Taking the path less traveled by

I had no idea where I was headed. There was a little parking lot, but there were few cars on a Monday afternoon. Upstream from all the commotion at the fish hatchery, my map says the Davidson River splits, then veers off to the north and then splits again into three little tributaries that originate close to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Adventure beckoned. New water and wary trout waited for my fly to float by.
I crossed the big bridge and really didn’t expect to find much. It was just such a perfect day for a gentle walk through the Pisgah National Forest under a canopy of gold and orange. After a week of unsteady rain, the cushion of leaves had softened, making the trek a lot like walking on thick new carpet.
But it was not a leisurely stroll. It was uphill, with steep banks stretching deeper and deeper with each step on the rapidly narrowing road, which turned into a trail which then turned into a skinny path.
It was way too far to slide to the water. I kept walking. A strikingly bright sun knifed through the beech and maple. There was a shy breeze whispering through the hemlocks. The air was perfect.
Normally, all my fishing activity is confined to the water downstream, near the hatchery or just below. That’s where the humungous trout big as hound dogs fin lazily in crystal clear water within sight of hundreds of tourists and fly fishers. Occasionally, I have caught some of those monsters, and at other times the bigguns broke my line. Mostly, those trout ignore anglers’ flies, for they have seen every imaginable type and size and color. They are, in a word, educated fish. They see a lot of fishermen, too, and don’t spook easily. They just hunker down and stare at you.
That portion of the Davidson is Catch and Release. Past that section and the hatchery, there is the part known as "The Gorge," which is not for the faint at heart or feeble of body. The water roars over boulders big as cars. It’s much tougher to get out than it is to get down the bank to the river.
But, like I said, there was adventure beckoning. I went farther up, past Cove Creek to where Long Branch Creek goes left and the Davidson wanders to the right where it later splits into three little creeks — Right Fork, Daniel Ridge Creek and Shuck Ridge Creek.
I walked forever.
When I came to what was left of an old bridge, I considered sliding down the bank to get to the other end of the road, but then I realized I would hve to climb back up that same bank.
So, I took the path less traveled by.
This little path, which followed Right Fork uphill, was just as steep with a gorge almost as deep as The Gorge. I found one place that was easily accesible to the creek, slipped down a gentle bank and caught a little wild rainbow surrounded by loud, rowdy water tumbling over huge rocks.
I leaned my back against a smooth, warm rock just to let the day soak in. I could have fallen asleep and decided it was too late and I was too worn out to finish the trek to the end of this little path.
The walk had taken its toll. And I still had the return hike to the car.
For the next week I walked with a little less bounce . It was Friday before the aches faded so I could consider finishing the exploration.
Yeah, I took the path less traveled by and it certainly made all the difference.
I ached all over.

How does one define the perfect fly-fishing day? The one day on the river that you never, ever forget. It could be a day when you catch all the fish you want, or it could be a day you finally catch that big brown that hangs out near the bridge. I was determined to find out.
The river was up after a week of rain. But I was anxious to get into some late afternoon fly fishing, so I tied a bushy, high-floating dry fly and let her rip through the current. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I mean really lazy.
I spent the first hour just getting rigged up, then reading some of the Sunday paper. I spent a bunch of time drinking in the cocktail of 100-proof color that lit up the mountains.
When I finally got up, on the first cast I hooked a wild trout, which jumped and flipped the hook with vigor.
Not a good beginning in the quest for the perfect fly fishing day.
Emerging from the creek, I noticed another car. Most campers had left long ago, way before Sunday afternoon, so I was a little startled to see humans, little humans at that, scurrying about the banks with little fishing rods. They asked if there were any trout there. I said they might be a little tough to catch today, but you never know. They’re in there, I assured the little anglers.
They were about 6 and 4 years old, I guessed. One held a rod with a big ole hook at the end of the line with enough corn to feed a pig, while his little brother had a little kid’s rod with a stick of wood tied to the end of the line. I figured the stick gave it some weight so he could practice casting until he was as old as his big brother and could fish with real bait.
Their mother said her dad brought her to this spot when she was a child, and they caught trout then.
Well, I said, I just lost one.
I began reeling in line, getting set to try some spots upstream, perhaps make it up to the waterfall if there were not too many leaf-peepers hogging the one-lane road.
I pulled out a little, then stopped, backed up and cut off the engine. The little fishermen were still standing with their rods and dirty faces.
Opening the back of the car, I grabbed a fly box and took two black wooly buggers — a fly sometimes considered as one for all seasons and all fish — and walked over to the bank.
I handed one to the oldest boy, who seemed delighted with his new treasure, and then gave the other to the little fellow.
They both looked at those scruffy flies, then looked up at me with smiles wider than a fat trophy trout.
Christmas came early.
The next day sparkled with fall sunshine. The river was clear as new glass, and I caught everything I cast to with whatever fly I chose to use.
Most would consider that the perfect fly fishing day, and I guess it was close to that.
But I’ll remember the previous day longer.
One can catch trout anytime, but the face-splitting smiles of little boys are rare.
That was a perfect fly-fishing day.

