TnRiver46

I have a truck and boats and kayaks and canoes, your truck doesn’t have to cost 60-150k haha, my house cost 85. do whatever you like, just remember they do sell used trucks

The park service allowed us to use a team of mules to access one extremely remote area, we had to stay up there for a week so we loaded the mules down with massive igloo coolers full of our food. Still had to carry the darn generators, and had to chase bears away from the coolers every night

I used to do a lot of electrofishing as well, mostly for the national park service. Hiking Honda generators and neoprene waders several miles thru the backcountry up to 3,000-5,000 feet was loads of fun 🤣. It was actually not as bad as the 6 gallon water packs filled with trout, those were very sloshy. A few people fell into the water while we were shocking and rode the lightning haha. Another crazy memory I have from that is when we shocked a water snake, the thing went wild our shocking was for native southern Appalachian brook trout, not a random sample. We conducted 3 pass depletions with block nets on either end of 100m stretches of water and compared it to previous years data. Also the brook trout is one of the only fish that inhabits these tiny streams that were usually no more than 6 feet wide. We occasionally found longnose dace, black nose dace, and non native rainbow trout in the lower elevations but it was only brook trout up top

We are getting heavy wet snow right now , but it was 67 degrees yesterday so I don’t think the ground will hold much. Looks pretty tho

It’ll be back in the next year or three

With water temps in the 40s, a bass can take like an entire week to digest a single shad. They might still eat another if presented with the opportunity, but they don’t have to. That’s why lots of folks focus on reaction strikes in winter, the predators just can’t shut off the instinct button. Lots of nice LM are taking ripping a rattle trap in cold water

@Blue Raider Bob, ever been to Tim’s ford ? Seems like if you fished rock cliffs there all winter you would catch em the others that should work would be dale hollow , center hill, anything steep deep and clear. nickajack, I would fish below chick dam or nick dam, never spent any time inbetween. Also I would fish with shad around that marina you are catching the bait, at least get a catfish to drag me around

I’ve caught a good many meanmouth back in the day before the Alabama bass was considered a species, and the SMB cross successfully with the KY spots and the result is always a very fat meanmouth, sometimes comically fat

My wife was in Nashville for a concert this weekend, therefore I fished Saturday me and a friend floated 11 miles of shallow river in my small long tail boat , started off with temps in low 20s but fish were still biting ok, I was just mainly missing them. We ended up catching 5-6, my buddy got at least one with the fly rod. The two better ones I got were with a 2” helgrammite. I’m still waiting on him to send the pics of the ones I caught 😂. The old predator engine still runs like a top, no clue how but she does. Of course Mr or Mrs eagle went along with us Sunday I took my wife’s kayak (on top of the Honda, fuel efficient rig all the way around) fishing down by the lakehouse, got 3 fish I believe but two were decent keepers, a LM and a spot or maybe meanmouth which I got on the way in right next to the neighbors dock. Winter drawdown created a nice little dry storage for the kayak 😂. Pretty scenery and the clouds were doing some crazy stuff, also had loons screaming at me most of the day

People do this, and they also have stories about having to go swimming. Not hard to beach a boat and/or tie it off