Poss Adapts as Fishing Changes at Pickwick Lake

By DAVID RAINER, Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources

Andy Poss knows the Tennessee River’s Pickwick Lake from top to bottom – literally. Fishing for both largemouths and the scrappy smallmouths, as well as crappie, is what he does now. For 15 years prior, he probed the lake from bottom to top to make a living.

Poss was a commercial fisherman and mussel diver during those 15 years until, in his words, “I got tired of being wet all the time. And it’s a lot of work to handle 2,000 hooks a day – baiting 1,000 hooks and then taking up 1,000 hooks.”

During that time, however, he added a wealth of knowledge about Pickwick to what he learned in recreational fishing time.

“I grew up in a family of fishermen,” said 62-year-old Poss. “It was all rod and reel when I started. I devoted myself to spending time on the river and, for those 15 years, that was my job of commercial fishing and mussel diving. I would guide some for smallmouths in the spring and fall, the better times of the year.”

Those pursuits eventually left him light in the wallet, so he turned to his vocational training and joined the pipefitters union. He has welded pipe all over the U.S.

Diehard bass anglers may know Poss for another reason involving a famous – some say infamous – bass bait, the Alabama Rig.

“I was supposed to start a job, and it got pushed back a month,” he said. “I told Dad (Houston) ‘I got something I want to try. I’ve had an idea about this.’ I had seen those guys trolling with umbrella rigs below the dam for stripers and hybrids. I wanted to make one you could cast. Dad has always been a fish bait tinkerer, and he had some spinnerbait wire. I used pop rivets you use on the back end of a buzzbait. It was small wire and I didn’t really know how it would do.

“We went to a grass line where we’d been catching some fish. After about the third cast, I told Dad this thing will whack ’em. That rig didn’t last but about eight fish before it was totally destroyed. I went back and got some heavier wire. I had to tweak to where the wire was not too limber and not too stiff. I lightened the head. I found out I had to have swivels with clips. The fish really liked it. Something new always catches them for a while.”

A few professional bass anglers found out about the Alabama Rig, and in 2011 veteran pro Paul Elias used it on Lake Guntersville to catch 20 bass that weighed 102 pounds to win the Walmart FLW Tour event. Six months after the bait hit the market, bass tournaments outlawed it.

Poss also found out that obtaining a patent for a fishing lure takes a lot of work and money. He filed for a patent in 2010. More than two years into the process, Poss found out that similar patent had been filed in 2009. After years of frustration, he walked away.

“There’s not an original Alabama Rig out there today,” Poss said. “I don’t make them. I don’t sell them. The financial reward was definitely not there. Anybody comes up with a good idea, call me, and I’ll give you all the free advice you need.”

These days, Poss does some fishing but not to the extent he once did. He’ll chase the smallmouth some and the crappie in the spring. He said the river has changed so much in the last 30 years that he has to adapt every time he launches his boat. When we hit the water recently, the river was low.

“Our dams, if we do not have a lot of rain, we don’t have much current anymore,” he said. “We’ve been 45 days without any rain, so we have very little flow. The water is crystal clear. Even though we have a lot of fish, they can get really tough to catch, even with live bait. We don’t have the number of fish we had when I started fishing Pickwick, and maybe fishing with live bait has something to do with that.

“I know 40 years ago I was the only person on the lake with a throw net. Now you can buy a net at a gas station.”

We were on the lake with less than ideal conditions with an east wind and very little current, but Poss managed to find several fish that cooperated. He started gathering bait at the boat ramp. The first few casts yielded numerous threadfin shad that were about 2 inches long that he put in a large tank in the middle of the boat with a double handful of rock salt.

Poss prefers to use gizzard shad, but those baitfish species have been hard to find the past three years, which means he depends on threadfins.

“The colder the water, the better the threadfins live,” he said. “If the water temp is in the upper 60s, the gizzard shad live good.”

With the conditions we were facing with a water temperature of 69 degrees, Poss guided the boat into shallow water out of the main river flow near the Wilson Dam to try his technique to anchor the boat and drift the live bait downstream, either free-line or with a split shot.

“If I can, I just free-line the bait to give it more of a natural look,” he said. “If you use lead, you end up getting hung up pretty bad. I like to anchor most of the time. If you get anchored near a school of fish, you’re going to catch them quick. If you drift, you end up drifting over the school, and you may get one. Then you’re going to have to drift over them again.

“I’ve got some main lake spots that hold spotted bass and largemouths. For smallmouths, you’ve got Seven-Mile Island to the dam, and that’s about it most of the time. You can go to the other end of Pickwick and catch smallmouths, but they never had them like the upper end. Smallmouth really love the current.”

After catching a variety of species, including freshwater drum (gaspergou for our Louisiana friends), channel catfish and small bass, Poss decided we needed to change locations and bait. He went to a slough off the river and caught larger threadfin shad and then headed to a deeper spot with current to fish what he called a Carolina rig with live bait.

The fish were definitely more plentiful in the current, and we ended up boating a five-pound largemouth and several smallmouths, the largest at three pounds.

“When the water temperature gets between 50 and 60 degrees, that’s when you catch the prettiest, healthiest fish,” Poss said. “This river has been fished hard with live bait for the past 30 years. It’s not just this lake, it’s everywhere. You’ve got more fishermen with better technology. There’s fish here, but you’ve got to work harder to catch them.”

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