Wow wow wow!!!  What a trip!!  If you follow me on Instagram you know that I went on a first time trip to Lake Chickamauga the first weekend in March.  After my trip, I completely understand why it’s rated the #2 lake in the Country by BassMaster magazine.  So let’s dive in and I will tell you how we caught them.

So whenever I am getting ready to visit a new lake I do as much online research as I possibly can.  I got on Youtube and watched videos from anglers fishing around the same time that I was going.  I also use Social Media and talk to people that I follow to find out info on how the locals are catching fish if they are willing to divulge info.  You know how some anglers can be right? Most will protect their spots (totally understood) but will give you a general idea of the types of areas to go to and lures to use.

My first recommendation is that you get on instagram and look up a hashtag for the lake you are going to.  In my case,  I looked up #lakechickamauga and started communicating with people that recently posted fish pics. Who better to reach out to than active anglers. I always offer to help them in the future with info on my home lake (Lake Lanier).  

The next thing I will do is look at a satellite view map of the lake I’m going to.  Based on the time of year I’ll also highlight some spots that i think will be good based on my fishing experiene. All of this feeds into my master plan on how to best attack the lake.  Next I’ll lock those spots into my Hummingbird Units. This gives me a good starting point.  Don’t wait to mark these spots.  Have all your stuff ready sorted before leaving so you can maximize fishing time.  

So now onto the fishing!!!  That lake is incredible for quality fish.  Like I stated earlier I went at the very beginning of March.  So this is considered the pre-spawn time of year.  The water temp. was 54 degrees and the lake was very high and muddy because of the enormous amounts of rain we’ve had.  I’d recently watched a show with Mark Zona and Wesley Strader (Zona’s Awesome Fishing Show) where they were fishing Lake Chickamauga and they were focused on the very shallow bite. 

The two main differences were as follows. I didn’t have clean water and they did, however, they had freezing temperatures and we had warm weather.  A helpful angler that I reached out to shared that they were catching fish in the backs of pockets.  If the pocket had fresh water running into them, that was even better.  I noticed right away that the lake was muddy but the pockets in the very back had slightly cleaner water. That clean water was the key to some Giant Bass being caught.