I headed over to the TN portion of KY Lake the last two weekends to try my luck on some largemouth:
Trip 1- Two weeks ago, I woke up late and had a leisurely morning in Nashville. The kids were both away, and the wife had to work on a school project. What is a boy to do?- certainly not watch the Vols get destroyed by LSU. I was hesitant to go due to a recent back injury, but the idle time combined with the perfect Fall weather was too much to take. So, around 9:15 am, I hooked the Bee up to the Landcruiser, and I was West bound on 40. I arrived at Big Richland Creek around 11 am, and I decided to try to pick the creek apart and resist the temptation to run around.
I idled out in the back 1/3 of the creek, and I started looking for bait and hopefully fish chasing them on top. There was bait everywhere on top in the back of the creek, but there was hardly any schooling activity. After idling around near the marina for 20 minutes or so, I decided to move out to the mouth of the Little Richland arm where I have had a lot of success in October before. It was fairly obvious that this was the spot, as three bass boats were weaving in and out of the cove chasing the schooling action. There was one adjacent area that was not being fished, and I figured it would be a likely place to catch a bigger bass (chunk rock and pea gravel bank with a decent depth change that sat closest to the creek channel).
I eased up on the flat within casting distance of the gravel bank, and I just waited. Within minutes fish started herding schools of small threadfin shad up against the rocks. As soon as it would start, I would lob the 1/2 oz Red Eye Shad into the chaos. They wouldn't bite it every time, but when a fish would hit the rattle bait, it was a good quality keeper. I caught four off of this bank, and lost two more. So, after an hour, I had four keepers for around 11 lbs. The fish quit chasing the bait against the bank, so I needed to figure out how to catch them.
In the past I had had luck in the same area on a small jigging spoon in open water, so I eased out toward the channel (100 yards or so from the bank) and the graph lit up with balls of bait and fish. I caught a variety of fish including white bass, yellows, and skipjack. I also hooked three keeper largemouth (only landed two). Of course the one I lost was over 4 lbs! I now had around 13 1/2 lbs on my best 5. The schooling action all but died in the cove around 1:30, so I decided to run south to check a couple of other spots.
I started in the Eva area, but the low water had moved the fish from the shallow pockets where they had been. I then ran across to Trace Creek to see if the fish were still in the first third of the creek. I could not find any bait or fish, so I ran back to Richland to see if the schooling action had resumed. I caught a few more white bass and skippies on the spoon, but it was clear that the easy pickings were gone. At around 4 pm, I put her on the trailer and headed home.
Trip 2- A friend of mine who has a house in Richland Creek called me during the week to see if I might want to go back to KY Lake on Sunday. His boat lift was out of commission, so we would need to trailer my boat. I was happy to take him, and I was confident that we would have some success. We put in at his private ramp on the other side of the creek, and we headed straight to the cove at the head of the smaller creek arm where I had caught them the week before. We pulled in and the shad were flipping but the only fish chasing were whites, so after catching three or four of them, we decided to move.
John suggested a flat across the creek with a couple of subtle ditches running out from the bank. He said that the ditches had some stumps on them, and he had done well here in the past. I set the boat well out off of the bank in about 5-6 ft, and we started combing the flat with rattle baits. Sure enough, when we got to the two little drains, I caught two nice keepers in the 2 1/2- 3 lb class on the Red Eye Shad. He suggested that we stay on the flat and keep moving toward the creek mouth. When we got down to a couple of private docks, I landed our third and fourth fish, and one of them was another solid keeper. We now had 3 keepers for around 8 1/2 lbs. We decided to run back to the schooling cove where we started.
The fish were not chasing bait up on to the gravel bank like the week prior, but the activity had definitely picked up. The white bass, skipjack, and an occasional largemouth were tearing up the shad. We landed ten or so whites, and I then I made a few casts toward the rock bank just to check it. I hooked a solid 3 to 4 lb bass here on the rattle bait, but he came unbuttoned half way back to the boat. We trolled out off the bank to try for the suspended fish in deeper water. I quickly nabbed two keepers on the 1/2 oz War Eagle spoon, so we now had our limit of around 13 lbs. As it had done the week before, the bite seemed to die, so I decided to make a run North to check another creek where I had done well in the past in October.
We made the 20 mile run to Hurricane Creek, and the shad were in there thick. There was occasionally schooling action, but it was hard to coax the fish into hitting. It was probably a timing issue, as I knew they were there with all the bait (and boats) in the creek. I did manage to catch a solid keeper on the Red Eye, and it probably would have culled our weight up by half a pound or so. It was now around 1:30, and John needed to run into Waverly to grab a prescription, so we headed in and drove back to Nashville.
It was an almost identical trip to the week prior, and I had a lot of fun. I did not uncover a pattern capable of winning any money, but it's always satisfying to catch a limit.
Until next time,
RBK
