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 […]
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 […]
Dogwood Winter Provides Varied Fishing
Early April in East Tennessee brings the blooming of dogwood trees, an iconic Southern Appalachian spring scene. It also tends to bring a cold snap regionally known as Dogwood Winter and this year has been about as wild as we can remember after the dogwoods bloomed, although we can remember one Easter weekend a few […]
All Options Are On The Table
It’s been incredibly warm here in the Smoky Mountains and East Tennessee over the last week. Hiking up a trail to fly fish a backcountry stream has been a sweaty affair with temperatures 20 degrees or more above normal, but the fishing has been pretty good. Nymphs are working, but we’re not sure who’s fishing […]
Waiting on Spring
It’s pretty safe to say that we’ve been at our annual fishing low point here in East Tennessee and the Smoky Mountains. Our tailwaters have been running pretty high from the excessive rains at Christmas and our streams have been running pretty cold for the last two weeks. We didn’t near so much snow as […]
Fly Fishing The Smokies and East Tennessee in 2016
So far we’ve had an unusual winter season here in East Tennessee. Right around Christmas we saw weather that would have been considered as unusually warm for Easter, let alone the shortest days of the year. Along with that warm weather we saw exceptionally heavy rains. Streams in the Smokies were at flood levels but […]