We’ve had an unusually cool late summer and experienced a couple of weeks of early fall temperatures here in East Tennessee and the Smoky Mountains. In fact, with water temperatures in the high 50’s here in Townsend you know it’s much cooler up in the park so we brought our waders out of summer retirement […]
A New Book On the Way! Trout Flies for the Great Smoky Mountains and Surrounding Waters
We’ve been working on a new book and it will be out soon! It’s Trout Flies for the Great Smoky Mountains and Surrounding Waters – Advice From the Guides. This book showcases approximately 50 flies used around the Smoky Mountain region, tells you how to fish them, the best times to use them, and has […]
Late Summer Fishing Report from the Smokies and East Tennessee
August is here and it somehow doesn’t feel quite like late summer. The kids started school this week, we’ve seen relatively mild temperatures with a few mornings registering 59 degrees on the porch, and it seems like TVA has really bumped the flows on the big rivers. It’s feeling more like fall than summer, but […]
Wet Summer Keeps The Fishing Good In The Smokies
Compared to last year we’re in the middle of a pretty wet summer, but as I look at the stats we’re really on target for rain. Aside from one big system back in the spring our rainfall has been where it belongs. And that’s a good thing for fishing in the Smokies. Water levels have […]
DrakeCast Focuses on Smoky Mountain Wildfires
Our good friends over at the Drake have started a podcast and the second installment was done here in East Tennessee. Charity and I showed Elliot Adler around last February and did an interview on the stream. He also interviewed biologists and employees inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park as well as the great folks […]
Mid Summer Fly Fishing Looking Good Across East Tennessee and the Smokies
We’re officially into summer now and happy to report fishing is looking good almost everywhere you look. A wet spring season made fishing pretty tricky, especially on our tailwater rivers which ran high for a pretty long time. In fact, we lost more float days due to high water this season than we’ve ever lost […]
Spring Weather Roller Coaster in the Smokies and East Tennessee
You always know it’s spring in East Tennessee because of the stomach churning roller coaster ride you’ll see with the weather. I say “stomach churning” because when you guide for a living you’re always living in fear of anything that wrecks a day or even worse, shuffles the calendar. Over the years we’ve gotten to […]
The Season Is Upon Us
It’s the middle of March and our guide season has started rolling even as hatches in the Smokies started at least a couple of weeks ago. We’ve been seeing Early Brown Stoneflies for some time and the Blue Quills and Quill Gordons have been hatching in good numbers. In spite of what’s been an exceptionally […]
Spring Hatches Should Start Soon
We’ve experienced an incredibly mild winter and the extended forecast shows nothing but above average temperatures over the next few weeks. This is important as we usually start watching for our spring hatches to get rolling in early March, about the time when the weather starts to warm up. Since the warm weather will be […]
Getting Back to Normal
It was a strange autumn and it’s been a strange winter as well. Water levels were at historic lows in the Smokies and through the month of November we experienced a string of wildfires. The one most people know about turned out to be one of the largest in the history of Tennessee and devastated […]