Yesterday afternoon and this morning I recorded a dozen videos posing the following question.
Is Cherokee Lake fishing big or small?
The reasoning is simple. Cherokee is 28,780 acres, and while that’s plenty of fishing space for 110 boats, it does shrink in size during the winter drawdown. As in about 20 feet.
“In wintertime on highland lakes like this you can easily visualize where the best areas are,” noted Alton Jones Sr.
Translated, that means the lower water exposes the bottom contours even more than at any time. Channel swings are easier to find. Main lake points show themselves even farther out into the lake.
Jones believes the lake is fishing small for those reasons.
“The fish are really spread out, and they have so many options,” he added.
Jones told me the lesson to be learned is covering vast stretches of the water column.
“You can’t leave any depth zone out, really, because with fish scattered like they are here you might find them from zero to 10 feet or somewhere down in deeper depths.”
Part of that is due to the unusually warm winter underway in east Tennessee.
“They aren’t in typical winter patterns that keep them concentrated in deeper water.”
That’s what Ott DeFoe told me yesterday. Most of the fish might be scattered, but some concentrations are being found by the leaders, obviously.
“The key for me is finding little concentrations of fish,” said Mark Menendez, currently second according to BASSTrakk.
“It takes a lot of work, but you go through a dry spell and then find a small area that holds more than one or two,” he said.
So far so good for Menendez. He said the lake is fishing big, at least for him.