During this movement, they are vulnerable to jigs tipped with minnows or night crawlers, and occasionally to slow-moving in-line spinners. During the actual spawn, they can be tough, but immediately thereafter, they feed ravenously. At this time, small, tight wobbling crankbaits often produce.

The trip back to the main channel is usually a fast one but often lasting only a couple of days. Still, if you hit it right, the fishing can be the experience of a lifetime. Catches of 15 keepers or more in a single day are common with numbers as high as 30 or more a possibility.

As the summer heats up, Center Hill walleyes tend to group tighter and tighter to the channel breaks and swings. At this time, jigging spoons, presented vertically, are often the most effective offering. Local anglers use a ripping technique. They jerk the spoon up, as far and as fast as possible, and then let it fall on a semi-slack line while watching for the telltale tick of the line.

Old Hickory Lake
Old Hickory Lake is best known for its sauger fishing, and for good reason. When conditions are right, you can catch saugers up to several pounds all day long.

“It’s basically a long, thin, shallow ribbon of water with lots of creeks,” said longtime Tennessee angler and professional guide Donny Felton (www.donnysguideservice.com). “A lot of how you fish it and your success on it depends upon the current flow. Really, that’s everything on this lake.”

By that, he means that sauger fishing on Old Hickory is usually good to great, especially early in the year, when there’s a good, steady current along the main channel and flowing out of the creeks. When either one of them stop, so does the sauger bite.

The year 2007 was problematic. Because of low water conditions, the current was slow to nonexistent. As such, the fishing was poor. “The bite just wasn’t there this year,” said Felton, referring to 2007. “I was real disappointed. You couldn’t hardly buy one. But if we get some rain or they move water down the Cumberland (River), it’ll pick up in 2008. And I guess on the positive side, we can figure that the ones we didn’t catch this year will be bigger next year.”

His plans for catching them in 2008 are simple but detailed and precise.

His weapon of choice is a big, heavy sauger jig -- at least a full ounce, sometimes an ounce and a half -- tipped with a minnow or piece of night crawler.

“I mostly fish the creek mouths with the jig, but you can’t always fish them the same way. If you do, you’ll have a lot of zero days,” he said.

“I always start fishing the deepest part of the creek mouth with a gentle lift-and-drop action. If that doesn’t work, I’ll raise the jig higher and let it fall faster. When that doesn’t work, I move around, sometimes fishing from deep water toward shallow, but at other times, the best bite is from shallow to deep. It just depends. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. That’s just the way it is.”

Felton believes color is very important to a sauger. Most of the time, he’s tossing something bright and flashy. Fluorescent yellow, gold and pink hues are his preference. In addition, to add even more color, he’ll frequently put a bead right at the head of the jig in a contrasting but equally bright color.