An opportunity to do both competitvely presented itself to me a few weeks ago on Chickamauga Lake. The Chattanooga Bass Yakkers held a casual, for-fun type tournament on January 16th, and the scoring format was the total length of the best three crappie, plus the length of one bass. It was a ten dollar buy-in with a pack of plastics or a lure going into the big bass pot.
The last multi-species tournament I entered, I had a really tough time managing my time and focusing on catching different species, and it was a tough bite. I still haven't figured out exactly how to plan for these types of tournaments, but here's how I tried.
During prep & planning, I asked myself a simple question. What lures do I have that will effectively catch both crappie and bass? I came up with a short list:
- inline spinners
- drop shot
- jigs
- beetle spin
- float-n-fly
So it was going to be a light tackle sort of day - not something I'm very used to on a lake like Chickamauga. I ended up rigging four rods:
- A shakey head setup, because it's my confidence bait for bass.
- A dropper rig with a non-traditional bait - more on that later.
- An ultralight rigged with a panfish magnet under a bobber.
- An ultralight rigged with a regular crappie jig.
The Diablo Amigo rigged and ready at Savannah Bay launch
The morning of the tournament was chilly, but nowhere near unbearable, and the high temperature was going to be in the mid-50's. A dozen of us showed up, and launched around 8 AM from Savannah Bay. I didn't have to go far to catch my first crappie. I caught it on a panfish magnet by the bridge piling about 20 yards from the launch about a 20 minutes into the day. Unfortunately, it was too small to reach the increment markings on the Hawg Trough. I stayed by the pilings a while longer but didn't get another bite from the crappie. I did miss a hookset on the shakey head, and reeled up just a fish scale about the size of a nickel. There were reports of some big freshwater drum being caught in the area that day, so I figured that's probably what I missed. Not the species I was after, but probably would have been a fun fight from the yak.
I had fished a Reel Krazy tournament from the Savannah Bay launch late in the summer of 2015, and caught a limit that included one really nice largemouth in an area near the junction of Savannah and Wolftever creeks a little over a mile from the launch. I fished a few good looking spots as I started making my way back to that area, and picked up my only keeper size bass of the day off a bluff wall, a 12.5 inch largemouth.
With a bass under my belt, I now had to focus on catching more crappie, but occasionally throwing the shakey head in high-percentage areas to try and cull my bass.
Not long after catching the bass, I pulled another tiny crappie and a bream from a large blowdown. I fished the blowdown for almost an hour before I headed the area to the creek junction I had planned to spend the rest of the tournament fishing.
The rest of the day was a skunk, except for a small bass taken on a crappie magnet near another brush pile. I threw the panfish magnet in a couple of different colors, a Bobby Garland minnow on a jighead, and a chartreuse 1/16 oz jig, and got one bite. I even used a streamer fly on the dropper rig. I had one bite on it as well but no fish. That was a complete shot in the dark - I wanted to try using a fly on a conventional rig. While I wasn't successful using it, it's something I want to try again sometime because I believe it could work, either on a dropper or drop shot rig.
The crappie needed to grow.
I went back to the 1:00 weigh-in to turn in the photo of my bass, and that 12.5" total was good enough for 7th place out of 12. We got off the water just in time, because the wind picked up that afternoon and it got very cold. We all expected better results with the pre-frontal conditions but the crappie bite was slow to almost non-existent. Most of us caught small ones but keepers were hard to come by. The winner of the tournament turned in 32.75" on two crappie and a bass. No one had a full four-fish limit.
Frostbite Biathlon #1* wasn't a complete failure because I caught five fish, and caught the target species. But it could've been better with some frying pan sized crappie instead of baby ones.
*Frostbite Biathlon #2 was held on 1/30/16 out of Ware Branch, but I did not participate in that one.
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