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Lake Oconee
Lake Oconee is an excellent fishing lake located in central Georgia on the Oconee River near Greensboro, the real Buckhead and Eatonton. Oconee is known for very good bass fishing, great crappie fishing for huge slabs, and very good fishing for linesides and catfish. The lake was created in 1979 when Georgia Power completed the construction of the Wallace Dam on the Oconee River. Lake Oconee runs through Georgia's Morgan, Greene, and Putnam counties and is separated from its sister lake, Sinclair, by Wallace Dam. Lake Oconee is home to a number of golf communities, including Reynolds Plantation, Cuscawilla, and Harbor Club.
Lake Oconee Resources
The Flint River Bass Club fished Oconee this past Sunday for our May tournament. The lower lake was clear where I fished from Long Shoals to the dam. Eight fishermen weighed in 19 bass weighing about 32 pounds. There was one five-bass limit, and the only fisherman who didn’t have a keeper had to leave early. I won with five at 8.56 pounds. I started at daylight running seawalls looking for a shad spawn but never found one. However, when I cast a swim jig to grass patches between rip-rap, I had four blow-ups, missing all four. Nothing hit my spinnerbait, topwater or buzzbait. That made me slow down with a weightless Trick Worm, and I caught my best three keepers in grass between 7:30 and 8:00. I fished many grassbeds without another bite. Docks produced some short bass on a wacky-rigged Senko but nothing to keep. Although I could…
Read MoreLake Oconee Articles
Jonathan Clifton, of Siloam, holds the current channel catfish record for Lake Oconee with a 34-lb., 8-oz.. fish he caught on May 31, 1998.
This Oconee slab wasn’t weighed until more than 24 hours after it was caught, but it still tipped the scale at 3-lbs., 12-ozs. Edward Rhodes, of Suwanee, caught the lake-record crappie Feb. 10, 1997 while trolling a 2-inch spit-tail grub tipped with a minnow.
The lake record for striped bass at Oconee was set May 10, 1996 when an Eatonton angler boated a 29-lb., 15-oz. striper. Fred Worthy was downlining a live shad 15 feet deep while fishing the buoy line at the dam when the big lineside hit. The striper hit the first shad Fred put in the…
The air had a brisk bite as I idled through the dense early morning fog toward the nearby creek channel. The fish had been holding in this area for about three weeks, moving only slightly as the water slowly cooled. The sound of screaming gulls, mufHed only by the sound of cars passing over the…
A lake record that some anglers thought would never be broken has been rewritten. The new mark for striped bass at Lake Oconee is now set at 29-lbs., 10oz., which exceeds the previous record by half a pound. Rickey Howington, of Jefferson, is the new record-holder. Rickey had a week off from work, and he…
Lake Oconee Record Fish
| Largemouth Bass | 12-lbs., 14-ozs. | Bill Brantley | 05/14/12 |
| Hybrid Bass | 14-lbs., 4-ozs. | Jan Allen Ward | 04/03/91 |
| Striped Bass | 29-lbs., 14.9-ozs. | Fred Worthy | 05/10/96 |
| Black Crappie | 3-lbs., 12-ozs. | Edward Rhodes | 02/10/97 |
| Channel Catfish | 34-lbs., 8-ozs. | Jonathan Clifton | 05/31/98 |
| Blue Catfish | 70-lbs., 2-ozs. | Koob Moua | 03/22/23 |
| Flathead Catfish | 62-lbs., 10.4-ozs. | Rob Allgood | 03/11/23 |
| White Bass | 3-lbs., 6-ozs. | Tony Couch | 04/02/93 |
| Longnose Gar | 20-lbs., 13-ozs. | Dustin Turk | 10/05/19 |
| Chain Pickerel | 1-lb., 2-ozs. | Terry Brice | 03/05/17 |
| Spotted Bass | 5-lbs., 3.2-ozs. | Austin Skinner | 03/19/22 |
| Shellcracker | 1-lb., 14.56-ozs. | Randy Smith | 04/23/22 |
| Yellow Perch | 11-ozs. | John Moore | 02/16/23 |