KY Lake from last week

Wow, fishing was as tough as I have seen it. While I spent one day just fishing, not for bass, but just to catch fish and was able to land over 60 fish in an afternoon. It included white bass, yellow bass, crappie, yellow perch, largemouth and channel cats. All came from pulling #5 shadraps or flicker shad. The lake is low and I found my fish by trolling the 15 ft contour line on my Lowrance maps. Once I located the fish I actually had trouble trolling two rods at times because there were so many doubles. Gotta love that kind of trouble.

After that day I started looking for a bass pattern that we could use for our Renegade tournament. Topwater bite was non-existent. Shad were scatter in the mouths of creeks and made it hard to pattern. We finally found two things that were producing big bass, but not in numbers. First we were burning Red Eye Shad where there was a steep drop from 1-2 ft into 10-12 feet. My partner lost one about 7 at the boat and had a 3+ jump and get off and caught a few short fish. The other thing we did was use jigging spoons around the bridge on Barkley. We had a nice 4lb 1oz smallie from that technique.

Once the tournament rolled around, day one was cool, windy and overcast and neither technique was working well. We went to a creek and started burning the red eye around docks and a monster loaded up, but broke off. We didn't land a keeper that day. On day two we moved to the canal and while my partner stuck with the red eye shad, I decided to slow down and Carolina rig a lizard (I despise a Carolina rig, but will do whatever works). Within minutes I had two short fish on a bluff wall and then landed a 4.5 lb chunk. With that we went looking for other similar areas, but was only able to land one other 15" fish. The lized was watermelon chartreuse. It was the only thing that they would consistently bite.

Don't know if this will help anyone, but good luck nonetheless.

RJP

[QUOTE=RADRJP;564929]Wow, fishing was as tough as I have seen it. While I spent one day just fishing, not for bass, but just to catch fish and was able to land over 60 fish in an afternoon. It included white bass, yellow bass, crappie, yellow perch, largemouth and channel cats. All came from pulling #5 shadraps or flicker shad. The lake is low and I found my fish by trolling the 15 ft contour line on my Lowrance maps. Once I located the fish I actually had trouble trolling two rods at times because there were so many doubles. Gotta love that kind of trouble.

After that day I started looking for a bass pattern that we could use for our Renegade tournament. Topwater bite was non-existent. Shad were scatter in the mouths of creeks and made it hard to pattern. We finally found two things that were producing big bass, but not in numbers. First we were burning Red Eye Shad where there was a steep drop from 1-2 ft into 10-12 feet. My partner lost one about 7 at the boat and had a 3+ jump and get off and caught a few short fish. The other thing we did was use jigging spoons around the bridge on Barkley. We had a nice 4lb 1oz smallie from that technique.

Once the tournament rolled around, day one was cool, windy and overcast and neither technique was working well. We went to a creek and started burning the red eye around docks and a monster loaded up, but broke off. We didn't land a keeper that day. On day two we moved to the canal and while my partner stuck with the red eye shad, I decided to slow down and Carolina rig a lizard (I despise a Carolina rig, but will do whatever works). Within minutes I had two short fish on a bluff wall and then landed a 4.5 lb chunk. With that we went looking for other similar areas, but was only able to land one other 15" fish. The lized was watermelon chartreuse. It was the only thing that they would consistently bite.

Don't know if this will help anyone, but good luck nonetheless.

RJP[/QUOTE]

Thx for the report RADRJP. I’m heading down next week or week afterwards. I’ll be around the Blood river area. Hopefully the water temp will be lower.

We always have our best luck pulling crankbaits. This trip was no different. The hot colors were purple tiger in the flicker shad and rainbow trout in the shad rap. By then you might be able to get on a good squarebill bite. I'd love to hear how you do!
Tight lines,
RJP

We had one really good day of practice on barkley and 2 really crappy days on KY. When the tourney rolled around we went with the only thing we had going on south barkley. Caught 6 1/2lbs on day 1 and was in 62nd place but we knew we wasted most of the day searching and still should have a pretty decent shot at qualifying. We went back to the same area the 2nd day and caught 10.5lbs and qualified in 29th with 17.5lbs. We knew 12lbs would be a good bag for what we were doing and decided to completely scrap it and try to hit a homerun on saturday with the weights zeroed. We missed. Only got one good bite on saturday that was a 5.23 and had one other keeper for 7.59 total and 28th place.