Kentucky Lake / Barkley Lake Fishing Review

April 29^th – May 4^th

^{By: Matt Morgan}

-Saturday April 29^th

Saturday my “fishing” partner Nick Neves and I left for Kentucky at around 5pm.  We made a few stops and ended up at the Devils Elbow area of the Land between the lakes at around 2am.  We managed to get about 4 hours of sleep and hit the water at about 6:30am.

-Sunday April 30^th (Barkley Lake)

We started the morning checking out a few bays that just looked good.  We managed to maybe catch 2 or 3 bass before going to our confidence spots where we knew they were, in the spring, the year before.  The first one came on a ½ oz. “poorboys” jig and trailer, both in the cucumber melon color.  It was about 2.5-3 lbs.   The other 2 were caught on a shad colored “XPS” rattle trap in about 6 ft. of water, neither of them were keepers.  We did manage to talk to a local about a few areas that he likes to fish and he led us to a main lake point were he said we might be able to pick up a quick limit on tournament day.  After fishing a little longer, we decided to hit up that point but didn’t manage to get a bite.  We logged the spot in our memory bank and thought we might hit it up early one morning before the tournament on Thursday.

At around 12:30 or 1pm, we decided to shoot over to our confidence bay and see if we could maybe find some spawners or cruising fish.  Boy did we ever.  As soon as we entered the 3^rd bay on the left, we noticed the water to be clear and about 65 degrees.  Immediately Nick saw a couple “ladies on beds”, and about 3 minutes later I hooked a cruiser on a white “Terminator” spinnerbait.  She weighed 3.5 lbs and had blood dripping from her tail from fanning beds.  We rounded the small buck brush point and Nick caught one that went 4 lbs on a Watermelon-blue centipede weightless on 8 lb Gamma fluorocarbon.  We were both starting to get extremely excited and contemplated not hooking any more fish in that area but did manage to mark a couple toads on beds with zip ties on the buck brush just above them.  We moved to the back ¼ of the main creek and Nick flipped his ½ oz. “poorboys” jig into the heart of a buck brush and pulled out a nice 3 pounder.  This fish came in about 4 feet of water, really close to some deeper water.  It also was still full of eggs but had no markings from fanning beds on her tail.  After continuing to cover water and look for shallow cruisers who may intend on either making beds or spawning we landed in the back of the main creek in this nice little gravel ditch with cruising bass in there as thick as you could believe.  Nick and I caught quite a few of them, only a few were over 2.5 lbs., but almost all of them were keepers.  We fished out the rest of the day and felt really comfortable about our chances of doing well in our tournament if we were to fish this bay on Thursday.

-Monday, May 1^st. (Kentucky lake)

We woke up at 6am and made an hour drive to Paris Landing in Tennessee.  On the way we stopped at a gas station to by breakfast, ice, and a few drinks for the boat.  It was a strange but very eye opening sight to see 2 shotguns behind the counter of the store and needless to say, Nick and I talked quite a bit about our observations until we arrived to the lake at about 7:30 am.  Our main goal this day was to find a spot that we were told from a friend.  This spot was a main lake pocket only about the size of a 100-car parking lot fairly close to where we launched.  We searched with no luck, made a few phone calls to our buddy, but still couldn’t find it.  Feeling a little dejected, and knowing that we probably wouldn’t find anything that could beat what we found the day before, we decided to fish until noon and then head back to Barkley to scope out some other stuff around our confidence bay.  I managed to catch 2 on chatter baits in about 2 foot of water.  At 11:30 we loaded the boat to find quite a bit of oil surrounding the motor mount that led to the cap on his oil reservoir inside the engine.  We put our heads together and found the problem, thought of a few ways we could fix it if a local Mercury dealer didn’t have the part we needed.  At about 1pm, we put the boat back in the water at the Devils Elbow in Barkley Lake and headed north of the 68/80 bridge looking for other areas.  Unfortunately we fished until 6pm with only a couple more bites.

On our drive back to the hotel, we discussed our findings and realized that both of us were worried that our first day might have been a fluke and thought that the next morning we were going to hit up that main lake point that the local told us about and also fish another spot really close, called the duck pond area.  About 2 miles from the hotel, Nick received a call from a fellow Ranger Boats pro from Paris Tennessee who invited us to fish with him the following morning on Kentucky Lake again.  Nick and I frowned at the idea of driving clear down to Paris Tennessee.  We decided to skip our prior plans and see if maybe this local could perhaps show us a thing or two.

-Tuesday, May 2^nd.

We arrived at the Fish Tale lodge at 8am.  We met the owner of the lodge who is also the gentleman that took us out that day.  His name is David Seaton and his lodge was absolutely beautiful.  It is a log cabin style lodge with all of the modern amenities and a restaurant that I found rivals the best peach cobbler I have ever had.  If you happen to stumble upon the area, check out the Fish Tale lodge, and ask for David.  On the Internet, you can find it at fishtalelodge.com. 

We hit the water at 8:30.  Nick and I had about 4 rods apiece, and David only had one.  He toted a 6ft. medium action worm rod with only a 1/8 oz. weight.  Not only did he catch the first 5 fish, he had Nick and I stumbling around the boat trying to duplicate what he had tied on.  By the end of the day, we each caught about 15 keepers, all of them on a baby brush hog in an array of different colors.  All of them were caught in that same 5 ft or shallower depth but what we learned that day was priceless.  We learned that we might have been missing quite a few fish by hugging the buck brush and not staying back about a boat length and casting at the bases. 

