Crow Terminator
Well-Known Member
My dad and I went fishing this morning in his boat. Since I am in this cat fishing phase, he reluctantly decided to go give it a try. He is a bass and crappie kind of guy. Anyway, we had been wanting to go for a while but I had the tree meets face incident that had me out of commission for a week or so. Then we both ended up with some kind of summer cold that had us down for about 2 weeks. FINALLY we found the time to go and all I had for bait was a few frozen skipjacks. On the way to dads, I stopped by the store and picked up a thing of chicken breast...thanks to rsimms suggestion a week or so ago...I figured that might give us some more options.
Long story short...we went to upper Watts Bar, where we hit the generation times wrong. Nothing was moving and wasn't going to be until after 1 o clock in the afternoon. You can't exactly drift when there's no current to drift you. So we slow trolled. I started off with skipjack at our first spot and didn't even get a dink bite. Back in the day, we used to fish for stripers at that spot with live gizzard shad, and always caught cats doing that but nothing wanted to play there today. When we moved spots to a bend in the river, I decided to try the chicken. I no more than dropped it down...I wasn't dragging my bait...but had it suspended about 3-4 cranks of the reel above the bottom in 38-42 foot of water. I caught several small blue cats, and had one that was much bigger on for a while that ended up pulling free. The biggest we actually got in the boat was a little over 12. Several in the 3-4 pound range.
What was happening was, I was having trouble getting hookups. We would be going along and I would have them hit it hard and then immediately slack my line...then nothing. I was using a 8/0 circle hook. I tried going to a different size hook but that didn't seem to help. All the fish I caught, would hook themselves...basically they would hit it, and then they'd just pull the rod down. I don't know what the deal was with the ones that were slacking the line. I only caught about 1/4 of what I actually had bite, and the chicken wasn't staying on my hook all that great either; the fish stole quite a bit of it. It was REALLY slow going until we hit one spot where the sonar just lit up with fish. Then it was a big flurry of blue cat action. We had 3 rods going and there for about 15-25 minutes, all 3 rods had fish on them or were getting bit. In some cases, you'd reel a fish in, rebait the hook and as soon as you dropped it back down they were going after it. Then those fish just vanished. Even with side imaging, we never found them again.
Long story short...we went to upper Watts Bar, where we hit the generation times wrong. Nothing was moving and wasn't going to be until after 1 o clock in the afternoon. You can't exactly drift when there's no current to drift you. So we slow trolled. I started off with skipjack at our first spot and didn't even get a dink bite. Back in the day, we used to fish for stripers at that spot with live gizzard shad, and always caught cats doing that but nothing wanted to play there today. When we moved spots to a bend in the river, I decided to try the chicken. I no more than dropped it down...I wasn't dragging my bait...but had it suspended about 3-4 cranks of the reel above the bottom in 38-42 foot of water. I caught several small blue cats, and had one that was much bigger on for a while that ended up pulling free. The biggest we actually got in the boat was a little over 12. Several in the 3-4 pound range.
What was happening was, I was having trouble getting hookups. We would be going along and I would have them hit it hard and then immediately slack my line...then nothing. I was using a 8/0 circle hook. I tried going to a different size hook but that didn't seem to help. All the fish I caught, would hook themselves...basically they would hit it, and then they'd just pull the rod down. I don't know what the deal was with the ones that were slacking the line. I only caught about 1/4 of what I actually had bite, and the chicken wasn't staying on my hook all that great either; the fish stole quite a bit of it. It was REALLY slow going until we hit one spot where the sonar just lit up with fish. Then it was a big flurry of blue cat action. We had 3 rods going and there for about 15-25 minutes, all 3 rods had fish on them or were getting bit. In some cases, you'd reel a fish in, rebait the hook and as soon as you dropped it back down they were going after it. Then those fish just vanished. Even with side imaging, we never found them again.
