Reelfoot Lake is about as perfect a place in West Tennessee as any sportsman can find. It's just great. And, it's packed with some cool history to boot! So, you can catch fish, kill ducks, learn about earthquakes, and hear an old indian legend all in one place! I'll refrain from the details of all that and let you find out for yourself, but here's a little summary of my time there last weekend.
Mom came in town Thursday night and spent the night with us at the house in preparation for our big trip north the following day. After work Friday, I came home and packed, loaded mom, the beagle, and the wife in the truck, and we started driving. It wasn't a bad drive at all - most of it was highway and it went by rather quickly. There are lots of pretty farms along the way. We got there around 6 or 6:30 and found the hotel, or Reelfoot Lake Inn, as it were. As you would suspect, it's right across the street from Reelfoot Lake. What a surprise eh?
The hotel wasn't too bad. Most (or all) of the places in the area aren't meant to be fancy bancy places like vacationers heading to the beaches crave. That's a good thing in my mind. This place is just a great little spot on the lake with five or six buildings around a pool. The rooms are nice, but nothing spectacular. There are only a handful of channels on TV, and there's really nothing to do after dark - except maybe eat dinner, and that depends on what time of year it is. Speaking of dinner, we ate at a place called Boyette's and dined on some wonderful catfish during a summer squall that looked like a 10-minute hurricane.
Perfect.
Saturday morning I woke up at about 5 or 5:30, took the beagle for a walk and morning pee (the beagle, not me), and loaded up my fishing gear in the back of the truck. The weather was much cooler from the previous night's rain. The Keystone recreational area is just a few minutes drive from Reelfoot Lake Inn. There's a hiking trail, a boat ramp, and a wooden dock jutting out into the lake there. Saturday morning it was beaming through the fog coming off the lake amidst the jumping minnows. Again, perfect. I made sure I was tied good to a lure, and started casting. I had a couple of hours before I had to be back at the inn to wake up wifey, take a shower, and get over to the State Park for a three hour pontoon boat cruise with a park ranger. I didn't have much luck fishing, but damn I had a lot of fun just being there. The pontoon cruise was awesome too.
I learned the lake was NOT created by the Mississippi river flowing north - that's a myth. It flowed sideways. Apparently the area Reelfoot covers today is a big sink hole that sank in 1811-1812 during a series of about 2000 earthquakes. Three of those were really big, and would have registered on today's Richter Scale somewhere around the low 8s. At any rate, since the sink hole sank, and the land under the river rose, water flowed sideways to low ground, and Reelfoot as we know it today was formed at a length of 14 miles long and at its widest point 5 miles wide. It's a big lake made up of four major basins. The kicker is that the average depth is just over five feet deep. Just imagine a lake that big, but only a few feet deep, with the deepest part being only 18 feet deep, filled with cypress trees and stumps. Two words...fish heaven. Speaking of cypress trees, the little things coming up out of the lake we know have to be at least four hundred years old. They're not even that big! It's amazing. Of note, a warning to boaters: people don't take fancy bancy fiber glass-bottomed boats (just like the hotel rooms) because of said stumps. The ones that do can be spotted by yes, even other tourists, as being jackassed tourists. In short, the whole place has amazing little nuances about it, and if you love the outdoors - ducks, fish, birds, hikes, whatever - Reelfoot is a place you'll enjoy.
Saturday afternoon the wife and mom took naps and relaxed at the Inn. I got back to Keystone and caught a little bass before coming back in. At about six I headed back and later that night we ate dinner at a place called Lakeview. The catfish was great. Do I have to say it was a perfect day again?
If Saturday was perfect Sunday was better except for the fact we had to leave that afternoon. Nonetheless, I made a full day of it before noon. The wife and I both woke up early Sunday, and I repeated the walk and pee routine from Saturday. This time it was even better. It was really, really foggy, and I was out early enough to see the sun rise up out of the general direction of the lake. After the walk we headed straight over to a nearby Cypress Point Resort, which is actually on the lake, and we rented a Jon Boat with an 18 hp motor on the back of it. We jumped in and headed up the shoreline to catch some fish and take great pictures. I fished. The wife took pictures, mostly. I have to say though, when she was fishing she got the hang of it very quickly. I had to take the rod and reel away from her before she caught more than I had - which wouldn't have been very many at all. Ok, one. So what. So that was how we spent the morning, casting, reeling, snapping pictures. All on a backdrop of cypress trees, sunrise, and fog over Reelfoot. Yep, put that one on the 'things I can check off the list" list. And of course, it was perfect. I ended up catching a Drum early on in the morning and later on I caught a catfish. Sweet. The catfish barked at me. They look like cats, but they bark like dogs. What a funny twist of irony the evolution of a fish has played on Garfield and Otis.
We headed back to Cypress Point at around eleven because we needed to get on the road to head back home. The weekend was, as they always are, too short indeed, but we'd had a good one. Mom has wanted to see Reelfoot for years, I didn't know what I was missing, and A took some of the best pics she's ever taken. We learned a lot about the area, got to relax a little, and just had a plane ol' good time.
Now there's a lot more to this place than even this drawn out post has mentioned. I haven't even brought up the two families of Ospreys we saw - with their elaborate scheme to woo away would-be predators - or us. I made no reference to Donaldson's Ditch, what the locals call 'Cottonmouth Alley,' a strikingly appropriate label. I'll leave that one to your imagination. Nor did I elaborate upon the Bald Eagles, Great Blue Herons, Catfish Hunter, Lotus blooms, "Beer, Bait, & Tackle One-Stop Shop" gas stations (yes, plural), eight mile pizza delivery radius, Barn Owls, the snakes in the visitor's center, or even Tecumseh's eerily delivered after-death promise of retribution.
By the time Monday morning rolled around and I was in the office, I'd caught 12 Largemouth Bass, 4 Crappie, 6 Catfish, and a damned ol' Gar. Hell, I had so many I threw them all back, and after the first Catfish the camera stopped working.
Perfect.
