Photo by Ron Sinfelt

When planning on fishing a place for the first time, I ask several questions of those who have fished it, including what kind of fish should I expect and what type of cover will I encounter. Once I have fished a place, I continue to ask questions, but I now focus on more specific inquiries, such as what trends are anglers seeing on the lake and how people usually go about fishing its waters. For lakes like Gibson County Lake and Davy Crockett, my plans were no different before I bass fished them, and I’m still asking questions after I’ve fished them. But I know how you’re going to catch fish on these two quite different lakes without asking any more questions at all. And it’s not going to be a very difficult thing to do.

GIBSON COUNTY LAKE
Gibson County Lake came to my attention when I was actually researching Glen Springs Lake in West Tennessee. TWRA fisheries biologist Dave Rizzuto gave me a breakdown of the lake, one of my favorite bass lakes, in fact, and answered every inquiry I had. When we were finished, though, he added a simple, but thought-provoking question: “Is that the only place you’re bass fishing?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Right now there’s a lake even better than that,” he said.

“Which one?”

“Gibson County Lake,” he said, and I needed no further pushing in that direction.

When arriving at this TWRA family fishing lake, which was originally stocked with 3- to 4-inch bass fingerlings in 2001 and opened for fishing in April of 2003, the first thing anglers will notice is the large diversity of cover at the lake. When I fished the lake for the initial time on a Saturday, I was one of at least 30 bass boats on the 560-acre midsized reservoir. Usually in this situation, I leave and seek shelter elsewhere. However, I had a good feeling that I could get away from boaters. Moreover, I had already heard very good reviews on the lake.

Gibson County Lake has already given up a bass weighing 12 pounds, 8 ounces. And that fish came in the third year after the lake opened.

In the fall of 2006, Rizzuto commented that in a 30-minute time span, biologists electro-fished a number of other bass between 7 and 8 pounds.

Originally stocked with a 50/50 combination of Florida bass and a northern strain of largemouth, the lake definitely boasts the potential to be one of the best big bass waters in the state.

Creel limits have been set at five bass, a slot between 14 to 18 inches, with only one allowed over 18 inches, in an attempt by the TWRA to put in place a method of leaving a number of emerging big bass in the lake to feed on the surplus of bluegills (which were also stocked for its bass fishery). Threadfin shad were also recently added to help with the booming bass population, a population that is growing faster than Rizzuto ever expected.

“Plus,” he said, “the lake’s not getting as much pressure as we thought it would.”

Originally built as a recreation/ fishing lake, the lake’s level is still low for most of the year. But this also allows anglers to see the structure available to fish at Gibson County, and there’s plenty of structure to see.