Every day that’s gone by hasn’t been quite so cold in the morning and a bit warmer in the afternoon. Yesterday it was pretty comfortable on the stream with just a light jacket. Today we’ve gotten out of bed with flat out warm temperatures but the wind doesn’t bode well for what’s to come.
Any time it’s this warm in the winter and the wind picks up pretty heavy you can be sure some heavy rain and cold weather are only hours away, but let’s focus on the positive stuff for the moment.
We managed to break out of the holiday count down for a few hours and head up to Tremont. The fishing was OK, not spectacular, but certainly worth the time. We focused our efforts entirely on nymphs. Charity used an indicator while I maintained a superiority complex and fished a pair of nymphs without an indicator. Overall we ended up with about the same results, both catching and missing a fair number of fish.
One of the curious things was that we both did much better in the deepest water available. The deeper the nymphs the better. In fact, a split shot made the difference in a couple of good looking runs that didn’t produce. After tacking on a little extra weight, BINGO!
That’s not strange, but the fact that Charity had four fish over the course of the afternoon eat her indicator was a little odd. One of those mysteries of fly fishing that we can all argue about but no one really has the answer no matter what they think
We saw a few black caddis on the boulders and the first Little Winter Stoneflies of the year. These guys are really small, around #20 and hatch even in the snow well into March.
Little Winter Stonefly
The tailwater situation remains pretty grim in our area code with everything running pretty high. The Clinch is out of the question, the South Holston has some windows of fishable flows, and the Watauga is the best tailwater bet when it comes to fishy flows.
We’ll see just how much rain we receive over the weekend and how that affects the tailwater outlook. We’ve had a few winters with limited tailwater fishing because of high flows and aren’t looking forward to the prospect of one more.
We’ll keep you posted…