. Suckfest had begun when I hear Damon yell "uh oh" and look at him as he's dropping his rod tip really fast. A big smallmouth chased his lure in and he saw it, dropped the rod tip and the fish dove for it. He set the hook with about 5 feet of line out. As I'm jumping down to get the net, I see that it has another good smallie with it, so I drop my jig (while trying to net the fish) and the second smallie takes off after it, but doesn't connect. That fish turned out to be the big smallmouth of the tx at around 3.92, I think. Then Damon swings again a short while later and catches a monster 12" spot. We are on fire with that baby. Well, things were looking pretty rough for us as we alternated between a couple of spots, none producing what we needed. We caught a ton of dinks just no big fish. We decided to try a bluff area and immediately started catching fish, but again, all dinks. I was retying when Damon yelled to get the net and pulled in a nice keeper. It came right out of the fork of a tree that was by itself on the bluff. I pitched in there while he was messing with his fish and caught it's twin. This allowed us to cull the dink spot. Somewhere along the way we were able to cull my other 15 incher but that was it. We talked about fishing a couple of humps, but decided that there were probably too many fish there and we don't like to get wet culling apparently, so we avoided them......we really aren't that smart. Pretty much all of our fish came from very shallow water on either a 1/2 oz football jig or a Sweet Beaver. If we'd not lost a few of the fish that we did we probably would have ended up with a couple of pounds more, but that's how it goes. I think we ended the day with around 13.25lbs.