Anglers fish during the Fishing League Worldwide Bass Fishing League Regional Championship tournament Thursday, October 25, 2018 held on Lake Chickamauga in Dayton, Tennessee. More than 200 anglers took part in the event. The grand prize winner will get a boat and a check for $20,000, and the top co-angler will get a new boat.Chattanooga will follow the lead of Rhea County, Tennessee, by marketing and coordinating tournament fishing to address concerns by local fishermen while using it as an economic driver for the region.
Chattanooga and Hamilton County – in coordination with Rhea County – will launch Fish Lake Chick, a marketing campaign aimed at promoting tournament fishing on one of the country’s top-rated bass fishing lakes. The campaign will officially launch online in early January with information about tournaments, fishing in the area and a schedule of events on the lake. The partners also will work to spread traffic between the north and south ends of the lake to avoid overcrowding. The news comes on the heels of a large uptick in visitors coming to Lake Chickamauga and high national rankings.
“We have some wonderful assets down here, like Chester Frost [Park], that we want to start highlighting at a higher level,” Chattanooga Sports Committee President Tim Morgan said. “This regional co-op will make that happen. It’s about marketing the second-best lake in the nation and doing it at a higher level than we’ve ever done it before.”
Rhea County began a similar initiative in 2013, called Fish Dayton, that helped pull the county out of the great recession. The county was searching for a way to increase commerce and believed using the existing boat ramp could increase revenue at a low cost. County officials began planning in 2011 to get major fishing tournaments on the lake within two years.
Now, Rhea County’s hotels are overflowing and businesses have seen an uptick in customers. The city and county have an executive director of economic development and tourism to travel the world to pitch economic development ideas and share the success of Dayton, Tennessee.