drumking, chickamauga, Crappie and bass, 7/24/09, Hal

[FishNews]

The white bass were jumping all over the place this morning except in the boat. 2 days ago with 2jigs, they hit everything that you threw at them. Today, we threw everything at them and only got 3 fish in the boat. We tried topwater, grubs, crappie lures, various spoons and it was almost a total bust for us. We had the fish practically schooling within spitting distance and we threw small topwater plugs right in the middle of the melee and nada. We threw spoons in the middle of the melee and nada. We threw grubs in the middle of the melee and nada. I'm blaming the fish on this entire day. There was another boat up there with us early and I only saw them land 2 whites during all that mess. They were throwing into the frenzy too and coming up empty.<br /><br />So, we said to heck with this and went crappie fishing and only had a slightly better morning. We did catch 26 including my ninth TARP crappie of the year, a nice fat 14.25 incher on a ringer stinger. Some of our fish came from about 10 feet of water, but very near 40 feet of water. The rest of the crappie came over 20 feet deep. Picky biters this morning. I know that Hal got a little frustrated as we were trying to catch a few fish for a friend of his. We managed to get him a mess of fish, but it was like pulling teeth.<br /><br />I did catch a nice 2-2.5 lb 16 inch largemouth bass and we each landed a baby bluecat. I caught 2 bluegills too. We saw Biofisher, his son and dad up there fishing for catfish. I didn't recognize them until we got past them and decided not to turn around. Sorry Gary. Hope you guys did better today.<br /><br />Water temps were in the high 70's early and then around 82.5 degrees at noon when we quit fishing. Slight current and the wind was from the SW, but not too strong. I looked at the NOAA weather this morning before leaving, and they were predicting the wind to be from the NW at 5 mph and strengthening. I can predict the weather better with no training than these guys can with all their computer models. I used the big rock method of weather predicting. <br /><br /> emoBig