Spring is here and the guide season has arrived with it. I did my first full day trip of 2012 and it was a good one. Fish were rising quite well and the few spots where we couldn’t rise a fish we often drew a strike on a nymph. We even managed to get a […]
The Smokies Are Fishing Great, The Tailwaters Not So Much
The fly fishing in the Smokies continues to be great! And the fishing on our local tailwaters… Did we mention that the fishing in the Smokies is great?!? We had some high water over the weekend, but that has subsided and there are clear flows in all of the mountain streams. All of the charts […]
Quick Pics: Trout Under Water
We’ve gotten some new equipment that allows us to get some really nice underwater images. Here’s a brown trout and rainbow trout, both from Little River in the Smokies. The fish are rising quite well, even if the number of bugs seems to be diminishing. The Quill Gordon hatch usually gets started in a week […]
Return to the Clinch River
This past weekend I couldn’t take it any longer and took the drift boat over to the Clinch River. Flows have been high for months now and while I wouldn’t do a guided trip under these conditions, I just had to get out and row the boat on a pretty day. I can’t say I’m […]
Hatches Continue in the Smokies; Meanwhile Winter Returns
Quill Gordon: The surest sign of spring on the streams in the Smokies Spring really has arrived early, at least from a fly fisher’s view. Here in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee we’ve already experienced about a week of afternoon hatches with rising fish. This doesn’t usually happen until early March or the last […]
Quick Pic: Smoky Mountain Brown Trout on the Dry Fly
I’m confident in saying the hatches have started. We’ve seen several days of consistent hatches and once they start don’t really stop. This brown came to a #12 Haystack dry fly fished on a 13′ Ayu Tenkara rod.
Spring in February
It’s been an extremely mild winter, even for the Southeast. Here in the Smokies we tend to get a more distinct winter season than neighboring areas in the Tennessee Valley. For instance, the last two winters were pretty severe and we had plenty of snow. In fact, almost six feet of snow accumulated on Mount […]
Big Brown Trout in the Smokies: You Win Some, You Lose More
It’s that time of year here in the Smokies when we have our best shots at hooking up with the really big fish. We’re not talking about 12″ – 14″ fish that put a lump in your throat when they eat your dry fly in May. We’re talking about fish that would be considered big […]
Spawning Brown Trout
It’s that time of year when we can expect to see brown trout spawing on shallow gravel bars anywhere from the Smoky Mountains to the South Holston and Watauga tailwaters. No other time of year allows a better time to see big fish. They don’t generally eat while they’re spawning and most anglers consider it […]
We Still Know How to Fly Fish
We’re on the tail end of another busy guide season and starting to find some time to go fishing for ourselves. After weeks of being out on the water guiding and instructing fly fishing sometimes you start to wonder if you’d even remember how to get a good drift. Yesterday Charity and I were able […]