Saturday, I had planed to go fishing with my brother Larry around 2:00 o’clock but it was closer to 3:30 before we headed out. We decided to go to Tellico Lake to try to catch some smallmouth with live bait. We stop by Ft Loudon dam to get some 4 inch yellow tail shad. Since we were there, I told him I would like to make a couple of float trips for strippers. He does not like the turbulent water and I let him out on the bank to watch the action. The first float I landed a 10 lb blue catfish and the next a 16 lb stripper. After getting that out of my system we headed to Tellico Lake.
There were so many pleasure boaters out on the water that it felt like the ocean. We stayed with it for an hour and half and ended up with three smallmouths, 1 stripper which Larry caught, and two largemouths which I caught. We both missed several fish.
Since it was early we decided to go back below Ft Loudon dam to fish for some more bass on the wing walls and down river on a sand bar. Off the wing wall we got two small strippers and a largemouth. The temptation of dropping my brother off on the bank and making a couple more drifts for strippers was getting greater than I could resist. So we left the dam and went down the river to the sand bar, where we caught 2 more smallies, three largemouths, and a sauger. Ft Loudon dam stop generating around 8 o’clock and the white bass started to break on the surface. We caught several white bass on a zara spooks pup before the returned to the depths.
Wednesday evening I returned to the Tennessee River with fishing partners included Louis Smyth and Chris Smith, both from Kingston. We caught our bait, shad minnows in a bay, and headed out to a point to try our luck. Immediately we started to catch large white bass in the 1