Lookng for answers to life's questions

Chilly winds swept the sky clean last Sunday. With the mercury hovering around the low to mid 40s, the emphasis was on chilly and for the first time this fall I bundled up with a sweater before hitting the river. It figured to be a pretty day. Leaves had turned a little, giving the feeling of driving through a church with massive stained glass windows on both sides.
Leaves also had decided to litter the river, for the sole purpose of snagging a fly fisherman’s flies, I’m sure. That happens a lot and is expected in the fall. We put up with it in our continuing search for the answers to life’s most perplexing questions, as they might say on NPR.
A fisherman’s ultimate goals change over the years — first trying to catch the most trout, then the biggest, then the most difficult — but life’s questions hang around to make it all that more difficult.
Like why?
As my fingers numbed in the wind, I asked that very same question. I was slinging a two-fly rig, with a weighted pheasant trail nymph tied about 6 inches below a larger Yaller Hammer nymph. The Yaller Hammer is a scraggly looking thing that used to be tied with the yellow/black feathers of the yellow flicker, now protected and off-limits to fly tiers. So, we use dyed imitations with feathers from some other poor bird.
A fish bumped the fly on my first cast, but I never hooked up with a single trout all afternoon. The impudent wind was a constant, nagging nuisance. Like a little brother pulling your shirttail, it was relentless.
I pushed on. Switching to a dry fly, I hooked into a feisty rainbow on my first cast. The little olive parachute fly bounced nicely in the channel flowing near the rocks, and through the crystal-clear water I watched the trout rise from his hiding place. The rod tip was shaking pretty well. Then, it wasn’t shaking at all. The trout was gone.
That rude wind slapped at my face.
Now, fishless after several hours, those persistent questions returned, especially that one about "Why?"
With those two flies tied in tandem, a good portion of the early afternoon was spent untangling those flies from the weeds and trees on the bank. Each time the question came up, "Why?" That wind did not help.
I tried finding the answers at the origin. I trucked upstream until there was no more stream, at which point I followed the trickle of water to where the French Broad River originates. It was a fairly rough hike, over boulders the size of small houses and past sheer cliffs of rock where you hang on the rhododendron limbs with prayerful grasps, hoping the wood does not break.
Scratched up and bumped up and heartbeat really up, I got to the source, a place up near the top of a little mountain.
The wind died. And it was so quiet there was no need for any answers. By then, I had forgotten the questions.
Except that most persistent query of them all – why am I not catching trout?

