Tim Little of TacticalBassin spent most of the spring travelling for family commitments. When he finally pointed his boat at Lake Chickamauga in mid-May, his plan was simple: read the water in front of him and let the lake split the day into two completely different patterns.
"Haven't been on Chickamauga in probably at least a couple months," Little tells the camera. "It's been a crazy spring, lots of travel, lots of baseball with the family and kids, and lots of other fisheries, but excited to be back out on Chickamauga today."
The morning starts in the back of a clear-water creek arm at 69.1 degrees, with a cold 38-degree overnight low in the air. Little is throwing a six-inch Mag Draft swimbait on an Outlier combo around laydowns and stumps. The first three bites are small — two rats around 10 inches — but the fourth one cracks the swimbait properly. He drops onto an old reliable: a Neko rig with a Karashi-style hook and a magic worm fished tight to visible cover. The shade and ambush angle is the whole point.
"Even on colder mornings, you can see I still have my hoodie on. These fish still sit in the shade," he says. "It's just a better percentage of them being successful when they're ambushing and chasing their target."
A quality fish on the Neko rig comes off a shade wall next to a laydown, exactly the kind of high-percentage spot Little is preaching. "Just a little shade wall right here. It's all sunny here. There's a big laydown right here and a shade wall right there. Threw the drop shot in there, threw the Neko rig in there, caught that little guy. And then — bigger one."
The second pattern arrives after a long run to a wind-blown muddy bay. Water temperature climbs to 70.1, visibility drops to six inches, and Little switches to a Z-Man Elite Evo ChatterBait with a Spunk Shad trailer. The wind, he reminds the audience, is the friend.
He sets up on a single big dock holding 20-plus pilings and refuses to blow through it. "Make sure you're really picking it apart," he says. "Choose your angles, choose your casts. That corner, that back corner, all the way through, make nice skips. Really pick a big dock like this apart, because a lot of times there'll be several fish under it."
The payoff is a five-pounder that smokes the ChatterBait on a backhand, left-hand cast along the dock edge. Several more fish follow on the same pattern, including a couple that hit not from the dark middle of the dock but from out in the bright water, hunting the shade wall from the outside. "Out in the sun, those fish will sit right there with their nose in the shade looking out to the sun," Little explains. "As long as you treat that shade line like a wall and run your bait right along it, but on the brighter side, you can really catch them."
Gear gets a mention because Little keeps repeating one combo. He has a Bantam reel paired with 30-pound braid and a 15-pound leader and rates the torque highly. "It is just a workhorse that is super powerful, super light, very sensitive, and is just so much fun to fish."
The day closes as a deliberate shallow-water decision rather than a Chickamauga ledge story. "I'm sure I could have gone offshore and found some offshore deeper fish, but I wanted to be shallow and power fish." Less than seven feet of water, mostly two-and-a-half to three, two completely different patterns, and proof that the lake's post-spawn bass are still right where Little expects them.
