Jessica Showing How It's Done

Location: Browns Ferry - Wheeler Lake - Alabama

Time: 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Air Temperature: 90 Degrees
Water Temperature: 86 Degrees

Lake Level: 555.76' Strong current. 

Weather Conditions: Moderate winds from the south. About 11 mph

I took Jessica out this afternoon after work. I didn’t fish, but instead worked the trolling motor to try to keep us stable. Winds were very strong and the current was pulling hard, since we really struggled to keep the boat in position. Nevertheless, Jess fished with cut shad bouncing bottom with the new inline float rig I’ve been working with. We fished alongside the boils and submerged pipeline by the nuclear plant. 

She immediately caught a nice 6 lbs class blue literally on the first drop in the water. She quickly followed it up with a couple more on the next couple drops. She even pulled a double with cats in both hooks! She was slaying them and managed to land 7 in roughly an hour or less. It was a blast trolling while she was hammering the cats!

Jug Recover + Bottom Bouncing = Winning

Location: Browns Ferry - Wheeler Lake - Alabama

Time: 6:00 PM - 9:30 PM
Air Temperature: 74-84 Degrees
Water Temperature: 83-85 Degrees
Lake Level: 555.96'
Weather Conditions: Calm early, but turning very choppy.  Winds from the South.

I got up this morning with the main intent to try to recover my jugs that I left floating overnight.  I launched from the house and headed over to where I originally launched the jugs last night.  I knew they drifted, but figured I'd start there.  I had studied the wind and current last night and found there was little to no significant current.  The main mechanism for movement would the the wind blowing from the south, south east.  I expected the jugs to be drifting north to north west. 

There were no jugs where I launched them, as expected.  I turned on the Navionics app and set it to track my course and I began to ride in a grid-like approach beginning on the north shore in case any had washed ashore.  They had not.  I continued to ride back and forth from the south bank to the north bank, traversing a little farther west each time.  Once I approached the islands where the power lines cross, I checked the south bank of each island to see if they had washed ashore.  I spotted the first jug just off the east point of the southernmost power line island.  I dropped a pin in the app to begin plotting a drift pattern.  This first jug was one of the ones with the monofilament leaders and had a channel cat on it.

I quickly picked up several more jugs within eye sight and plotted each one with a pin.  I quickly began to see the drift pattern being plotted and headed along that course and spotted more jugs.  I pick 11/12 up pretty quickly.  The last one was not anywhere to be seen, so I figured either a barge pulled it away, someone picked it up, it broke loose, or a fish pulled it away from the others.  I began making parallel runs along each side of the drift pattern.  On my final pass, I was going to head back towards the nuclear plant.  Along the way, I spotted and picked up the final jug, which had a channel cat on it, too.

I was VERY happy to have recovered all the jugs.  Navionics said I covered 25 miles in 1.75 hours during my attempt to round them up.  In the end, they had floated 3.5 miles over night.  The results of the monafilament vs. nylon experiment was interesting.  Of the 6 with monafilament, I caught fish on two jugs and a third showed one had been on, but had thrown the hook.  I had zero bites on the nylon.  I will be changing the others over to monofilament.

It was only about 8 AM and the weather was nice.  I had about 4 shad or 16 pieces of bait remaining from my trip last night, so I decided to bounce bottom with my new rig over in my normal spot at the nuclear plant.

The action was as hot as it had been the previous night.  I immediately begin catching good fish.  I fished here for about 1.5 hours and literally ran out of bait.  I caught 14 catfish on my 16 pieces of bait.  It was a very good morning! With rod and reel plus jugs, I caught 16 total and took 14 of them home. 

ThunderCats. Lost Jugs.

Location: Browns Ferry - Wheeler Lake - Alabama

Time: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Air Temperature: ?? Degrees
Water Temperature: 83-85 Degrees
Lake Level: 556.03' - A bit high
Weather Conditions: Calm to choppy, winds from the South.

Decided to night fish tonight.  I got up this morning and headed down to Wheeler Dam to try to catch some bait.  I was very happy to find the threadfin shad running hard.  I threw a casting net one time and literally caught so many that I had difficulty lifting the net out of the water.  I brought a 2.5-3 gallon bucket and filled it overrunning with shad in a single throw.  I headed back home and divided the shad into Ziploc bags.  I filled each bag with 15 shad and had a total of 18 bags.  I froze these for future trips.  Very successful bait trip!!

