My Buddy Jamie Toon asked me to tag along with him to Alabama’s famed Lake Guntersville for 5 days of bass fishing. Now there’s a social distancing option I couldn’t pass up.
We hooked up his Phoenix 921 ProXP and started the six hour drive south dreaming about some big bass. We wouldn’t be disappointed.
Lake Guntersville is Alabama’s largest lake at 75 miles long and 70,000 acres stretching along the Tennessee River between Guntersville Dam and Nickajack Dam. The Bassmasters Classic was held there last month and crowned Hank Cherry as its newest Champion.
One of the best ways to get on fish at a new body of water, especially one the size of Guntersville is to hire a local guide, we used Shane Ellis. Shane guides or just fishes almost daily, and stays on fish year round. He explains his thought process on fish movements, how the fish relate to cover or structure and how he expect changing weather patterns to effect fish movement. What I expect in a guide is someone that shares knowledge and works hard for you, Shane does all this and more, if you’re headed to Guntersville for vacation I would recommend giving him a call.
Now to the good stuff! We found water temperatures In the low 60’s, water levels dropping and a cold front with some rain had just passed through. Believing these conditions had pushed fish away from the bank we started fishing off shore grass flats ripping rattletraps out of the grass and was quickly rewarded with several largemouth in the 4 pound range. This pattern lasted throughout the week. We would rotate off the grass flats to rocky shoreline structure and pitch Yamamoto’s Spicy Beavers to the edge of the structure this also worked throughout the week. As the trap bite would slow we switched over to JackHammer Chatterbaits with a Yamamoto Zako trailer, slowly over the course of our trip the Jackhammers started to out fish the Trap in both quantity and quality.
On our 4th day of fishing we decided to explore some new water, and ended up in the State Park Area, this seemed like a deeper area of the lake, we still found fish on Chatterbaits and Beavers including some decent Alabama Spotted Bass. As you would expect the spots were found slightly deeper than the largemouth.
Lake Guntersville is one of the best bass fishing lakes in the country and should be on everyone’s bucket list. We are headed back in June for the Big Bash Cash tournament and I can hardly wait.
For Guide Service:
Shane Ellis
(256)744-5185
Www.shaneellisfishing.com
Jeff Jewell
RBBASS