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Fished Sunday Morning Bills Creek Bass Tournament and lake is still beating anglers up. Small bass are every where hitting everything you throw and the Keeper size 14 inch and larger are avoiding most baits and anglers. Bags of fish that would not even get near drawing a check are now winning tournaments. Today 14 pound bag won and 7.15lb was big fish and to date is holding big fish of the year in that trail. 10th Place had 8.45 pounds. Three years ago this same lake 8.45 lbs would have been the big fish in a bag with 23 lbs of fish in it to win. I can say my partner and I did win 8th place with 3 fish that weigh in at 8.55lbs today. Old Hickory is going to be tough for about 2 more years because we did have a great sucessful spawn last year and the lake is packed full of 10 and 11 inch fish from last years spawn. The only reason for that was we had a lot of heavy stains water during spawn last year and it really played hard ball on the sight fishermen so it helped the spawn considerably. Now if the lake will just grow up it might become a good fishery again.

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Life Jackets and Kill switch's save lives! Soft baits catch fish softer baits catch more fish!
I carry a gun cause a cop is to heavy and when seconds count the police are only minutes away!!

Great report. I was up there last june fishing a tournament, and it was hard to catch the 14" keepers. We caught tons of 13" fish, but not many less than 12". I really enjoyed fishing the lake, but it seemed like it got an enormous amount of pressure. The only place I have ever been that they had tuesday morning tournaments in the heat of the Summer!!!

Hey Tree, That Tuesday Morning tournament is mine. I run it for old guys and young guys too because there is not much boat traffic and it gives the old guys a day that they can fish without alot of pressure. I did some changes in for this year to help the fish and the anglers. I took the creel limit back from 5 fish to three fish. That gives the guys fishing by themselves a better chance at winning once in a while fishing against teams. I also have a date & time change that on first Tuesday in June the weigh-in will be moved back an hour and have everyone at the scales by 11AM instead of 12 noon. That gets us old guys out of that sun a little sooner which everyone including the young guys liked that idea. I am also asking the guys that bring in a lunker or two to take them back out of this pocket and away from the launch ramp and put them back out on the river channel. I have several teams that caught three sows last week and had a total weight of close to 15 pounds and They asked if they could take them back where they caught them and release them and I said yep because I knew they were sight fishing and took them off of beds. I asked them if they knew which fish went where and they said yea that they marked the fins so they would make sure they got them back on the correct beds. Now I know that seems like something stupid to some folks but that is how much we care about our lake and our bass. If you want to see some really mad bass anglers come up here and see what gets said when an out of town Club comes here and releases a bunch of dead or inflated bladder fish and leaves them floating after release. It can get ugly real quick. When the weather gets real hot I insist that all anglers put ice and Rejuvinate or catch and release in their live wells and if they don't have the chemicals I will loan them some of mine. I do not allow dead fish weighed in at my tournaments and many other tournaments here are adopting that same policy. Other have gone to a 1 pound penalty for each dead fish weighed in. If you get up this way again give me a shout and we will get out on the water for awhile.

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Life Jackets and Kill switch's save lives! Soft baits catch fish softer baits catch more fish!
I carry a gun cause a cop is to heavy and when seconds count the police are only minutes away!!