Barren River Sauger??

We were bass fishing from canoes at Sallys Rock (mouth of Gasper) a couple of years ago a young guy in our group caught two sauger there at the riffle using a spinner bait. If I wanted to try and catch some I would go back there and fish on and below that riffle with worms and grub twister tails if I were fishing from the bank and I would jig night crawlers on a dolly fly around the riffle if I were in a boat or canoe. Ive fished for Walleye but not for sauger. On Nolin the Walleye start moving up to shallow riffles to spawn as early as Feb. The local fishery biologist say the new native walleye in Barren should behave the same way. I bet Greencastle would be a good spot to hit for sauger here shortly.

Live you! Live I say!


Got the sauger itch again and the time is right. Done a lot of exploring since 2012. Put in below Greencastle once and ran down below Gasper when Green was up. Had spent a fair amount of time up above L&D 5 before they saw fit to get rid of it. Have ran from Paradise up to 3 as well. Rochester up to the bend where Taylor Lake is and from Morgantown down to Taylor Lake and back up to 4.

Just got through reading a fisheries report about stockings of sauger done way back when this thread was started. None of them panned out. The conclusion was sauger don't do well in the shallower, riffle-hole-run rivers like Barren and how Green gets up above L&D 4. Now that 5 and 6 are gone on Green I can only imagine it has made it worse for them. The gist was that sauger preferred wider rivers with longer, deeper hole sections and plenty of tributaries to get up into when the water gets rolling.

It is just as quick for me to go down into TN below Cordell Hull and fish. Taking me some time to get that river figured out but it has both sauger and walleye. Down in that section Cumberland is about the size as the Ohio up above Louisville due to being the very upper reaches of Old Hickory lake. Still has a substantial amount of current however. I was drifting at 4 mph this past weekend.