I had the honor of taking James Storie and his Mom, Rita out fishing yesterday. James told me he tracked me down from fishingtn.com, and that made me feel bad for not "showing up" here lately.
They were troopers, It was a very tough day until we finally figured out a decent pattern to stick some hard-fighting channel cats. October can be an outstanding month to crush some quality channel cats in the Chickamauga Dam tailwater. Fight a big channel cat on regular spinning tackle and you are in for a tussel. They fight like smallmouth without that pesky "jumping out of the water" stuff.
One fish had Rita yelling, "Help!" The channel cats saved the day for us and Rita went home with a cooler full of future filets, including the only big blue cat of the day.
I've been lazy, in my fishing and my reporting recently. I've got a new retriever so I've gotten her out after dove and early ducks... and just haven't fished too much. My partner Sam Simons has stayed hard after 'em, with a few great catches including a MONSTER blue caught by his petite wife, Kylene.
I finally got around to updating ... you can read the last month's reports
HERE , or just look at the pictures
HERE .
Reader's Digest version... for a while we were murdering white bass and skipjack on a topwater bite. That was fun. However the colder weather seems to have put them down. Sam's caught some big blues, but it seems to be exclusively an evening or nighttime bite. Daytime fishing for blues has been tough.
With water cooling off the smallmouth bite is picking up. Sam and his clients caught three
bragging-sized smallies yesterday.
I have another big hunting "Road Trip" planned to South Dakota for the tail end of October, but if you want to get in on some serious fun channel cat fishing, I've got a couple of open dates left in early October... and partner Sam is ready and willing to chase smallies, channel cats or the BIG blues! Call us... please.
Scenic City Report (Remember me?)