fly fishing delayed harvest waters

Today dawned gray and dreary as an abandoned battleship, and just as wet, but the weatherman has promised that Monday will shine like a Marine’s brass buckle. Though I’m already thinking about tomorrow, I won’t spend today indoors.
If a light drizzle ruins everybody else’s day, it will be perfect for a fly fisher armed with tiny blue wing olive dries. The little mayflies love this kind of weather and will hatch all day, taunting rainbow and brown trout until the fish rises to the surface to sip their insolent little bug bodies.
I stood in a Virginia trout stream some years back with such a misty afternoon, stayed in one spot just a few feet from the bank and caught nearly 30 trout. Even the water was muddy, but it mattered little and may, in fact, have helped since the fish couldn’t see me. I was astonished they could see the flies.
Since then I have had many good fishing days when the rain relentlessly pelted my cap like a pecking hen.
There is no such thing as bad weather, I’ve been told. There’s bad fishing gear and good fishing gear, but there is no such thing as bad weather, at least not bad enough to keep me indoors.
If the wind roars and the rain falls sideways, I may spend some time listening to the car radio until it lets up. Then, I’ll be out again.
But I love sponging up rays, too. Blindingly bright days are hard to fish, certainly, but they always feel good after weeks of wetness and cold.
A sun-warmed boulder on a chilly autumn day beats a Lazy Boy recliner.
Monday’s battle plan calls for an assault on the East Fork of the French Broad River, just outside the little town of Rosman.
It’s a Delayed Harvest river, which means fishermen cannot keep their catch during the winter months.
From October until the first Saturday in June, the such rivers are "Catch and Release."
Upon June’s arrival, the trout population begins a rapid reduction.
So, during the winter I always know that stretch of water will have trout. They may not be easy to catch all the time, but sometimes they are.
Usually, it takes a few weeks after the state stocks the stream for the fish to become acclimated.
Most have never even seen a bug, having been raised on little round pellets of trout food, and, no, I do not fish with a fly that resembles trout pellets.
During the past seven years of fishing this river, I’ve discovered there is no reasoning why those fish hit certain flies for a while and then ignore the same flies later.
As a rule, I catch a trout with one fly, then change to another, and catch more fish before changing flies again.
I use a lot of different flies on the DH waters, especially in the early fall. Come spring, they’ll recognize a little yellow stonefly and its bug relatives and the fishing will be entirely different.
Until then, I’ll just keep changing flies over and over.

Fall fly fishing: It's in the air

The familiar smell of approaching fall hangs in the air now. Gentle breezes shimmy through the trees in a graceful dance at the top of the mountain.
There’s a sprinkling of rust around the edges of trees, which should be expected after weeks of pounding rainstorms. The air, thick as warm syrup just a couple weeks ago, carries a sneaky cool that slips down the mountain in the early evening so you don’t even notice that the day is done.
Darkness arrives quietly. Before you know it, it’s time to go home.

Already, I miss the long, lazy lateness of summer sunsets that allow me to fish well into the night.
But I also love fall fishing. The air begins to nip with a fresh crispness. Here and there you catch a whiff of wood smoke from a nearby campfire or cabin.
Being early in the new season, the dead leaf invasion has not yet cluttered the creek to snag my flies, so there is still lots of prime unmolested fly fishing.

A couple weeks ago, my river was too high to fish, with the current ripping along at 9,500 cfs. The North Fork of the French Broad was rocking and rolling, an angry caramel monster that moved fallen trees and knocked aside boulders and, in effect, rearranged everything. So, I had a new river to fish the next weekend when the flow slowed to about 650 cfs (normal is about 350 cfs, I’m told.)

July water had been almost too low to hold a fish, and I was happy to see the rain.
Fishing on the last weekend of September, I found a lively but friendly river moving along at a moderately fast pace. I nailed rainbow trout, mostly with marabou muddlers and green inchworms.

I tossed some big hoppers into the slower current also, and was surprised by some feisty fish smacking the fly.
Fall is the perfect time for hoppers, ants and beetles. Trout love those flies.
And, since I would rather fish dry flies, the box is stuffed with these imitations.
For the first time this year, the water across the highway from our cabin flowed fast enough to fish without scaring every trout in the neighborhood with one faulty cast. Water flowed around my knees in spots where there had not been enough to reach my ankles in August.

To my delight, the trout were feeling frisky.
I tossed out a black muddler, let it slip downstream with the current and got a bump on the first cast. On the second cast, I had a struggling rainbow shaking his head at the end of my line. Then there was another, then another.
Boy, was I having fun.

Downstream, I noticed that the fallen tree that had blocked my path previously had been relocated by the storms. The way was clear.
The trout hit every fly I threw out. I even caught a few of them.
Cleared out, it was like fishing new water over old rocks. I marked in my mind the locations of the trout that shook my rod before shaking the fly. I’ll be back, I vowed.
Later, as the sun slipped behind the mountain, you could feel the bite of the coming fall in the air.

Again, the air filled with the scent of wood smoke. I pulled out a sweater.
I love fall.

We need a talking flybox

A flybox can be read like a book for what it tells us about the owner, or it can be meditated upon like an album of old yellowed photographs for what it tells us about ourselves. Most of us own more than one, if we fly fish just a couple times a year, and some of us stuff our vests with foam, plastic, wood and aluminum contractions that hold our dear little trout flies tightly so they are not blown into the river or clumsily dropped into autumn’s pile of leaves on the riverbank.

