If you’ve looked through various fish-catch photos from this morning, you’ve noticed quite a few largemouth bass. That will be a surprise to some. Because Cherokee Lake has been such a dynamite smallmouth bass fishery in recent years, most of the anglers surveyed predicted the four-day winning bag would be something like 19 smallmouths and a single largemouth.
But Skylar Hamilton, the 22-year-old Elite Series rookie who lives nearby in Dandridge, didn’t see it that way.
“People don’t give this place credit at all for the largemouth it has in it,” Hamilton said yesterday. “There are some good ones. I think a guy could win with about half smallmouth and half largemouth. There will be a lot of mixed bags.”
At least today anyway, it certainly appears there will be many mixed bags. There’s a 15-inch minimum length limit on both largemouth and smallmouth bass at Cherokee Lake. State regulations include no minimum length limit on spotted bass, but B.A.S.S. rules require a 12-inch minimum length limit on spots.