Saturday afternoon (July 4) I went to Tims Ford to try out the trolling "Spread" set up and see if the fish were hitting it. Hoping the weather would get bad enough to send the pleasure boaters home (no such luck). It did rain for a while as you can see from the water droplets on the camera lens in the photo below.
I had a pretty good afternoon. Had boated seven Hybrid/Stripers and one nice smallmouth when the boat passed over a large school of fish!. The "Spread" includes six rods (three on each side of the boat) plus two down riggers pulling Urigs, eight rods total. As I passed through the school, I got hookups on all eight rods! Here is a photo from the middle of the battle.
The two rods on either side of me were the Urig rods and the fish had already been landed. In the photo, I am fighting a fish and another is hooked on the rod in the rod holder to my left. What you cannot see in the photo is the four other rods (two on each side of the boat) also have fish on them.
When the action was over, I had landed five fish, two had broken off, and one had come unhooked. That gave me a fish total of 13 for the afternoon. I set everything back out and trolled over a point and picked up a Striper and a Hybrid raising my fish total to 15. It was 6:00pm and I was tired and went home. Fishing will be like this all summer!
Here are photos of one of the Stripers and the smallmouth ...
I Love Middle Tennessee!
Saturday afternoon (July 4) at Tims Ford
