John Bornhop with a couple of nice ones caught off Blackburns new brush piles. We have some good ones for you. 
The lake level is 556.64 and has dropped 1.2 inches in the last 24-hours with both generators running for about 16-hours. The White River at Newport is 25.23 feet and is back in it's banks after being in flood stage for a couple of days after last Tuesday's 3-inch rain. Flood stage there is 26-feet. The surface water temperature was 46.5 degrees yesterday and the main lake was clear and I could see my lure down 5-6 feet there.. The creeks are also clearing with most of the brown dropping out. Fishing was slow for me in the nice warm sunshine but the bass started biting just at sunset and I caught several. They were on the drop-off on steep banks near deep water. They hit the grub in about 15-20 ft. of water near the bottom. Crappie were slow but I managed to catch a couple on live minnows on a slip float right in the brush about 5-6 feet deeper than when the minnow went out of sight. Those crappie are not liking the sunshine and are deeper on sunny days than on cloudy ones. The evening bite just before dark that had been going on for several weeks is now gone but it is still the best chance to catch them. Our other fishermen said the bite was slow but they caught both bass and crappie. It is good to have the bass bite picking up. It needed too. I only saw a couple of other boats out there and they were both from Blackburns. I guess there was something else going on to keep fishermen off the lake in the late afternoon but I do not know what it was. I hope it did not have anything to do with kneeling for the National Anthem. That does not go over very well with me and I am slow to forget.
