Late Winter Fishing on Dale Hollow

I suppose every hard core angler has a few favorite lake that they like to fish. For me one of my all time favorite lakes would have to be Dale Hollow Lake. Every time that I have got to fish this lake I have had a memorable trip. As many of you anglers already know this is the lake that the world record smallmouth bass was caught in. This small mouth bass was caught by David L. Hayes in 1955 on the KY side of the lake. The fish weighted an amazing 11 pounds and 15oz. Now if that is not enough to get you on the waters of Dale Hollow Lake then I don't know what would. Part of this lake is in Ky and part of it is in Tenn. There are parts of the lake where you can fish with a Ky or Tenn fishing license and fish in both states. And some parts of the lake you can only fish that state waters with that states fishing license so be sure to look or ask someone.

This lake is world famous for its small mouth bass fishing but also offers some top notch large mouth bass, walleye, trout and musky fishing . Me and a friend of mine took a late winter trip to Dale Hollow lake to bass fish. We had checked out all the fishing reports and called and talked to several people at the dock we were going to.

All the reports and all the folks we had talked to had all given pretty good reports of good action for small mouth and large mouth bass and that the musky action was decent. The weather had been in the low 40,s and kind of overcast skies. That is about as good as it gets for a late winter fishing trip. So a few days ahead of time I started getting my boat and tackle ready. I decided to go with light clear line on my rods. This is normal in winter fishing and this is a clear deep cool water lake so this would work just fine. As for lures I decided to try hair jigs . spider jigs, tube baits and jigging spoons or the float and fly if the weather was cold enough. The morning of our trip we met up at around 3 am in the morning and headed out for Dale Hollow Lake or as the locals call it , the hollow.

After about a 4 hour drive we arrived at the boat dock we got out, loaded our gear and backed the boat into the water and got ready to start our day of bass fishing. But as the morning started to break it did not take long to tell there was a definite change in the weather and it was not for the good of our trip. The mild temps in the 40's had been replaced with a very cold chilly wind with a wind chill way below freezing. And the overcast skies were replaced by mile high blue bird skies. We were experiencing a very bad cold front.

Any angler will tell you that in a cold front situation that a bass angler must change their fishing presentation or pattern to be successful. This is just what we did. Instead of fishing in the 8 foot depth range on steep rocky banks we had to move out to much deeper water and fish old weed beds to find our bass. We worked our jigs slowly through the weed beds and over deeper rocks on main lake points to find our bass. At the end of the day were cold and tiered but for our efforts we were blessed to catch a couple small mouth bass in the 2 to 3 pound range and a large mouth a piece over 4 pounds. So you could say we were happy with our trip.

On the way home as we warmed back up with in the truck I thought back on our day and was glad we did what we had to do to catch our bass. And to this day this was one of my favorite fishing trips and on one of my all time favorite lakes of all time Dale Hollow Lake.