Tennessee’s Chickamauga Lake in the past two decades has risen from bass fishing doldrums to one of the leading fishing destinations in the U.S. as the genetic influence of a rod-bending largemouth bass species from Florida continues to thrive in the Tennessee River.
Chickamauga Lake is home to the state-record largemouth bass caught in 2015 that tipped the scales at more than 15 pounds and regularly produces trophy-sized fish that have led to numerous amateur and professional fishing tournaments on the lake that appeals to fishing fans from across the nation, according to pro anglers and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.
The state record is a hybrid of the Florida largemouth bass strain and native northern largemouth bass that have made the 36,200-acre Chickamauga Lake the bass-fishing national hot spot it has become for anglers across the U.S., according to Mike Jolley, a regional fisheries manager for the state agency. Jolley has been with the Florida bass project since the beginning in 2000 and has watched the lake’s popularity grow.
“In creel surveys that we do, we’re able to look at a lot of the socioeconomics from people who are fishing Chickamauga as well as fisheries data, and through that we know where they’re from, how much money they spent on that trip and all that,” Jolley said in a phone interview. “We don’t do creel surveys every year on Chickamauga, but the last one that we did still showed good effort from out-of-state folks as well as in-state folks. We also do an angler attitude survey as part of the creel survey. We ask them to give us a satisfaction rating.”