I have been talking with Dan from Ohio since February about a guided river smallie trip. We could never seem to get things to fall into place due to a number of factors that included high water on the Little Pigeon River. He asked me to give him a two day notice and he and one of his fishing buddies would make the trip south. The river had again been high due to some recent rains, but I could see that it was going to drop into that range where the flows were acceptable to start fishing again. We talked on Friday and I said based on the information from the reading from the river gauge in Sevierville that the Little Pigeon should start fishing well on Sunday. Dan said that he and his friend Tom would be ready to hit the river and fish for two days. It was sunny, warm, and windy with a high in the low eighties on day one. TVA was running two generators or more at Douglas Dam with an average of 12,000 cfs. The water was slightly stained on the Little Pigeon. I motored upstream to the same section of the river where I have had some exceptional fishing over the past couple of weeks. I knew that kind of fishing was not going to last forever, and I hoped today was not going to be the day when the bite was going to wane. As soon as Dan and Tom made their first couple of casts I knew that the fish weren’t there like they had been the past couple of weeks. It was one of those spots where we didn’t have to move the boat more than fifty yards in a six hour trip. Now I had to go to work and look for the fish I knew were there but had moved to parts unknown. It didn’t take long before they had hooked up not far from the “Honey Hole”. It wasn’t as fast and furious as it had been over the past couple of weeks, but by the end of the day they had managed to land 28 smallies. The majority of the fish were between sixteen and nineteen inches. They even had a few doubles. The picture of one of those doubles is included in this report. Tomorrow’s weather is supposed to be slightly cooler and not as windy. The Little Pigeon will continue to slowly drop and my hope is that it will fish as well again tomorrow like it did today.
River Smallie Adventures Fishing Report May 3, 2020
