Twin brothers and Sale Creek anglers Dylan Nutt (left) and Carter Nutt after winning at Center Hill Lake.
By DAVE LINK
Twin brothers Dylan and Carter Nutt are the hottest team on the Tennessee BASS Nation High School Fishing circuit.
The seniors at Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School in Nashville are atop the points standings in three of the four regions they’ve fished in the fall – North/Central, Central, and Southeast regions.
Although they live in Nashville, they’re fishing for the Sale Creek Bass Team.
“Sale Creek is a club, and our high school doesn’t have a fishing team,” Dylan Nutt said.
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They’ve logged many miles on highways, lakes, and rivers since they started fishing high school tournaments during their freshman years.
Their father Michael serves as boat captain, as was the case in mid-June when Dylan and Carter clinched the Tennessee BASS Nation State Championship at Lake Chickamauga.
They fished for Nashville’s Backwoods Bassin’ club team during the 2020-21 high school season and have switched to Sale Creek this year.
No matter what team they’re on, the Nutt brothers are tough to beat on the water.
“It’s actually been a really good year for us so far,” Dylan said. “Out of the seven tournaments we’ve fished, we’ve got four top-five and two top-10.”
They’ve posted two wins and a second-place finish in recent tournaments.
Carter and Dylan won the Tennessee BASS Nation’s North/Central region event Nov. 27 at Center Hill Lake and followed that with a second-place finish in the Central region event Dec. 5 at Normandy Lake.
And last Saturday (Dec. 18), they won again at Watts Bar Lake in the Southeast region’s third stop.
They’ve fished together since they were kids, using crickets on a family pond with their grandfather.
And they now enjoy fishing as a team.
“It’s really nice fishing with someone who I can get along with,” Carter said. “We challenge each other’s thoughts on what we need to be doing, and we can get along, so it helps us. We’re a good team.”
SLOW START AT CENTER HILL
It was a cold day and tough conditions Nov. 27 when the Nutt twins took off at Center Hill Lake with temperatures around 23 degrees.
“We had a hard time fishing,” Dylan said, “when it was that cold because the guides on our rods would freeze up, and three of our reels locked up because they were frozen.”
Not only was it cold; they weren’t catching any bass.
“We were mainly trying to target fish that were suspended chasing bait fish out there in 30 or 40 feet (of water),” Carter said. “We ran with that, once it warmed up and we could actually fish, and we did that for about 4 hours and couldn’t get anything going with that.”
They didn’t catch a fish until about noon but knew of a spot where they could get bites, so they moved there.
Bingo.
CATCHING THE LIMIT
They ended up catching all but one of their five keepers in that one spot.
Their bag consisted of three largemouth, a spotted bass and a smallmouth.
“We found a school of them in about 35 feet of water and just started catching them,” Dylan said. “One of our fish came from somewhere else, but all the others were from that one spot.”
They left the spot a couple of times – searching for bigger bass – only to return to the same spot, where they caught their biggest of the day, a 3.51-pound smallmouth.
Dylan caught the big bass on a three-quarter ounce Scottsboro Tackle Company Hellcat jig.
“Whenever I hooked into it,” Dylan said, “I kind of could tell it was smallmouth because it came straight up, and typically a largemouth kind of stays down, but it came straight up and it started fighting once it got to the boat. I knew it was a pretty good one, but it was pretty skinny. It should have weighed a lot more than it did, but it needed to eat a little bit more.”
Carter said it measured 21 inches “but it was paper thin.”
Still, it was just big enough to win the event.
The Nutt brothers claimed first place with five bass weighing a combined 13.7 pounds.
Warren County’s Gage Pursley and Braxton Campbell were second (five bass, 11.98 pounds) and Mt. Juliet’s Easton Drennon and Chase McConnell were third (five bass, 11.31 pounds).
“Going into the weigh-in, we were one of the first (boats), and I expected we’d get knocked out of the lead pretty soon, and it never ended up happening,” Carter said. “It was a surprise, like it was another tournament on Center Hill two years ago. It was a surprise to win that one too.”
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