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I'm fishing below Fort Loudoun and/or Melton Hill Dam this weekend for stripers and would appreciate any advice on where to find the bait. Usually it is pretty thick below both dams, but at times it is nowhere to be found. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks and good luck!
With the water on, you can find bait at both locations where the water is coming out of the discharge. At Melton hill they are typically bunched up next to the bank just right of the discharge and around the cement wall protuding out from the dam. Loundon is the same, with the thickest bait being closest to the rock wall and the dam. Some of the eddies such as the one directly below Loudon dam hold bait that you can only detect with a depth finder... Let us know how you do!
I don't even use bait below Melton Hill. I just troll large chrome and blue deep divers. I don't catch as many but the ones I do catch are big. I got three 40"+ in one evening there last year. Drive up to the wing wall, throw your lure toward the face of the spillway, put the engine in gear at idle speed and head straight down the intersection of the discharge water and the eddies on the spillway side. It is only 15 or 16 feet deep so be careful until you have gauged how much line to put out to just barely tick the bottom or you will lose WAY more lures than you want to. Unfortunately, there is often somebody tied up to the wingwall drifting live bait downstream so this messes with the pattern. Give it a shot if you can't find the bait.
on loudon when you launch go across river to second neck go go to the little dam and throw your net in front of the dam or under the bridge.beware you might pull up some keeper crappie
Thanks guys for the info. We went last weekend. I had 3 stripers on and lost all 3. 2 pulled out and 1 broke off. Bait was very easy to find at Loudoun and a little tougher at Melton Hill. Good luck to you all.