Campbells Point 9/12

[whiteley.matt]

Got on the water around 7:30 last Friday morning at the Shell Knob bridge. Ran down to Mill creek and started fishing in Mill creek. Spent the first couple of hours between the first bend and the power lines. The shad were there sitting about 25 ft deep in 50-60 foot of water, and so were the bass. There wasn't a lot of surface activity so we went with the drop shot and spoons. Could not buy a bite on the spoon, but, they were all over the watermelon dream shot. With the overcast skies I had to try a topwater. Started with a spook and not much luck. Switched over to a Strike King Sexy Dawg Jr. and that was the ticket. My guess is that it was the rattles that made the difference. I was throwing it in 60 foot of water over the schools of shad. My partner stuck with the drop shot and was hooking up fairly consistently, but no where near what the topwater was doing. It was a mix of both Kentucky's and LM. Had to keep the boat out in around 60 ft of water and just make some long casts. Even though there wasn't much surface activity they were still coming up and killing it.

We also fished in the mouth of Big Creek and the same pattern with the same results. In between the first couple secondary points they were all over. You just had to be out quite a ways to be on them. We saw countless boats fishing right up on the shoreline and never get a bite. We were a good 50-60 yards off the point and consistently catching fish. We had 3 fish in the 4 lb range that we didn't quite get into the boat. We only had 3 keeps that we landed. On the day we had around 50 fish and I would say 40 were on topwater. Most of the fish we caught were right in the 13-14 inch range and very very fat.

Just an interesting tid bit, this was the first trip in a while that we did not catch a single smallie.

Water temp was 82 and shad were pretty much all around 25-30 ft in both Big Creek and Mill Creek.

[Quillback]

Sounds like you found Babler's school