On the drive home, stuffed from all the peach cobbler, we were extremely optimistic on our day and were excited to mix our new found technique with the ones that already worked on Sunday.

-Wednesday, May 3rd

-Thursday, May 4^th Tournament Day!

“Lets do what we do” were the words Nick exclaimed as we took off in boat #61 position.  Headed through the Kentucky / Barkley lake canal.  Over the motors quiet but fierce roar Nick asks me, should we take the short cut that we took last year and maybe gain a few positions?  I screamed, “go for it” as we headed across the lake, down the shore, past the Kentucky State Penitentiary, hooting and hollering, excited beyond belief of what the day might hold for us.  We went under the 68/80 bridge and entered the creek with the main lake point that we thought might be able to give us a quick limit.  We were on a 7 cast limit and then we were off to our money spot where we spanked them the first day of practice and never toughed since.  On about our 5^th cast, Nick hung a 3 pounder on that darn rattletrap he got the night before.  After a few more casts we were off to our money spot.  We entered the bay and rounded the bend into the third creek on the left when we saw a boat in the same tournament, fishing the exact spot where I caught the spinnerbait fish and Nick caught the other on the buck brush point.  Feeling a little shocked, we started in a different spot, and preceded to cast our spinnerbaits, rattletraps and brush hogs.  About an hour into the day, “Got em” was exclaimed by nick as he set the hook into an extremely mad 4.5 pounder that came straight out of the air 3 feet from the boat.  A few casts later I got a 3 pounder from that same area, on the same colored baby brush hog.  We were both extremely excited and decided to head back to that nice little gravel ditch where they were stacked up a few days ago.  As we entered the shallow creek we noticed that the water, which was already muddier than the previous days, and was also a chilly 54 degrees, almost 10 degrees cooler than out in the main bay.  We only flipped our baits around in there for a few minutes before heading back out into warmer water.  Our 4^th keeper came with only about 2.5 hours left in the tournament.  We were starting to panic, but knew we were doing thing correctly because we couldn’t keep the smaller fish off of our hooks.  With about 2 hours left in the day, we made a quick run up the lake to a creek that we hit last year but failed to make it to during practice.  About that time is when the “wheels started falling off” or should I say, A certain something or other hit the fan.  As we were slowing down, coming off plan, we noticed a slightly irritating clicking noise coming from the motor, which Nick likes to refer to as a “shaking bag of marbles”.  I asked Nick, should we be nervous, in his confident, slightly carefree voice he exclaimed “not at all, I guarantee we will make it back fine.”  If only he could have knocked on his wood-grain dash, but we will get to that after I describe how I caught our last keeper.  We were casting as fast as possible, in and out of trees, when I exclaimed, “there he is”, BOOM I set the hook, Nick netted him, jumped down from the casting deck where he clutched his right knee, whailing in pain, about to cry.  While the fish was flopping around in the bottom of the net, I kept asking, are you all right? What happened? Are you all right?  All of the sudden he gets this look on his face, it turns from a frown to a grin, and he says, just joking dude, put that fish in the well and lets go.

With only about a half hour left, we started screaming up the river; headed to the weigh-in with what we thought was around 16 pounds.  We knew it wasn’t enough to win, but we were hoping it was enough to land us in the top 20 in order to fish on Saturday.  Just in front of Motley creek, that clicking noise became a little more evident.  Nick started to realize that his motor RPM’s were decreasing ever so slightly and his top speed went from 64 to 54 in about 30 seconds.  He turns to me and says, “We’re in trouble”.  All of a sudden the boat starts making this gnarly grinding / grumbling noise and then it stops 30 miles from the weigh in and absolutely no one around us that can help.  We sit there in silence for a few seconds, which seemed like an hour.  I looked at Nick and said, “We better call someone.”  First we called Kelly Warner and told him to sadly tell the tournament director that we weren’t going to weigh-in and secondly we called the Eddy creek marina to ask them for a tow.  Our cell phones were in and out of service and we were getting more and more upset at the thought of perhaps being stranded on the lake.  We decided to try to start attempting to flag someone down while we were waiting to hear back from the marina.  The first 5 bass boats either ignored us or didn’t see us, when we got a call back from the marina which sadly informed us that there tow boat was out of commission.  The lady was extremely polite but informed us that we would have to find an alternate way in.  5 more bass boats went by and we still had no ride.  Nick then said, “Dude, I know were stuck, but let’s make the best of it and weigh our fish.”  We had nothing to put them in so I emptied the ice bag out of the cooler, which was rather large, and we proceeded to weigh put them in the bag.  Nick zeroed his scale and we let go of the bag.  The weight was much heavier than I thought and what I thought was 16 lbs turned out to be in between 17.3 and 18.3.  Needless to say we put them in the water for another day. 

After about 3 hours of floating in the middle of the river a kind Gentleman from Missouri finally towed us in and then from there we hitched a ride to get Nick’s truck and trailer. 

It was a long, upsetting 3 hours and unfortunately there was nothing we could have done to prevent it.  The lower unit had thick, rope like, fishing line entwined in the gears.  We must have run over a trotline or something of the sort.  To top things off, 18 pounds would have landed us in 2^nd place. 

What a bummer!!!