Got the itch last week so I took Friday off and hit the road with Lance Merry, a friend who photographs fish professionally. We drove down to north central Tennessee and started fishing around noon.
First spot was supposed to have elegant madtoms, a small species of catfish, but we couldn't them. However, there were chub mounds (piles of rocks built by redtail chubs) that had Tennessee shiners and scarlet shiners spawning on them.
It didn't take long to catch a male scarlet shiner.
Followed by a male Tennessee shiner.
Lance is really into photographing chub mounds, so he put on his mask and snorkel and got to work. Not sure why his ass is always in the air when he's doing his thing. Maybe it needs to breathe too?
While Lance was taking photos, I poked around in the riffle and found some orangefin darters.
Once he was done, I took a turn using my waterproof point and shoot camera. The fish tightly hugging the mound are Tennessee shiners, and the ones swimming higher above it are scarlet shiners. I'm looking forward to seeing Lance's photos, because they will be much better than mine.
We drove through the stream in my Subaru, but we didn't make it far down the gravel road because of these two guys. And I do mean guys, because they were both males!!
Our next spot was the same stream but 10 miles upstream where the bottom switches from gravel to slab bedrock. This is a location where I've previously tried and failed to catch blackfin suckers, a very rare fish found only near the TN/KY border. I saw a few, and even had one nibble my bait, but when I tried to set the hook, it didn't connect. My only consolation catch was this boss rainbow darter.
Next we headed south to a stream that was stocked with redeye bass back in the 1940's. The population is doing quite well, because Lance and I had no problem catching them. The teal colors are pretty weird looking for a bass.
A little ways downstream was a waterfall, and we hoped to catch a lunker bass out of the plunge pool, but we only found rock bass.
We stayed the night in a motel and continued our journey south the next morning. The first stream we tried didn't have very good access, but I scrambled down to try it anyway.
Lance had no desire to bushwack through the poison ivy like I did. Thank God I'm immune to it.
After a bit of cursing I was able to catch my target here, a male cherry darter.
Unintentionally I also caught this shiner. Looks like a juvenile striped shiner.
Next we went to a public boat launch on a larger stream, the Barren Fork. I found darters in the pools next to one of the bridge pilings.
My first catch was an unimpressive fringed darter.
Followed by another cherry darter. I was using tiny earthworms that we would dig up at each site we went to. They worked much better than store bought redworms.
Further south we crossed into the Duck River drainage, which is one of the most biodiverse rivers in the country. Lance wanted to get his hands on a colored up flame chub to photograph, so that was our top priority. Unfortunately, I could only find boring ones.
Plenty of other fish at this spot. The rosyside dace were cool looking.
This darter I think is a saffron, but I'm not 100% sure.
Our last fishing spot was just upstream of Rutledge Falls. Before we fished we walked down to the waterfall to take a look. We don't have these in Illinois!
We were again looking for colorful flame chubs, but at this spot we couldn't find any, colored up or not. I caught a few darters that I haven't been able to ID. I'm hoping to get a couple species for my lifelist out of this bunch.
Rosyside dace were looking good at this spot as well. This was the last fish of the trip.
We were anxiously watching the weather forecast because a big line of thunderstorms was fast approaching. We decided to cut our trip short because the streams were likely to be blown out if it rained hard. We had about an hour before the rain started, so we drove a few minutes over to another waterfall.
Lance is obsessed with aquatic plants, so he was enjoying this spot.
The first set of falls was man-made, but further downstream we found some natural falls. It was a nice end to the trip.
