This years crappie season has been hit our miss depending on where you were fishing. Ft. Loudon started out strong; lots of fish had to be caught to cull enough for a limit. Local fishing legends Ed Rose and Alton Lingerfelt had some good days in Angler Cove – sometimes not even leaving Alton’s dock. They did put forth an effort to make some brush piles in late winter last year which paid off. Some crappies are still being caught and night fishing for them will soon start.
This year I introduced some friends to bow fishing. The first group was from Connecticut. Eric, his son Adam and a co-worker from Poland were down on a job. They had fished with me several times in the past but this was their first time to bow-fish and did very well, getting several gars.
Another first timer was Christophe. He too was on a temporary assignment at the Oak Ridge National Lab. New to bow-fishing, he had shot a bow as a child but never at any game, which is not allowed in his home land of Germany.
The water was a little higher than I normally like so I could not pull him around on the front of my john boat. The fish where further in to the grass and we had to sneak back into the shallows. Christophe got the hang of it pretty quickly, getting several gar and missing some carp. 
He also got a reminder of the trip by letting the string hit his forearm leaving a nasty welt followed by an awful looking bruise the next day. That was the one thing that I forgot to tell him about. He will be returning in a couple weeks and is eager to give it another try.
The bluegill and shell cracker fishing on Chickamauga has been good. It took a little more time to locate the bedding fish earlier in the season. They seemed to be in a little deeper and water was a little stained by all the rain. On the last trip I enjoyed fishing with Aston and Jacob Parkinson; two fine young men from south of the river. We tried a new technique where we drove down the shore line 30 yards from shore until we spotted bedding shell crackers. This was very productive with each bed producing twenty to forty fish. Our afternoon total was over a hundred and fifty fish.
The dam tail water fishing is coming along well as normal for this time of year. Rockfish, white bass, large mouth bass, small mouths bass, spotted bass and cat fish are being caught in good numbers. Recently I took Mason Woody to Ft. Loudon for some rockfish and bass action and a drum thrown in for good measure. Mason put on quite a show pulling in these big fish with a professional rod pumping action that I had only seen on TV. He did complain slightly about how sore his arms were.
Take someone fishing, Greg