Cumberland River July 14th

After checking out some maps I decided to hit the Cumberland River today. Looking at the forecast rain was supposed to hit later in the morning but early morning looked good. I was one the water by 5:30 and ready to go. After a pretty good drought Nashville had finally got some rain the week before. My hope was the rivers would be up and they would be letting some water out of the Old Hickory Dam. The smallmouth bite was what I was after. Well the rain started around 6 with a light rain. It rain off and one the rest of the morning with some really good down pours.

I started off throwing a crank bait and caught a small smallmouth pretty quick. I didn’t want to waste a lot of time messing around by the boat ramp so I moved on to the Cumberland River. This was my first time on the actual Cumberland River because I wasn’t too sure about what I would do if a barge came along. Well it happened.

I had just paddled upstream from a spot that had a little beach area and was now next to a rock bluff. I paddled back down stream to the beach area and got ready to face the barge. It ended up not being a very big deal and the Frontier handled it without any problems.

My hopes of a good current did not work out. Paddling upstream and fishing was no problem with the lack of current. I had switched over to a hair jig and a baffle bug but did not catch anything else going up stream. By this time it was around 8:30 so I decided to paddle back towards the ramp. I ended up picking up one more bass that wasn’t very big.

I will repeat this float sometime. I really enjoyed it and I know there are some fish to be caught.

4th of July

 Monday the 2^nd I came in to work on to a report of hybrids on Percy Priest Lake. My buddy at work said he was fishing a point and all the sudden fish started blowing up everywhere. There were two boats out besides him and they both caught at least 6 and one guys had his line break on one. My buddy didn’t have the right equipment so he never caught any. This was all I needed to hear to plan on hitting JPP on the 4^th. Every since seeing the Stripers on Caney Fork I have wanted to hook into one. This was my chance. 4:00 the alarm went off and I was ready to go. The bait shop didn’t open until 5 so I had to wait until then. By the time I hit the water and started paddling it was close to 5:30. It was a perfect looking morning and I just knew I was getting ready for a sleigh ride.

Well when I got to the area I wanted to hit there were at least 12 boats.

Apparently work got out and folks had the same idea I did. A couple of small fish were caught by others but besides that the action did not look too good. I was trolling two shad and casting top waters and throwing a large pearl fluke. Bait Fish were showing up on the depth finder but very spotty for the most part. I did have two pretty good hits but no hook ups. I do not know if I had the shad hooked wrong or what but both times I reeled in with no shad so I figure something hit them and stole my bait. I was off the water by 8 with nothing to show for my morning.