February 23, 2018
By Wes Taylor
“…I’ve lived on the Tug my whole life, I’m 43 and I love this old river.
My grandfather Ray Taylor will be 86 this February and he has lived on the Tug his whole life, too. I love the stories about him growing up here and fishing the Tug but a lot has changed since he was a boy.
He told us about the white bass and sauger runs every spring and the drums under boats but now we don’t have the runs or drum and would love to have that back, but I think the reason for us not having the runs is the fish can’t make it up and over the old locks down Louisa.
You can go there in the spring and catch them but I’ve fished both forks of the Big Sandy and have only caught one white bass above the locks and that was years ago and it was when we did a float down that way.
Our river is a lot cleaner now than it’s been in years, and more people are taking interest in the river and I think it would be great if we could get the fish runs back up the river again I mean two years ago I caught a green eel l had to call the Ky fish department to find out what I had caught. The guy told me that it was the first time he had heard of one being caught on the Tug.
That’s when he said it must have got over the locks when the river was in a rise so I thought about it unless the river is up really big at the time the runs happen there’s no way for the fish to get on up the river so I was wondering if there’s other guys out there that would love to fish these runs like my grandfather did and if there’s a way to start talking to whoever is over things like this and see if there’s any way to remove the old locks or have a fish byways put in so we could have the runs of fish back up both rivers of the Big Sandy.
I hope that I’m not the only guy who would like to fish for this fish and maybe there’s someone that reads this will know who we can talk to about restore this fish runs.”
