My buddy and I went to Cherokee and Norris lakes last week. The first day we fished Norris but it was the coldest temp recorded for that day by 5 deg. We didn't catch anything. We fished until 3 a.m. and never heard any shad come up. We decided to fish Cherokee the next day and we were still experiencing cold front conditions. We fished all day pulling Alwife shad. We would mark fish and we even saw fish come up and look at our bait but no takers. Cold front funk. We threw Flitterbaits while dragging shad and right before dark my buddy hooked up on a big hybrid. He went around the boat twice before the fish got off. Had to be a dandy. I got the next hit burning a Flitterbait. It was a good hybrid and while I was fighting that fish I had a hit on my shad. Now I had two fish hooked at the same time. My buddy was fighting a fish at the front of the boat. It was a small 3 lber so he was able to get it in the boat pretty quick and come down and help me out. We had three hybrids in the boat. We caught several more including one on a wake bait. We left right after dark and decided to get an early start the next morning. The weather was starting to turn for the better, but we still didn't do very well until right before dark. The hybrids came up again and we started catching them on Flitterbaits and wake baits. The action stayed good until dark and then it shut down. We waited for a couple of hours for the shad to come up but we didn't hear much so we headed to a different spot. It was now 1 a.m when we got back to our new spot and shad were everywhere. We listened for a few seconds and heard hybrids. We started casting wake baits and started catching fish. We ended up with 14 hybrids from 3 to 7 lb and one 5 lb largemouth. We left them biting at 3:30 a.m. Here's a few pictures.
Wow, those are some big fat hybrids! Glad to hear Cherokee is fishing well. If we could finally get some stable weather this year it would be off the charts.
Cherokee Lake Hybybrid Stripers
