Big water, big cranks, and big fish!

[duckydoty]

What a weekend!  Got last minute reservations for our bed and breakfast on Tuesday, I think, for my old high school buddy to come down and fish this weekend. Thursday, Blake, his son,found out he could come too. I was already scheduled to work Saturday Morning and Sunday afternoon, so I could fish with Blake and his dad after work Saturday and again before work today.  We got on the water around 3:30 Saturday afternoon and fished till 8.  I decided to do something I have never done on Taney, and that was to fish with big crank baits. I brought the regular trout gear, jigs, drift rigs, and shad flies for Blake and Jack to fish with if they wanted to use.  I started off throwing a mega bass 110+1 while Blake and his dad, Jack tried jigs and shad flies. I think Blake caught the 1st fish on his 1st cast.  On my third cast, I hooked my first fish. He absolutely slammed the mega bass. Got it to the boat and it was a 20 inch brown.

It did not take long before the others were tying on crank baits. Nobody else wanted to take a chance of loosing a mega bass so they tied on different assorted crank baits. About four cast later, I lost the mega bass and started trying crank baits. Found some rather large shad looking cranks and as we were drifting down stream, we would cast back up stream. Give the bait a few slow cranks till it started digging bottom. We would stop reeling and it would just keep digging bottom as we drifted down stream. The hits would come hard! We started picking up nice rainbows in the 16-20 inch range.

We continued the drift down past Lookout and I had another slam. My third fish of the day was this 22 inch brown.

We came back to the dock for a quick photo, release, and then back up to the trophy area. We picked up several more big rainbows,

and another big brown.

The numbers and the size of the fish we were catch was better than I have seen in a long time.

We wanted to caught some smallmouth and had to switch over to a jig to make that happen.

I got to witness some fantastic father/son bonding and unbonding.

We decided to end the day after Blake brought this nice bow to hand and loosing the last of 3 crank baits I had that were working for us.

This is what the crank bait looked like but it was the next size smaller.

We stopped at Wally World to see if we could find something similar and came up with some Bomber Fat Free Shad to try this morning  

We got on the water about 6 am and headed for the cable.  Our first drift was from the cable all the way down to the narrows.  We boated 2 triples, three doubles, and over a dozen singles on that first drift.  We caught some smaller fish today, but still a lot of them in the 16-18 inch range.

Blake was the first to hook up again today.

Big smallmouth today.

You can see the size and color of the bomber we were using in these pictures.

One of our doubles.

Beautiful day, beautiful fish, and not so good looking friends having fun!

We ended the morning with Jacks personal best rainbow.  His first 20 incher.

 

[MoCarp]

Telling my secrets here but a 1/2oz to 1oz rooster tale in white, black or brown with a gold blade works awesome

get them with a single hook you lose less fish

also a black with copper blade crawled on bottom is a smallie slammer

leave the braid at home  quality fresh camo / green is a must as is a quality SMALL swivel if you look hard enough you can get them in a red or black

to get your spinner deeper a loosely pegged bullet weight in color or spray the new lead color with WD40 to knock off the shine

use the least weight you need, quarter your casts across the current they usually slam it as the spinner swings back upstream

a little flutter or a speed up sometimes triggers a follower to hit, salmon sized browns are in Taney, sometimes fishing a lot farther down lake near brush holds the biggest fish, if you roll a monster remember and try him again later in the day or another day the REALLY big fish have home range 

we are talking huge fish here

 

 

 

[Mitch f]

Nice fish guys! I think those Megabass will work great with not so big water too...just work em faster.

[BilletHead]

    Nice! Thanks for the good read first thing this morning,

BilletHead

[Jhoff]

How fast is the water flowing?  I'm wanting to bring my kayak or John boat down and fish at night.

[duckydoty]

It is flowing pretty fast. You could set up a shuttle and do a one way trip with kayak but still might be dangerous at night. 20,000 cfs flowing right now.

[Krazo]

Great report! Awesome pics! Looks like everyone had a ball!

[Seth]

That will be hard to top! We had a great weekend as well. I'll throw together some video footage and post my report in the next day or two hopefully.

[Haris122]

Which ones fought the hardest/longest?

[VJMAC]

Awesome fish and pics. We were there over weekend too. We had same results. Remember seeing your boat. I was using the small flicker shads in same color pattern. Wife used  used white jigs.