Fished a little today.....

Decided that I just had to fish a river today and get my "string jerked". I have two home rivers and they both were releasing way too much water to wade fish. One was releasing 1200CFS and that river is wadeable at 200CFS. The other river was releasing 4100CFS and it is wadeable at 350CFS. We have had a lot of rain in the last week and the lakes are over full and pushing the top of the gates at the dams.

I have fished the one river when they were generating and just walked the rip rap along the chute where the generator water was coming out and have caught a few trout doing that, so, I decided I would give that a try. Once I got to the dam I notice that they were not running any water from the generator area, but, releasing water from the spillway. This is what the spillway looks like with 4100CFS coming down the spillway:

http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o...psc9dd6c12.jpg

This is looking down the spillway towards the bridge where the river starts and the first access area. I fished from the bank on the right hand side of picture and caught 2 stripers and 15 skipjack. The skipjack ran from 14" to 20". They sure are a lot of fun to catch on a 5wt!

http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o...ps699ea3e7.jpg

I was having too much fun catching the skipjack and did not try to get my camera out to take any pictures of them, but, I had so much fun today that I may go again tomorrow and I will take a few pictures of the "catch".

No trout, but, sure a lot of fun!!

Warren,

Looks like a fun place to fish; thanks for the pics.

Regards,
Scott

The fun part is that you never know what you might catch when they are spilling water like this. Tim's Ford Lake is 10,700 acres of water with many species of fish in it. It is a really good smallmouth lake.

Hopefully, I will get to fish the spillway again tomorrow. Today was predicted for 20% thunderstorms and we got nothing and tomorrow is 60% so I may get rained out. Hope not.....

They are running the spillway on the Chattahoochee 24/7 recently, no both is trout fishing in the Metro Atlanta area that I know of at the moment. Maybe going to the mountains. I decided not to even try today, I heard Tuesday it's supposed to be clear, so I may get out the FishCat float tube and hit a lake I haven't been in this year. It was the best lake in the country before they drained it about 8 years ago. I got some charcoal and some chicken to try out my modified smoker. Yesterday I built bird houses.

Thought the "fun" was what it was about.. Congrats on a fun day

Good for you Warren! Good fishing!
Mike

I'll have to look and see if I have any pics of my my local tailrace looks like at either 20,000 cfs or 40,000 cfs. Of course, with that kind of flow, I'm not using a fly rod, but a surf rod for cats.

I love catching Skipjack! "Poor Man's Tarpon", indeed!

My problem is, if I'm catching Skippies, I'm either going to keep them for cutbait for cats, or try to keep it alive long enough to put out under a balloon for BIG Stripers.....

Well, I was able to get out again today to harass the skipjack. I called another guy I know and asked him if he was interested in catching skipjack and he met me there and between the 2 of us, we probably caught 25 to 30 skipjack plus I caught one small stripper and one rainbow. My fishing partner also caught one rainbow.

I did have my camera and I took some more shots of the water coming from the spillway plus a couple shots of the many skipjack we caught.

I did not realize my car was in this picture until after I loaded it into the computer.

http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o...psd35ad58b.jpg

http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o...ps4ee164ae.jpg

http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o...ps06cb69a7.jpg

http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o...ps65c42a03.jpg

http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o...psf06a36d6.jpg