The season is in full swing and every day finds us in a different place. One day rowing the drift boat, wading a stream in the Smokies the next day. This week we’ve had a true blend of fly fishing for trout in our home waters. We saw a little more snow this week and […]
Dogwood Winter
They call it Dogwood Winter and for good reason. Every year about the time the dogwoods bloom we get a cold snap. This one is a real one too with a hard freeze tonight. It’s been a wet and cold day today with temperatures falling through the 30’s. Looks like we made the right call […]
Quick Pic: Golden Stonefly Nymph
Here’s a golden stonefly nymph we recently found in a stream while flipping rocks. These guys are very common in the Smokies and are very distinctive in appearance so they’re easy to identify. Now you know why the Tellico Nymph does so well in streams across the region.
A Beautiful Weekend on Hazel Creek
After last spring’s “Wet & Wild” Hazel Creek camp that featured torrential downpours for the second half of the weekend, it was a breath of fresh air to have nothing but blue skies and sunshine for all four days of our stay this past weekend. In spite of nearly perfect conditions, the fishing was a […]
In The Thick of The Season
Well here we go! We’ve been guiding a pretty steady schedule for a little more than a month now, but the lingering cold weather put things off just a little bit. But that’s all about to change. We’re packing our last items for our long weekend camp on Hazel Creek while trying to remember to […]
Trail Closure on Noland Creek
A quick update for those who like to fish around Bryson City, NC. A landslide on the trail upstream of The Road to Nowhere has closed trail. The trail is closed because of heavy construction equipment in place now to remedy to issue. The trail is closed up to campsite #65, but the trail is […]
High Water in the Smokies Before the Great Weather Arrives
Last week was just one of those weeks… This is my twentieth season guiding and Charity’s thirteenth so it’s not new, but you certainly don’t like it. A constant parade of weather disturbances came through featuring everything from snow, to rain, to high winds. It was just a tough week with yo-yo-ing water temps and […]
A Week of Ups & Downs
This past week was quite a roller coaster ride for us fishing guides. It started last weekend with a fresh 4″ of snow in the Smokies that flat out shut down fishing in park streams last Sunday. Trust me. As a guide it wasn’t pretty. But the weather quickly warmed up and our new drift […]
Good Bye to an Old Friend
The phone rang about dinner time last night and it all became a little more real. It was a truck driver on the outskirts of St Louis heading this way with a load of Hyde drift boats. One of them is ours. “You’re the guy with the trade-in, right?” That was our cue to get […]
Looking for Some Consistency On the Way
This week’s fishing could be best summed up by Dickens’ opener to a Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Over the period of less than a week we saw gorgeous, sunny weather, snow, a couple of passing storm fronts, a temperature roller coaster, fantastic hatches, […]
