Down south

Just returned from three days fishing in Tenn. Most of the time was spent chasing stripers below dams on the Clinch and Tenn rivers. That bite was fairly slow and about what you might expect this time of year. I did manage to land one dandy that was over twenty that somehow ended up back in the river without it's photo being taken. ( I dunno how the H#@ you do that, I don't wanna talk about it) During midday you couldn't have gotten a striper with dynamite so after the first day I headed to mountains during the heat of the day and chased brook trout with the fly rod. They were tiny mostly about five or six inches long but plentiful and heartbreakingly beautiful.
The real story of the trip though was what happened yesterday evening and throughout the night. The dam was releasing quite a bit of water when I came back from chasing brookies and there was a huge eddy on the near bank. And pushed right against the bank in a band about a foot or two wide and at least a hundred yards long were millions and millions of shad. Enough that one of the guides had his big twenty five foot boat full of coolers which he filled completely with shad using a dip net. I guess he was planning on selling them to bait shops since no one could ever use up literally hundreds and hundreds of pounds of shad. Anyways right up against the dam is a wall that runs at a right angle to the dam about the length of a very long cast. The big eddy hit this wall and the water shot up along the wall upstream to the dam. Fast. Very very fast. Fast enough that when one of the guide boats tried to fish it he couldn't hardly hold the big boat in place with the outboard and gave up after bouncing around in a scary looking ride. The reason he tried was you could see fish murdering shad in vast numbers all along the wall. Well with a bit of rock climbing and probably a tiny bit of trespassing I worked my way to the end of the wall. Up close the carnage was cool to watch. Blue cats were straight up and down in the water column just working there mouths open and closed sucking down mouthfuls of shad. And then every few minutes a big shovelhead would come streaking down the wall with his back out of the water looking like one of those killer whales chasing seals up on the beach on animal planet. There were so many shad of all sizes that the shovels would just drive into them with their mouths open. I caught catfish on topwater plugs and big curly shads on two ounce striper jigs. Finally trying to catch a bigger one I tied just a hook on. With a couple feet of line out I'd dip the hook into the band of shad and hook one. I'd rehook it thru the nose so it would stay on and flip it out along the wall. The current was too fast to hold it in place tho, the shad would just skip along on top of the water. The trick was to flip the bail open and the shad would hurtle along the wall till it hit the corner against the dam where it would swirl around for a moment before being swept along the dam. And a moment was all it took till a catfish found it. They generated from at least six in the evening when I got there till 1 am. And I literally caught a catfish nearly every cast the entire time!!!!  Now the current was so fast that even with the big 8.5 foot heavy action striper rod  from Little Miami Rods and 50 lb braid  five or six pound fish took a minute or two and and the bigger shovels might take ten or fifteen minutes. I had a big Okuma Avenger baitrunner reel with the drag cranked all the way down and with the raging current to help the fish would pull drag like crazy. Plus I lost about an hour fighting one giant shovelhead that eventually just pulled off. I have no idea really how big it was though since the swift current made even medium sized fish feel like they were huge. No channels at all, most were blues though one in ten would be a shovel. I lost track of numbers right away but it's safe to say I caught more blue cats in that one night than the rest of my life put together. Then they quit generating and everything just stopped. I was covered in shad scales and fish slime and exhausted and the today would find my right bicep sore from fighting fish.  It was easily one of if not the most outrageous and surreal experiences I've ever had out fishing.