We all have our favorite, the one that goes to the river when there is only room for one in the shirt pocket, and for me it has to be the big foam box I bought five years ago. These types are typically the cheapest on the fly shop shelves. There are probably more than 200 flies of all sizes inside. Since it fits nicely, if a bit snuggly, into my shirt pocket, it’s my Go-To box when I travel light.

I’ve had wooden fly boxes, with brass nameplates on the outside and magnetic strips to hold your flies. I’ve had, and still do, plastic ones you can see through and some you cannot. I once lost an aluminum flybox in a tiny Madison County creek while fishing in late fall and then found it sparkling on the rocks underwater in the spring. All the flies were fine, though pretty well soaked. None rusted.

Now, I carry the white foam box, a little plastic one you can see through, one with little compartments that you cannot see through and a couple of old Altoids tins I stuffed with big Green Drake flies and oversized streamers. I don’t even like Altoid mints that much, but I love those tins.

There’s no telling how many flies are tucked away in my vest.
Looking at photos of fly boxes in magazines and Web sites and blogs, I’m almost as ashamed of the mess as of my uncut front yard. Those are some scruffy flies, I have to admit. But they are scruffy because they’ve been chewed like dog toys by playful trout in my neighborhood creeks.

There are quiet times when I’ll just stare at all that mess, recalling the days when certain flies nailed certain fish at a particular spot near a waterfall or bridge. When I see the hackle dangling loose as an untied boot lace, I smile at the memory of a wild brook trout that had an exceptional row of teeth. When a stranger looks at that same fly box, he probably wonders if my home is as messy. My sock drawer is. You know I’m no engineer. Neatness is overrated.

The one essential thing a fly box cannot, but should be able to, do is tell the fisherman which offering will fool trout at a particular time of day and year. Somebody should invent such. But for now, all a fly box can do is tell us a little about the owner and remind that owner of days past on wild rushing water full of trout.
And, really, that’s quite enough.

Top Ten Trout Town? Asheville?

This could be a good thing or a horribly disastrous thing. My neighborhood has been tagged by Forbes Magazine as being close to one of the Top Trout Towns of North America, and I am tempted to write to the editors to complain.
I live in Transylvania County near the Blue Ridge Parkway. My backyard is the Pisgah National Forest. Walk 3 miles from my front porch, and you will find a nifty 50-foot waterfall. I can walk to four different creeks and catch wild trout. Across the road, fat rainbows splash and play. About a mile down the road, big browns lurk on the bottoms.
It’s never crowded.

Until now.
We are within a 45-minute drive from the city of Asheville, which now has been dubbed No. 10 in the TTT list.
That’s sorta like wearing a bullseye on your back. They’ll all be gunning for our trout.
Like we don’t have enough tourists driving their SUVs at 5 mph through our neighborhoods already.

Usually, magazines that come up with such lists ignore western North Carolina. All the great rivers are out west or up north in Sarah Palin land … you know, within sight of Russia. Nobody ever picks Asheville, which by the way is a city and not a town. A town is something like Rosman, with one grocery store and a community swimming pool.
But I guess Asheville is a good headquarters stop for visiting fly fishers. The article touts trout, but the French Broad River flows through the city and that big ole river is also full of smallmouth bass and muskie, so there is more to fish for than just salmonids. You can wade the river in some low spots and cast from a boat in others.

Within an hour or so drive, you can hit prime trout water in just about any direction. Go east, find Wilson Creek. Go west, find the Davidson. Go north into Tennessee, find the South Holston River, a tailrace that has wild brown trout as big as German shepherds, though they are not as easily caught.
I’m surrounded by waters full of all types of fish, but mostly I concentrate on the trout. In 20 years, I have barely scratched the surface and its doubtful I will ever fish them all.
So far, for the record I’ve slayed ‘em at the South and North Forks of the French Broad River, the Davidson, Avery Creek, Courthouse Creek, Hickey Fork, Beegum Creek, the Pigeon River, Kiesee, Big Creek, Whitewater, Laurel Creek, Reems Creek, Doe Creek, the Watauga and the South Holston.

And there are a host of others I never got a name for. I couldn’t fish all these creeks and rivers in WNC in two lifetimes.
So, upon serious reflection, I will venture the guess that I will always be able to find a creek or river to cast a fly that is not crowded.

Being tagged as a Top Tenner may not be so bad after all.
Bring ‘em on.
We got room.

Just try not to drive so slooooooooooowly. There’s trout waiting.