For the shallow-water fishing in May, Jones spends most of his time in the backs of creeks. He prefers creeks that have a water source emptying into them, although that is not essential. He does note that the odds of finding shallow-water fish on the bed in a concentrated area are best in those situations. It certainly proved to be the case the days we fished.

Our first stop was in the back of a creek where the old creek first widened out into the lake. The bottom was primarily gravel/sand and the depth was about 3 to 4 feet. We simply eased along with his trolling motor, fan-casting around the boat. We fished the middle open water in the cove as much as the shoreline.

His technique is to slowly reel the jig/night crawler combo so the lure is just off the bottom by a few inches. Bring it over a springtime bream or shellcracker and wham! -- they’ll nail it. Typically, we’d catch several fish from each spot where we found fish.

We moved to new areas as soon as the action slowed. Jones does not linger long in any place that is not producing. We’d change the depth up and down to effectively fish the area we were fishing, but otherwise, the technique stayed the same.

The flats at the very back of the creeks, and shallow sloping shorelines with gravel and sand bottoms were the places he concentrated his efforts. Sometimes there was no woody or weed cover associated with the beds, sometimes there was.

“Check everything, but stay on the move until you hit a hotspot. Sometimes you have to be very accurate with your casting to continue to catch fish,” he noted.

Such was the case on one shellcracker bed we fished that day. While fishermen talk more often about 1-pound-plus bream than they actually catch such fish, I weighed a number of the fish we caught that were well over a pound. We caught 26 shellcrackers from a single place no larger than a sculling paddle. Hit the target and you’d catch a big, hard-fighting shellcracker. Miss it by inches and you’d get no bite.

On that day, and as a general rule, most of the shellcrackers were in shallower water than the bluegills. Generally, they were segregated in terms of hotspots, but it wasn’t unusual to find shellcrackers along one area and 20 to 40 yards away, hit a bed of big bluegills.

“Occasionally, I’ll find a spot and catch both shellcrackers and bluegills,” he said. “But typically, the big beds will be specific to one species or the other. Also, one or the other may be much more available on a given day. If the shellcrackers are really biting, I’ll usually focus on those because they are so much larger. We’ll catch a lot of bream in the 10-ounce and up class, but the shellcrackers average a lot larger. But scads of bream that approach a 3/4-pound average is plenty good fishing for sure,” Jones added.

He noted that traditional bream fishing techniques will work fine on Chickamauga. Fishermen using crickets or worms as bait will do well.