The Mrs. is back in Texas visiting the grandkids. So I loaded up and decided to catfish below Guntersville dam. There is a wall on the south side where one can fish and people were lined up catching mostly carp. But some of those things pushed close to 30 lbs. And shad. I've never seen so much bait fish. To catch them you ran a long handled dip net through the water. So much for using my new cast net. Settled in on a pier below the dam, tied a silver spoon to my ultralight and started casting for skipjack, aka "catfish candy". At dusk, the water looked as it were boiling, the skipjack were chasing the shad. A fish on almost every cast. I kept 6 and when the bite stopped, I rigged up two catfish poles. I wish I could say I caught a mess, but alas, nary a bite. The fellow next to me managed to catch a nice flathead that we guessed weighed 10lbs, based on our elbow scale. Around 1am, some guy shows up and asks if anyone wanted any fish. He and his brother had just ran their trotlines and had close to 200 catfish in the back of their truck. (Alabama has no limit on catfish, but only one can be over 30 inches.) Too many to clean, he said. Truth is, they were too drunk to handle sharp instruments. My new found neighbor, took his stringer and came back with 10 fish, each one over 5 lbs. We sat there until 2am and called it quits. He had a mess of fish to clean and I was ready to sack out. I have to hand it to Alabama, the people here are mostly nice and the scenery in the Tennessee River valley is very special.

WTG Kurt gOod job .Glad you are getting t o fish a little.

I love the Tennessee River. I go to Pickwick and fish below the dam. In April when generating schedules are fairly consistent, a person with a five gallon bucket of skipjack can catch 20 to 30 pound blues all day as long as there is current. No current, no fish.
The skipjack are a blast to catch. I tie up a rig with red head jigs and white tubes and catch them two at a time below the dam.

That's another reason we quit. When the dam shut down all but one generator and the river level dropped two feet in about 10 minutes.