I launched at the house at around 7 PM.  I used shad as cut bait from the morning trip to the dam.  I launched 12 jugs on the south shore on the Decatur side just off the island outside of Mallard Creek in about 12-14 foot of water.  I had retied 6 of the jugs with monofilament leaders and left 6 with nylon leaders as a trial.

I headed back over to the nuclear plant and began fishing my normal spot alongside the boils.  I was bumping bottom with a new rig that I was experimenting with.  I've heard a lot of positive feedback from the Demon Dragon product line.  This is basically an inline float to keep your bait suspended in the strike zone and keep it from falling to the bottom or hanging straight down.  I had an idea to rig my bottom bouncing rigs up with small 3/4 size floats inline on each of my 2 leaders.  These really small slip floats actually worked very good to offset the weight of the hook and bait and kept the cut bait suspended nicely.  I dropped the down and bumped bottom like normal.

Immediately, I was on the fish.  The depth finder visibly had fish stacked up along the drop off of the pipeline.  This was nice to see.  I started getting strong hits immediately and began catching fish.  I stayed in this area and continued to fish my new rig for about an hour or hour and a half with very good luck.  Ended up catching 10 in this time on rod and reel.  The last one I caught was a very nice blue weighing around 25 lbs.  

I would have kept fishing, but there had been pop-up storms all day.  A storm cell came out of nowhere and the wind picked up and cloud to cloud lightening began filling the skies over both Decatur and Athens.  I grew pretty nervous and decided I better play it safe and pack it up.  I headed over to where I dropped off the jugs.  It was dark by this time and I made several passes but could not locate the jugs in the dark with the choppy water.  My spotlight also just wasn't as powerful as I remember.  After a few attempts, I thought it was best to cut my losses and head home.  I will try to find the jugs tomorrow morning.

Overall, other than abandoning the jugs for the night, it was a very successful trip.  I wish I could have stayed longer, but the storms just didn't cooperate.  

Jugs: 0 Rod and Reel: 12

Location: Browns Ferry - Wheeler Lake - Alabama

Time: 6:45 AM - 1:00 PM
Air Temperature: 90 Degrees
Water Temperature: 83-85 Degrees
Lake Level: 555.98'.
Weather Conditions: Calm.

Launched at the house and started by floating jugs on the flats out in front of the house.  I was using cut bait solely today.  

As a side note, I installed a new hydrofoil on the motor and today was the test drive.  I was very impressed with the performance.  It really helped to keep the bow down and get the boat to plane quicker.

I went over to the nuclear plant and fished my normal area.  Bite was a little slow, but I was picking up fish.  I caught several out there bumping bottom before heading back to run jugs around 9:00.  

Jugs were a total bust.  Not a single bite.  I let them keep floating and went back to fish the nuclear plant.  I fished along the spill gate pylons.  I caught a couple more here.  One blue weighed around 8-10 lbs and I turned that one loose to grow.  I moved back over towards the green buoy and fished the drop off and caught 2-3 more cats.  

On the way home, I ran the jugs one last time and had nothing on them.  I'm concerned the nylon leaders might have something to do with the lack of interest, so I'm going to re-tie 1/2 of them with monofilament to see if that makes a difference.

Ended the day with 12 cats total from rod and reel.  I kept 10 that dressed into 9 lbs of fillets.  Overall it was a very good day, even if jugs didn't produce.  

 

                            

  

Ultralight Cats

Location: Pointe Westmoreland Dock - Wheeler Lake - Alabama

Time: 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Air Temperature: 92 Degrees
Water Temperature:
Lake Level: 555.93'
Weather Conditions: Strong west winds.

Decided to try to catch some bluegill or other sorts of small fish for bait from the dock this afternoon.  Winds and water made it rough fishing.  I was fishing night crawlers under a bobber.  Caught one nice bluegill quick.  The next time the bobber went down, I had a nice channel cat. I ended up catching 4 nice channels in total.  Had a blast catching these cats on ultra light tackle.  Had a great day even though I didn't intend on catching catfish.

S L O W

Location: Browns Ferry - Wheeler Lake - Alabama

Time: 6:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Air Temperature: 89 Degrees
Water Temperature: 83-85 Degrees
Lake Level: 555.98'.
Weather Conditions: Calm.  Winds less than 6 mph SSE

I launched again from the house today with the intent of running jugs.  Today I launched them right in front of my house on the flat between the stump row and the channel in about 12 feet of water.  I had cut bait on all the hooks.  I only launched 12 today since they didn't do so good yesterday.

