11/29, Little Three Mile Creek Fishing

Russ and I decided to hit a local warm water discharge on the Ohio River Friday morning. I got everything loaded up and was on the road by 7:30am. It was still pretty cold outside at this point but I don't think I was prepared to handle how cold it was. My cars outside temperature reading was 14 degrees when I started heading down the road. The Weather Channel mobile app was calling for a high of 39 degrees so I knew we had warmer weather to look forward to.....my concern was how long we'd have to wait to see the warm up. I met up with Russ at a local gas station and got his gear loaded up into my vehicle.We grabbed a couple drinks and hit the road.

We got on the water around 9am and quickly noticed that a thick fog had formed around the warm water discharge. The discharge water temperatures were in the 70's while the Ohio River temps were in the 40's, both of which were significantly higher than the current air temperature of 20 degrees. The difference in temperatures created for some interesting fog, which then of course then froze onto anything and everything it touched. I quickly surveyed the water and discovered that the water level was at least 10" higher than normal and that it was super muddy. (viability of less than 2") I told Russ that we were going to paddle upstream to a fallen tree and see if we could find a few active fish sitting in the current breaks formed by the fallen tree. Russ quickly tossed out a catfish rod baited with shrimp, and then worked Smack Tackles Flitterbait on his other rod. I decided that I wasn't going to bring any catfish rods along, since the kayak I was using didn't have rod holders yet I really couldn't use them anyway. After an hour and a half without a bite we decided to head upstream even further and work a small discharge channel created by the power plant.


I took one side of the channel and Russ took the other side. A small school of shad had found a small eddy where the discharge channel and the main creek had met and were constantly flipping near the surface. I casted probably two dozen times into the eddy but failed to get a bite, or snag a shad for that matter. At one point Russ hooked into something but after a few seconds into the fight the fish had found a way to throw his bait. We sat at the mouth of the small discharge channel for another hour before I started asking Russ if he wanted to move. I told him that we had pretty much hit the two best spots in the creek at this point. I then suggested that we head out into the Ohio River and see if we can find some action there. Past experience has taught me that if the fish aren't biting in the creek, then more than likely they aren't biting in the river......however, I didn't tell Russ that. We took a few more casts and then we pulled our anchors. We slowly drifted down stream toward the mouth of Little Three Mile Creek casting our blade baits along the way. Russ had something hit his bait again, but it failed to find a treble hook this time.

We got out to the Ohio River and  quickly dropped anchor. Russ then decided to bring out the "big guns"; turkey gizzards, turkey heart, and turkey livers left over from the turkey he had for Thanksgiving dinner. I kept working the Flitterbait anywhere and everywhere I could throw it. I did take noticed of a few fish breaking the surface merely feet from my kayak. After 20 minutes of casting to the fish breaking the surface I discovered what they were, Gar. My chances of hooking and landing a gar on a bait with treble hooks was pretty slim, so I pulled anchor and decided to work some deeper water. About 30 minutes later I look over to see Russ fighting a fish. His turkey gizzards had paid off for him. After a short fight he pulled the 23" channel catfish into his kayak. It wasn't much but for late November and a nearly 5 hour trip without a fish to show for it, we were happy to have it. We fished for another hour and a half, we even moved back up into the creek, but failed to find another fish. At 4pm we decided to call it quits. We drug the kayaks back up to the car and loaded all of our gear up.

All in all we had a fairly successful trip. We managed to find a small channel cat, avoided the black Friday sales/mobs, got out of the house for a few hours, and had a pretty good time on the water.