Southern Middle TN Reservoir Crappie Information

If you are looking for a day where catching a limit of crappie is more important than potentially catching a handful of slabs, then Woods Reservoir might be your destination of choice this coming spring in southern Middle Tennessee.

However, if you are in search of big crappie—with the hopes of maybe bringing home the daily limit of 15 fish—then Tims Ford or Normandy reservoirs offer excellent alternatives near the cities of Winchester and Tullahoma.

“I don’t expect we will have an exceptional crappie year on any of the lakes, but we should have days where good fishing takes place,” said John Riddle, a reservoir biologist for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

“When Woods Reservoir has a good year, it is one of he hottest crappie lakes in the state. I don’t expect it to have a topnotch year, but a fair year for Woods creates better crappie fishing than a lot of lakes having good years,” noted Riddle.

The daily creel limit on Woods, Normandy, and Tims Ford is 15, while the minimum size limit is 10 inches.

“That size limit is easily reached and passed by many of the crappie in Tims Ford and Normandy,” said the biologist. “While those lakes don’t have Woods’ quantity of fish, they have excellent quality.”

Natural reproduction helps feed the yearly crappie population in Woods Reservoir, while supplemental stockings from TWRA hatcheries benefit the numbers of fish in Normandy and Tims Ford.

“Woods is a shallow reservoir with lots of mud flats and very little fluctuation in water level, which is good for crappie,” explained Riddle. “The other two lakes are deeper, don’t have natural habitat as good as Woods, and have more frequent fluctuations in water level.
“While they don’t tend to have as many crappie as Woods, they do tend on average to have larger crappie,” explained the biologist.

Normandy, which is 3,048 acres in size, is stocked most years with fingerling sized black-nosed crappie at approximately 5 fish per acre, or between 40,000 and 50,000 fish each year. Tims Ford, a much larger lake at 10,600 acres, usually gets 100,000 plus crappie, also black-nose.

“Black-nosed crappie are in the black crappie family, but have a black stripe across their head. They are a fun fish to catch, but important to us is we can raise a lot more of them in our hatchery ponds than white crappie,” said Riddle.

Whether anglers choose Woods Reservoir (3,660 acres in size), Tims, or Normandy for their spring fishing, they should head to the lakes knowing that they have a good chance of bringing home a mess of fish. And, if one lake doesn’t produce for them, the good news is at two other alternatives are only a short drive away.