Fishing Tenkiller Lake in Oklahoma

[Okanagan]

Fished several times last week with a cousin who lives by Tenkiller Lake in Eastern OK.  Torrential rains and tornadoes in the general area kept us off the lake sometimes.  We caught ten species of fish, had a good time visiting and forgot to take a camera our best day.

My best large mouth went just under 18”, best small mouth went 16 ½”, best sand bass a smidge under 2 lbs.  We never found crappie and only caught one.  The lake rose every day and got 6’ above normal out into the trees.  We caught more small mouth than anything else, first time that's ever happened to him my cousin said.  We got into a school of sand bass chasing bait on the surface once, fun and ferocious fighters, two fish on at once etc.  Several channel cats on lures.

Sand bass below.  First time I'd ever seen one. 



Perch below had striking markings with black and white lines on the edge of fins, which didn't show up strongly in the photo.  Technically not a bluegill said my cousin, but one of the sunfish perch family, a green something. 



I liked the color of the smallmouth below.  A few were almost black.  I did my best to OD on southern fried fish rolled in corn meal.

[nastygunz]

Those Sandbass are pretty neat looking critters never seen one before.

[riverboss]

You guys are really catching some nice fish.

[FinsnFur]

Very nice! Your sand bass look exactly like our Stripers. I wonder if the same species just called different names due to our locations.

[Okanagan]

Very nice! Your sand bass look exactly like our Stripers. I wonder if the same species just called different names due to our locations.

That would be my guess.  Like you, I'd have called this fish a striped bass if they hadn't told me different.

Like fishermen all over, some kinds of fish had several names, apparently called different things in nearby regions.   They had a kind of bass that they called Kentucky which was different from large or smallmouth.  They also had line side bass, black bass, spotted bass (all of those may be largemouth?) tiger bass and stripers.  What they call stripers are apparently a hybrid of salt water stripers that have a seasonal run up the local rivers.  They called smallmouth bass brownies.

Quite a few snakes in the water and lying on rocks.  We saw one cottonmouth, very poisonous, and lots of water moccasins.  A couple of the water snakes swam to the boat to try to get in with us.  Again, I'm going by local names. 

Added:  in case a game warden is checking here, we released all fish within the slot limit parameters, though we measured some of them before releasing.   Plus we released more fish than we kept anyway. 

[Hawks Feather]

A couple of the water snakes swam to the boat to try to get in with us.  Again, I'm going by local names. 

That would be Damn Snake!  Looks like you had a good time.

Jerry

[FinsnFur]

Jerry lol!

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[Dave]

nice write up and pics.
any pics of those Damn snakes 

[Hawks Feather]

This was Kelley's Island on Lake Erie on Sunday.  Probably pretty close.