I went up to the nuclear plant to rod and reel fish.  Bite was very slow near the boils by the pipeline.  I only picked up two here today by bouncing bottom with shrimp.

I split my time between fishing the boils, the water intake gates, and running the jugs in between changing spots.  The jugs didn't produce a single fish on the first run.  The intake gates didn't produce any fish today at all.  I caught one nice blue about 8 lbs on my second jug run and also caught a small flathead. 

I picked Jessica up and we rotated through the normal spots again with no luck.  We even tried a bobber over the rocks on the bank to try to see if they were spawning on the rocks, but had no luck there either. 

We ran the jugs a final time and and caught one small blue.  Overall, a very slow day with only 5 fish.

Location: Browns Ferry - Wheeler Lake - Alabama

Time: 6:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Air Temperature: 94 Degrees Hot!!
Water Temperature: 83-85 Degrees
Lake Level: 555.99'.
Weather Conditions: Calm.  Winds less than 6 mph SSE

I had spend the previous week re-tying all my catfish jugs and added 8 more to the fleet, so I was anxious to get some jugs out.  I launched at the house and started off by dropping 20 jugs on the flat just west of Mallard Creek in about 14 feet of water.  I had cut bait on every hook.  I then headed to the nuclear plant to fish my normal spot along the pipeline.  

I was bouncing bottom with shrimp as bait.  Fishing was a bit slow.  I fished about 1.5 hours and pick up 3 catfish.  One was a very nice female blue cat full of eggs.  I'd say she weighted 10-12 lbs.  

I then headed over to run the jugs, but had absolutely ZERO fish or lost bait.  It begin to cross my mind that jug conditions may not be right.  We were on the tail end of a mayfly hatch and some of the catfish were releasing eggs.  They may not be on the flats like normal.  I pulled all the jugs and took them to the north side of the river and launched them in deeper water about 20 ft deep just as an experiment.  I figured the catfish may be moving shallow, but wanted to rule out deep water first.

I returned to rod and reel fishing over by the nuclear plant intake gates and pylons.  I picked up three more nice cats there with one big blue in the boat that probably weighed 10-12 lbs.  I released both of the large fish of the day.

Jessica joined me and we ran the jugs again.  ZERO luck again.  Headed back to the house having caught 6 cats total and kept the 4 that were of a good size to eat.

Jugging with Doug and Douglas

Location: Browns Ferry - Wheeler Lake - Alabama

Time: 8:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Air Temperature: 86 Degrees Hot!!
Water Temperature: 81-85 Degrees
Lake Level: 554.7' - A little more than a foot low.
Weather Conditions: Started calm, choppy by the early afternoon.

Fished with Doug and Douglas Ainsworth for catfish today.  Launched by my house this morning.  Immediately noticed water had dropped.  TVA was pulling water out in preparation of rising waters from all the recent rain from the tropical storm.  

We launched some jugs over on the flats off the point of Mallard creek in 13-14 feet of water.  The idea was to catch the cats on their journey leaving the shallows from their overnight feeding and heading to the channel. Then we headed over to the nuclear plant.  I had fears that we might be dealing with some strong current and that ended up being the case.  I've never seen current so strong in Wheeler Lake.  We had a really tough time keeping in the sweet spot and keeping our line vertical.  We gave it a shot of a couple hours, then decided it wasn't worth the struggle.  Doug did catch one blue cat while bouncing bottom.  We had several other good bites, but just could stay on them in the current.  We were using shrimp and cut shad as bait. We did notice the catfish guide boats appeared to be heading in early.  I think they were struggling, too.  

We decided to run the jugs and regroup with a new plan.  Jugs ended up producing well!  We caught 5 fish off the first float with one being a whopper.  I'd estimate it to weigh in around 20 lbs.  With the success on the first float, we reset the jugs and tied up a couple more and let them soak for another hour.  We ran them the 2nd time  around 1:00.  We only caught one on the 2nd float, so it appeared the fish had made their move, so we called it a day.

Ended up keeping 7 cats.  They dressed to almost 8 lbs of finished fillets.  Looking forward to doing it again!