drumking, chickamauga, crappie, 8/27/09, Bassert

[FishNews]

Pat Ryan (Bassert) must be my lucky charm. Everytime that we fish together, we have a great day for numbers of fish and today was no exception. We landed 45 crappie from about 7:30 til about 12:30 or so. Quit just before it started raining. Actually it did start raining before we quit, then it slacked up and we ran to the ramp and got home before it started up again.<br /><br />Most of the fish were legal sized keepers, although we did catch a few under the 10" limit. However, we only had 8 that fit into our slot limit of 11" to 13". All the fish are really feeding up at this time of year. They look healthy and fat. The lake is full of 1" threadfin shad right now and the fish are having a party.<br /><br />The bite today was almost maddening at first. So subtle and light and you had to be lightening quick on the hookset or the fish would blow the bait back out. I missed more strikes today than I usually miss in a week of fishing. We caught some fish on vertical structures and others on docks, but all the fish were deep except for a couple that hit about an 8 count. All the rest were around 12 to 20 count. We finally happened to be in a good spot when the feedbag went on and we caught fish after fish for a few minutes, then just as suddenly as it started, the bite was over.<br /><br />Today, the fish would bite just about everything that we threw. Panfish assassins, ringer stingers, slab slayers, and bg shads all caught fish. We tried a few different colors and the fish did prefer pearl/chartreuse over other colors, but some were caught on vegas bg shads, blue/silk chartreuse stinger, and a couple more different colors. Red/chartreuse produced a few fish for Pat. Some fish came on 1/16 oz jigheads and I caught a lot of fish on 1/32 oz jigheads.<br /><br />I didn't look at the water temp. Pat, I had another good time and next time we will go down the Nick and see about some crappie down there. emoBig emoGeezer