By Lawrence Taylor
Highland lakes, those deep, clear and rocky beauties typically known as smallmouth bass havens, often see a lot of night fishing activity. For good reason, too. Darkness prompts the smallies to move shallower and feed heavily before the bright sun pushes them to deeper water.
Friday May 29th a good friend and outdoor writer Mike Lambeth and I met fishing guide Billy Stanton at Edgar Evins State Park on Center Hill Lake east of Nashville, Tenn., for a pair of night-fishing ventures. We found that Center Hill’s dam is currently under construction and the water level has dropped considerably, and was in fact still dropping, leaving many boat ramps short of the water.
I asked Stanton what affect the low and dropping water level was doing to the fish. “It’s getting tough,” he said. “The fish are still in the areas where I found them prior to the drop, but they’re getting more tight-lipped.”
Highland lakes typically feature plenty of rocks, cliffs and ledges, and Stanton says the key to locating fishing hotspots is finding that “something different” that can be a series of shelves at prime depths that allow fish to quickly move up from deep water to feed, rare patches of weed growth, or in our case a submerged roadbed and one area about the size of a football field that simply didn’t look as if it belonged in a highland reservoir. That spot featured shallow water that rose to an island with 4- to 8-feet of water surrounding it in what constituted a flat.
The first evening Stanton and Lambeth headed toward the island flat and I headed the other direction with Matt Gibson, a great gentleman who’d volunteered to spend at least some of the night running the trolling motor. We hit the submerged roadbed. While Stanton picked up several chunky 3-pound smallmouth casting a Fat Free Shad BD6F, a big, deep running crankbait in Foxy Shad color pattern, and Lambeth scored on a BOOYAH Moon Talker nighttime spinnerbait in black/red. Despite the dropping water level, the smallmouth continued to utilize the shallow flat to push, pin and attack shad.
The water level at the roadbed, however had hit the depth where most of it was too shallow to hold fish. I picked up one good smallmouth bumping a YUM Wooly Bug in Watermelon Red Flake and Matt picked up two on a Big Show Craw but the majority of smallies had relocated.
During any night fishing trip, action is normally fast as the sun sets then there’s a lull until around midnight. This, of course, is subject to all types of factors. It is the pattern we experienced. We caught a few more small fish, mostly spotted bass, through the deepest part of the night, and as the blue light of extremely early morning appeared we headed back to the island flat and caught about a dozen more fish including a 4-pound smallie and several spotted bass. Stanton capped the early morning with his signature drum, and with fuzzy brains and beyond-tired bodies, we motored back to the State Park and slugged to our cabins, which, by the way, were far nicer than most state park cabins I’ve stayed in, with comfortable beds and cable television, although the TVs didn’t get a whole lot of use.
After some well-deserved sleep we dragged ourselves over to the marina restaurant, the Sweet Water Grill, for a meal that served as breakfast, lunch and dinner and headed back to the water for another evening of fishing. We started the evening at one of Stanton’s favorite spots, the vertical face of the dam. Throwing a shaky head with a 6-inch smoke red pepper Houdini Worm, we worked every irregularity in the dam by tossing the lure to the dam face and letting it free fall for up to 20 seconds before twitching and shaking it. We caught plenty of spotted bass off the dam face and worked the corner and adjacent riprap with crankbaits to take several nice smallmouth and a 4-pound walleye.
The Moon Talker, Fat Free Shad and Big Show Craw resulted in the bulk of our catch for that evening and we called it a night around 3 a.m. and returned to our welcoming cabins. The fishing, on the whole, was pretty slow, but considering the recent and ongoing water level drop, that can be expected.
Center Hill Lake is 64 miles long and consists of 415 miles of shoreline and 18,200 acres of deep, pure water. The dam gates were closed on Nov. 27, 1948 on the Caney Fork River to create the lake. During our two evenings/nights on the lake, we caught walleye, spotted bass, largemouth, smallmouth, drum and white bass.
In the future, lurenet.com will feature several stories on water levels – quick drops, low water, high water, etc. – with information from Stanton and other professional anglers. Special thank you to Billy Stanton, who despite the slow fishing, made the trip extremely enjoyable with constant off-the-wall comments and observations. He’s gotta be one of my favorite guys to fish with.
Postscript: One week after our relatively slow fishing on Center Hill, the action has picked up considerably. In a conversation with Stanton, he reported that in the Saturday night tournament (June 6), 18 pounds of fish didn’t even cash a check. Typical for me, I’m always a week early or a week late. -- LT