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.
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