For years I had heard reports of huge catches of oversized bream and redear sunfish from Guntersville Lake. This past Saturday my brother, a friend from high school and I planned to give it a try. The crappie fishing here on Watts Bar had slowed down if it had ever gotten started and the pan fish on Chickamauga had not started so it was a good time to make a road trip. A little investigating on the internet and checking with some bass fishing buddies that fish Guntersville, confirmed that the next two weeks prior to a full moon would be a good time to try.
Leaving earlier we got to witness some of the tornado damage first hand in the Scottsburg area before arriving at the predetermined boat ramp around 8:45. After questioning some bass fisherman about bedding pan fish, we had a location to try. Within minutes my brother Larry, was catching fish with a beetle spin and my friend Cliff and I was trailing him with a pop eye fly dressed with a wax worm. We seen several bedding areas that where obvious from the basketball size craters that they had dug into bottom of the two foot deep water.
After a couple hours of battling the wax worms and crickets with no better luck than my brother’s artificial bait, both Cliff and I changed to beetle spins which gave my brother an excuse to try something different. He chose a Mister Twister artificial cricket which turned out to be the best bait of the trip.
We tried a new place where the rip rap from a road lead into two and half feet of water which held the best size and most variety of sunfish. In this location we caught bream, red ear sunfish, the largest redbreast sunfish I had ever seen, and a warmouth which resembled a pint size grouper. Here we decided to start to keep some fish to take home. In a short time we all were fishing the more productive artificial cricket and had a live well full.
We called it a day around 7:00, almost ten hours after getting started. All in all it was a very enjoyable and productive day of fishing with well over 250 fish and the weather could have not been better.
Over two and a half hours and we where back home cleaning what we thought was fifty fish, turning out more like seventy. Even though we can clean one fish per minute, it still took two hours to complete the task including clean up – making for a long day.
I would recommend Guntersville for a great pan fish trip. The fish are easy to find and the pressure is minimal, most fishermen focusing more on the largemouth bass. But I would suggest staying for two days.
Take someone fishing, Greg
