Welcome to February. The lake level is 554.59 and has dropped about 1/2 inch in the last 24-hours with several hours of generation. The weather was cool and windy yesterday but you just have to know where to go to get out of it. I like to hug main lake cuts where the wind is coming from in the old river channel next to deep water. If you go back in the creeks it is just swirling. Blackburns Creek is usually pretty protected and has some good brush piles. I do not ride far in the boat when it is cold but fish close to home. You can bet I will not be out there in open water trolling around. Our monthly rainfall for January was below average and they still will not drop the lake. March-May are our rainiest months with September after that. They should know what is coming but refuse to do anything about it. It would be nice if they could keep the level where it is now but they cannot. 560 is the level where some dock access, parking and launching becomes affected. Day users are the ones mostly affected. Blackburns has dock access at all levels but it becomes a pain and requires steps to get to it. Otherwise you can park and step right on the dock and launch right here. No need to go elsewhere to launch and one person can do it easily but we will help you if you want. Some resorts do not have launch availability and you have to have two people. The weather is to be in the low 40's today and then warm up nicely the rest of the week with an arctic cold front dropping down from Canada this weekend with the coldest temperatures of the season. We will see. Their batting average is not very high but they seem to be pretty sure about this one. We can take a couple of cold nights without dropping the water temperature much but do not need prolonged cold to cause a shad kill. This starts to occur at below 40 degrees. I like the shad population right where it is. Everything has plenty of food and the fish are very healthy. The crappie are full of eggs and the spawn looks to be right on schedule with the big ones spawning first. I have not killed any other kind of fish since the catfish stopped biting.
