March has given us a real taste of winter after an exceptionally mild January and February. We started seeing some mayfly hatches last month and really expected an acceleration into March. However, we saw a resurgence of winter weather and our view has featured white capped mountains almost daily.
A regular scene in the Smokies lately
The fishing has been pretty good, but has steadily degraded as the temperatures have fallen. We’ve had several mornings in the low 20’s or high teens and afternoon highs in the low 40’s. This has put a real chill on the fishing although afternoons have been workable.
Ian gets in some personal fishing time on a mild afternoon
Fishing in the mornings has been relatively slow but not hopeless. That said, fishing has really picked up during the afternoon hours. In fact it has gotten such that dry fly fishing often outperforms nymphing in the afternoons. The window has been anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours, but the fish have been clocking in to work in spite of the cold.
A really nice wild rainbow trout caught on a dry fly last week
The extended forecast shows us returning to warm, spring weather and we’re ready for it! We’re not really fans of the hottest days of summer, but pretty spring days are up there among our favorites.
So far we’ve used a narrow but common variety of nymphs and dry flies. #14-16 Pheasant Tail, #12 -16 Pat’s Nymph, or #16 Zelon Nymph have been our choices. No need to be constrained to these flies though. Most common patterns in those sizes should work fine. In the afternoons we’ve fished #12 – 14 Haystacks and Parachute Adams. There are some good hatches of Blue Wing Olives or Blue Quills depending on the day and location so we’ve used some #16-18 Parachute Blue Wing Olives as well.
On a side note, we’ve seen more and more mergansers on local streams every late winter and spring. These are waterfowl we’ve seen commonly in the Rocky Mountains, but not in the Smokies until about three or four years ago. We wondered if it was an isolated appearance by a few birds, but we’ve seen them on a variety of streams in the Smokies and beyond Townsend.
This pair of mergansers was along Tremont Road, but we’ve seen them on all forks of Little River as well as Abrams Creek. We’ve also seen them in the Cherokee National Forest.