Fishing Tennessee's Clinch River

It had all begun the day before. Fishing guides Scott Manning and Brycen Roberts had helped me catch eight to 10 (I actually lost count in all the excitement) large-striped bass from east Tennessee's Clinch River. Those fish weighed from 20 to more than 30 pounds each, and fought so hard it was all I could do to land them.

"Now tomorrow, we'll see if we can catch a really big one," Manning said when our morning's fishing was over. At first, I thought he was kidding.

"What?" I said incredulously. "You don't consider those fish we just caught to be big?"

With trophy stripers, Scott Manning (right) practices fish CPR
whenever possible: catch, photograph, and release.

"Well, they're nice sized," Roberts said, "but we might be able to do better. You'll only have a 50-50 chance of catching a fish in the particular stretch of river we'll be fishing tomorrow, but if we do hook one up, it'll be a true trophy striper."

Trophy stripers, usually the preserve of the Northeast, do occasionally waltz in Tennessee for the patient fisherman. Roberts should know, his personal-best striped bass weighed 53 pounds; Manning's largest to date weighed 58 pounds. The current Tennessee state-record striped bass stands at a whopping 65 pounds, 6 ounces.

We caught our fish that morning using three methods: trolling, casting, and fishing cut bait. About an hour before dawn, we left a boat ramp on the Clinch River and motored upstream about a mile to the base of Melton Hill Dam. There we began slow-trolling (0.5 mph) live gizzard shad behind homemade, in-line planer boards. We caught one striper that way, about a 20-pounder, and then, at first light, fish began hitting the surface.

"Let's switch to lures," Roberts suggested. We put on giant soft-plastic baits — the size usually used for muskie fishing — and began casting to the rising fish, catching another striper using that method. It wasn't until we began fishing large chunks of cut bait (skipjack herring) directly on the bottom of the river, however, that we really began catching stripers consistently, one about every 10 minutes or so. At one point we even had a double, two fish hooked on separate rods at the same time. Stripers fight so hard that they have very little energy left once you get them to the boat. So if you don't keep your catch, plan on spending a few minutes reviving each fish before releasing it. To do so, simply hold it in the water by the tail alongside the boat and gently move it back and forth until it revives. When the striper eventually struggles to get free, release it for another lucky angler to catch.

"Personally, I practice fish CPR — catch, photo, and release — whenever possible," Manning said. "Stripers are a great game fish, too big and too valuable to be caught just once."

TVA Two-Step

Striped bass, also known as rockfish, have been stocked into Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) lakes, and the rivers connecting them, for decades. What's unusual about stripers is not only their huge size, but also that they're actually a saltwater fish that can easily adapt to living full time in fresh water. The TVA was a public works project signed into law in 1933, the heart of the Great Depression, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of his New Deal. The concept was to build a series of hydroelectric dams on the Tennessee River system, bringing not only electricity to the rural South but also flood control and much-needed jobs. Today, the TVA boasts 29 such hydropower facilities, creating deep lakes behind them that provide habitat for striped bass and many other species of fish and wildlife, as well as recreation.

It's difficult to overstate the positive economic impact the TVA has had on the region during its 82 years of existence. Even by Depression standards, the Tennessee Valley was economically dismal in 1933. Thirty percent of the population were affected by malaria, and the average income was only $639 per year, with some families surviving on as little as $100 per year. The popular country-music group Alabama summed up the dire situation well — and the subsequent relief provided by the TVA — in their 1988 number-one tune, "Song of the South." Some of the song's lyrics read:

"Somebody told us that Wall Street fell, but we were so poor we couldn't tell.
"Momma got sick and Daddy got down, the County got the farm and we moved to town. "But Daddy got a job with the TVA, he bought a washing machine and then a Chevrolet."

During its years of development, as today, not everyone was enamored with the TVA. An actor at the time and host of the '50s television program "General Electric Theater," future-president Ronald Reagan criticized the TVA, saying it was "one of the problems of big government." Reagan was fired for his remarks, as General Electric was one of the main suppliers of power turbines to the TVA. It's with that bit of historical background that I came to be floating down a beautiful Tennessee stream in a small boat on a sunny summer day, anticipating catching my fish of a lifetime. Even though it was late July, a sweatshirt felt good. The water discharging from the base of Melton Hill Dam into the Clinch River is only in the 50-degree range, creating an almost constant mist over the river as the warm air above the water condenses. But such cold water has made the Clinch one of the top 100 trout streams in America, home to sizable brook, brown, and rainbow trout. To make a long fishing story short, after floating downstream several miles that second morning, I didn't catch a trophy striper. Didn't even get a bite, in fact. But remembering our outstanding catch of the previous day, I was more than pleased with my trip to the Volunteer State.