First, which Cumberland this is
The trout tailwater everyone means when they say the Cumberland is below Wolf Creek Dam in Kentucky, 75 miles of cold water that ends at the state line. The Tennessee river on this page is a different animal. From the state line down it is a chain of Corps of Engineers navigation pools, Cordell Hull, Old Hickory, Cheatham and Barkley, and the water that matters to a Nashville angler is the Cheatham pool: 7,450 acres of riverine reservoir from Old Hickory Dam through downtown to Cheatham Dam below Ashland City, with the Stones River up to J. Percy Priest Dam counted as part of it. TWRA manages it as a reservoir, and the reservoir rules follow the river all the way up to the dam.
What lives in it is what a big warm river holds: stripers that the striper guides say grow larger here than anywhere else in the state, sauger and walleye that TWRA stocks and that stack below Old Hickory in winter, spotted and smallmouth bass on the channel rock, white bass in the Stones in spring, blue and flathead catfish, and 2,000 rainbow trout at a time dropped below Percy Priest Dam in December, January and February for a city trout fishery that nobody expects to survive July.
A gauge that runs backwards
USGS 03431500, Cumberland River at Nashville, sits in the middle of the Cheatham pool where the river is backed up by the dam below, and it does something a river gauge is not supposed to do: it reads negative. On September 17, 2026 it ranged from minus 3,600 cfs to plus 17,900 in a single day, and most days that month swung from a few thousand below zero to 11,000 or 12,000 above. The positive numbers are Old Hickory generating upstream; the negatives line up with the hours Old Hickory shuts down while Cheatham keeps pulling water below, which reads as the pool sloshing back, with lockages and wind added on a river that is barely a river at that point. The Corps' preschedule page shows the cause, with Old Hickory running 25 to 50 megawatts most of the day and Cheatham 12 to 24.
So do not treat the reading as a wading number; there is no wading here. Treat it as a current signal. The long-term monthly means at Nashville run from about 10,500 cfs in October to 41,000 in March, and TWRA's sauger advice gives a threshold that matters: fish the generator side of Old Hickory Dam until the discharge passes 30,000 cfs, then move to the lock-wall eddy. That is the 10,000 to 30,000 band on this page, the range where the current below the dam is fishable from a boat or the bank.
Old Hickory Dam to the Harpeth: where the fish stack
TWRA's Cheatham page is specific about the geography. Sauger and walleye concentrate below Old Hickory Dam from November through March, with the best catches December through March as rising flow and temperature pull spawners up against the dam, and they drop back downstream once the water nears 60 degrees. Boats work the eddies between the generator wall and the spill gates and along the lock wall, fishing straight down the wall with a half-ounce to one-ounce jig tipped with a minnow or a 4-inch chartreuse grub and a stinger hook, bounced within a couple of feet of the bottom; bank anglers cast live shad into the boils on the generator side or into the lock-wall eddy. Public ramps at Old Hickory Dam, Peeler Park and Heartland Recreation Area cover that stretch, and the creek mouths below the dam hold bait as the embayments cool.
Spotted and smallmouth bass live in the channel, and TWRA names the stretch from Old Hickory Dam to the mouth of the Harpeth as the productive one: live threadfin or gizzard shad or a golden shiner under a float drifted over the big rock on either side of the channel, live crayfish on a light Carolina rig on the bottom, or jigs worked along the channel overbanks. Bank fishing is available on the downstream sides of both Old Hickory and Percy Priest dams, and at the 16 free public access sites on the pool.
Late April stripers, December sauger, and the shad in between
The calendar on this pool is a run calendar. Stripers push into the Old Hickory tailwater from late April to early June trying to spawn, and summer generation pulls them back to the oxygenated water below the dam, where live skipjack is the trophy bait and bucktails, jerkbaits and shad swimbaits take the rest. The Cumberland system produced the state record striper, 65 pounds 6 ounces at Cordell Hull in 2000, and Best Fishing in America says no water in Tennessee is more likely to give up a 40-pound fish. White bass spawn in the Stones from Percy Priest Dam down to the Cumberland channel and up to Old Hickory in April and May. Sauger own December to March. Catfish are year-round, with the channel at the mouths of Johnson Creek, Sycamore Creek and the Harpeth holding the big blues and flatheads.
For a fly angler that means one thing most of the year: baitfish. Shad and skipjack patterns on sinking lines in the tailwater current, a Clouser or crayfish on the channel rock for smallmouth in summer, and in winter a heavy jig fly bounced for sauger the way the spin anglers do it.
Cheatham Reservoir rules from the state line down to the dam
TWRA's Cheatham Reservoir regulations apply to the whole pool including the Stones River up to Percy Priest Dam, and they are stricter than the statewide table on bass. Black bass are five a day in combination, with a 14-inch minimum on largemouth, an 18-inch minimum on smallmouth and no length limit on spotted bass. Striped bass and hybrids are two a day in combination at a 15-inch minimum. Sauger are 10 a day at 15 inches, walleye five at 16, white bass 15 with no length limit, crappie 30 at 10 inches, and only one catfish over 34 inches may be kept. Paddlefish season runs April 24 through May 31 at two a day with no culling. Rock bass and redear are 20 each.
The trout below Percy Priest are seven a day with no minimum and require the type 022 trout license on top of the fishing license, and TWRA asks that you keep them. Reservoir full pool, 385 feet, is the legal boundary between the reservoir rules and the tributary stream rules, so a smallmouth caught up a creek above that elevation is under the statewide five-with-no-minimum rule instead.