Fishing Report Archives

A few die-hard winter crappie fishermen have been slugging it out in the trenches and scoring some decent catches on Kentucky Lake as of late.

It’s fair to say the winter fishermen have fared better than weary duck hunters these last few weeks.

From a few anglers stalking deeper depths in open water areas when the wind allowed have come a few nice stringers of crappie. Most credit their catch to a variety of colors as jigs have been paying off it appears. While a few anglers always dunk some live minnow presentations it seems jigs have paid the most dividends.

Depths for successful anglers have ranged from 12 to 17 feet but some boats have reported fishing much deeper with catches made between depth zones of 20 to 28 feet!

Lake levels this week have been rising slowly in the aftermath of some heavy rains across the TVA valley last weekend. The reservoir had been down near its low ebb elevation of winter pool but has risen slowly this week to an elevation of 357.1 at midweek.

Water color has been clear in Big Sandy but stained elsewhere as rising levels often push the dingy water back. Surface temps have fallen to the 43 degree range this week reflecting the frigid temperatures and snow that entered the area earlier this week.

There has been a lot of current this week in the main Tennessee River channel as TVA has been pushing up to 133,000 cubic feet of water per second through Kentucky Dam. A large influx of water earlier in the week was entering the reservoir from runoff and upstream through Pickwick Dam as some pretty heavy rains plus snow fell recently across the valley.

After the cold front now in progress that is delivering some nasty weather it appears the local weather will moderate by this weekend as temps are forecast to rebound into the low 50’s this weekend with another short cool snap in the cards by early next week.