Kayak Fishing Narrow Creeks

Hey guys, welcome to this week's episode. I'm Chad Hoover and we're on a beautiful middle Tennessee River, remote. We're not gonna tell you the name of it. You've gotta find places like these yourself. But I'm with the guys from TN Moving Waters and we're chasing some big ol' backwater bronze backs.

This creek can be kinda small at the beginning, and we actually had to limbo underneath some branches and push some branches out of the way and navigate through some really nice, tight water but just adds to it.

We're gonna be going through shallow sections and then connecting to the deeper holes. And most fish are gonna be around the deeper holes 'cuz they feel more comfortable in deeper water. When they get really aggressive, they will swim up on the shoals and chase some minnows in the shallower water. We can find some really unusually large small mouth in these creeks because these creeks we're fishing, are connected to really good small mouth water, be it rivers or lakes. And a lot of these big fish will come up to spawn in the spring time. And then they find such favorable conditions, they'll just live here for the rest of their life. A 20-inch creek fish is approximately 16 to 20 years old. So these fish are slow-growing and live a long time in this kind of environment.

There's two small mouths that keep swimming up to it and looking at it. I think there's a bed right here. So what I've got here is I've got a bed down here. These fish are not committed to the bed yet, so they're hanging in this cove back here and they're establishing kind of their protected area and they're running stuff off. So this bass will dart at it, trying to spook it off, playing a little game of chicken, but she won't eat it. So I'm just gonna keep...for lack of a better way of putting it, antagonize her until I get her to eat it. And the buck is down there and he's doing a little swarm. He's establishing kind of a perimeter guard and the female is staging. She's getting ready so that when she's ready, she can ease into the bed, drop her eggs, the male can fertilize them and then she'll move on.

Well guys, we got a really big bass right here. We got a buck that's set up on the bed and he's running out. And what he's doing is he's establishing a perimeter. So right now, he's concerned about pan fish. He's getting them scattered out of the zone. The nest raiders, your lizards, your crawfish or things like that, they're going to attack those in the second phase. And so right now, she's in there swimming, and she's basically circling like a shark. If they swim and circle and never stop, they're pretty much uncatchable in my opinion. It's when they swim up to the bait and they look at it, and they fan their pec fins at it, that they're trying to spook it. That's when they're catchable. But you have to invest the time to agitate them, and we've got a long float, and we got a late start. So I'm gonna have to let this girl do her thing and head on down the river, looking for some more cooperative fish. But this can be both amazing fun and maddening at the same time. And honestly whether you catch the fish or not, you learn a lot by doing things like this, by just sitting here and observing. And we've got the kayak right on top of...she's actually swimming under the nose of the boat right now. And that's another one of the great things about kayak fishing. So I'm gonna ease over there and grab my spinner bait, and we're gonna head on down the river.