Wheeler Lake Bass Fishing Report

[MotherNature]

Wheeler 9-30-05

It's been almost a year since I had the privilege of fishing with long time friend Mike Francis. Mike has been a seasoned tournament fisherman here in middle Tennessee for a long time as well as a expert rod and lure builder and a wealth of information to me on a wide variety of fishing related subjects. As I always say, I consider  Mike and David Duvall as my mentors on Tim's Ford.  Mike and I have fished Old Hickory, Tim's Ford, Guntersville and now Wheeler together and have yet to have a trip where we didn't catch some good fish like the ones in the pictures here.  Our day started at 3:00am this morning as we pointed the Stratos toward the Alabama line and for what we hoped would be a good day..........3 Hours later let me tell you how it started. We launched the boat at a ramp just outside of Athens and headed to a channel point where Mike had caught some good fish on past trips. The wind was blowing across the point and there was a ton of shad all around us...the results? First stop,  12 in the boat and at least 8 the jumped and threw the  crank baits.  What a start...but it got even better from here.........we quickly determined by fishing a couple other spots that the dingier water was where we need to be so we laid down everything else picked up the crank baits again, put the trolling motor on high and began to cover as much water as we could. This end of Wheeler (Elk River End) is completely full of lay down timber, ledges, boat docks, chunk rock banks and patchy grass. We kept the boat away from the bank in 15 to 16 feet of water and ran our crank baits (Luhr-Jensen Radar 10's and # 5 Shad Raps) down the break lines that are fairly easy to follow on this end of the lake.  We could have taken many more pictures of bass near the same size as the ones we have here in this post...but this will give you a good idea of the type of day we had..............Totals for the day was 40 plus Bass and 20 or more White Bass with many of the White Bass being the size of the one in the upper right hand picture.  By 2:30pm we decided to head back to Woodbury and actually left the fish biting. I honestly believe that we could have caught fish steady all the way until dark if we had stayed. But I will take 60 in one day anytime! Wheeler isn't a lake that we talk about much because we spend so much time on the lakes here in Middle Tennessee-Shay Doming our guide on Priest is an excellent fisherman not only on the Athens end of the lake but the Decatur end of Wheeler as well. So if you want to take a road trip a little further south we can hook you up and as always do our best to make your trip a memorable one.  To contact us concerning any lake-river or stream we guide call Rick McFerrin at 615-765-7303 or e-mail at rickm@dtccomnet.