Yesterday Charity and I hitched up the drift boat and headed over to the Holston River. Our original intent was to focus our attention on smallmouth bass, but we were in a section of the river that has good trout populations in addition to smallies.
We put the boat in the river and the water was around 60 degrees; excellent for a hot day this far down the river. Our plans of fishing poppers were put on hold when we saw pod after pod of rising trout. We finally rigged up a four weight, tied on a dry fly, and started casting to them.
The fish were obviously midging, but we decided to see if they remembered what a caddis was. Charity captured this superb sequence with the camera.
Yeah…Â They ate the caddis emerger.
We finally got around to getting the bass rod out. We cast poppers for the duration of the afternoon. Honestly, the bass fishing was a tad slow. We would have done better to have stuck with the trout, but we still caught about 8 over the afternoon. It wouldn’t have hurt if we were further down the river where the bass are more prolific and the water warmer, but we couldn’t complain. Heck, we even caught a trout on the popper! Not a bad way to spend a summer day.
Check back over the next few days for more. We got some pretty good video from the day that we’ll post, plus I’m planning another trek into a remote backcountry stream for brook trout.
