Getting cold for fly fishing

My backyard mountains have thrown off the gaudy attire of fall for the colors of faded flannel. Within a week they resembled rounded hunters in camo. Now winter's breath ices our necks and the hills look like eerie formations of emaciated Confederate soldiers, standing tall and straight still but rough around the edges. A little haggardness, I guess, sends the silent message that winter is a lilttle more than a week away.
Still, we catch trout. Not all the time, but mostly.
With just the smallest window of warm opportunity between the hours of 11 and 3, dry flies have been working well. Mostly, parachute Adams and tiny caddisflies.
Only one weekend was blown out by the icy wind. I joked at the flyshop that perhaps it was cold enough to rig up inside the Troutmobile while the heater blasted. You know, rig up, jump out, make a cast or two. Jump back in. Warm those fingertips. Jump out again.
Nah.
Another day and it was wind. Then wind and rain, heavy doses of both. The North Fork of the French Broad got rowdy and danced out of her banks. One motorist was swept into a field and had to be rescued.
I keep looking for little splashes of sun. If it warms the water some, it may warm up the trout appetites for dry flies.
They were popping pretty good last week. There is a little stretch about 400 feet in front of the cabin that few fish. It's just a surpreme bother to struggle through the rose thorns, so few bother.
The little girl across the street, along with her 4-year-old daughter, tried to clean my home waters out a month ago. They bagged a bunch. Kept 'em too.
Then, little momma tells me about the 31-inch brown some good ole boy caught at the waterfall last year.
That, friends, broke my heart. It was like General Lee once again had his sword stolen by some Yankee general.
More and more the trees lining the little creek took on the somber look of Army of Northern Virginia ghosts, standing blind sentry by precious water.

dry flies and brook trout

Tough place to cast a fly. Worth it, though.

Fly fishing amid fall's brilliance

Fall in the mountain of western North Carolina is a little like driving around the inside of a brightly-lit Christmas tree, with a rainbow shower pouring through the branches drenching everything. It's one of my favorite seasons.

The perfectly blue sky was marred by only a few feathers of cloud. The sun was bright. The air was sweet and warm.

Leaves were beginning to shower to forest floor and clog the trout streams, but I caught surprisingly few of them this past weekend. I also caught surprisingly few trout, though the ones I did manage to hook and land were memorable, mainly because they were the first fish I had hooked in more than a month.

For the record, I was skunked on the East Fork of the French Broad River two weekends ago, humiliated by gently rising trout sipping God-only-knows what type of flies. They certainly were not interested in anything I had to offer, which included hoppers, midges and parachute cahills and a few streamers too.

It can be demoralizing. You're standing on the edge of a mirrow-smooth pool reflecting the flame-red and gold of maples and beech, and the water looks as if it were raining. Trout are feeding everywhere. The rise rings pop up and disappear.

So, you tie on a fly. You pick out a spot and you let loose with a perfect cast that lands feather soft on the water's surface, allowing the fly to float for a few seconds before ...

Nothing happens. The trout continue to feed on everything in the water except your fly. They splash and swirl and swallow every bug in sight ... except the one fly that's not real.

This happened on the East Fork of the FB, on the Davidson River near Looking Glass Creek and once more with feeling on the Pigeon River.

It's one thing to get skunked when there is nothing happening and quite another experience when the fish are feeding all around and the water looks like it's been peppered by birdshot.

I tied a little sparkly midge, about a size 20, and cast to a little channel next to some rock. It was late Monday and I had not caught anything but leaves. I watched the little fly bounce jauntily along before disappearing with a violent splash.

The spell was broken. The remorseless drought came to a splashy end and I had the fist trout of the day, indeed of the month, struggling at the end of my line.

That felt good.

I got another brown while floating the fly downstream, mending the fly line every few seconds so it wouldn't drag it like a wiggling snake and scare the fish. I missed two or three this way, mostly because I had so much line loose in my hands trying to get a long, quiet drift to where the fish were feeding.

Overhead, a blue heron soared.

I drove home through a tunnel rich in fall color, with gold and crimson light pouring softly through the trees like honey. Everything glittered.

Fall's one of my favorite seasons.

Fly fishing is all about timing

I had slept on the ground with the stars winking above, crashed inside the car during a rainstorm and found a cabin with air conditioning during my experiments with camping out near trout water.

Best of all, I spent a couple of nights on the banks of the South Holston River with a camper to sleep in and a stack of firewood to burn. I was so close to the water I could hear trout rising to eat little yellow bugs.

On the hottest day of summer, I selected the cabin as the best option. It remains so.

The riverbank site conjures the best memories. There, I would arise with the sun, check out the water, go eat breakfast at one of the two country stores, return to the site and fish until noon, eat lunch, then fish the early afternoon sulphur hatch until the water began to rise with roiling water released from the dam.

One day TVA did not generate, so the water stayed safely wadable.

The river itself is wide and open. I fished under mostly cerulean skies, rimmed with puffy clouds that reminded me of piles of popcorn.

I caught a ton of fish.

My most recent trip to the So Ho reminded me that in fishing, as often it is also in life, timing can be everything. You grill the local fly shop operators, tie the correct flies, arm yourself with a stout flyrod and use 25 years' of trout fishing experience to get out there and rip some lips.

None of that matters if the timing is off.

There had been a heavy rain the night before I arrived. The lower end of the river, the part I usually hit first before fishing near the dam, resembled cafe au lait from you favorite coffee house. I zoomed upstream, only to find every flyfisher from three states standing knee-deep in the river slinging flies into a vicious wind.

There was even a squadron of blue heron between the anglers.

I had to hike a bit to find an unoccupied stretch. The hatch was on, trout were rising here and there and everything was perfect ... except for that damn wind.

My timing was off. I should have arrived hours earlier. There probably was plenty of gusty wind then too, but I could have had my choice of places to fish. Although I didn't know it at the time I waded out from the bank, I picked the worst spot of all. It was scary wading, with some really deep dropoff punctuated with little ankle-breakers in the rock formation that made up the river bottom.

So, I could not wade far. And the different currents dragged my fly across the water like a berserk bass boat, scaring every fish in Tennessee with its wake. When I thought I had a good cast, that pesky wind would rev up and take my fly for a wild ride to someplace else.

I got a couple hookups, a few handshakes so to speak, but no fish. I skitted the fly over the surface and got some good rises, but missed them each time.

Two hours went by. No fish. The afternoon wore on. The wind wore me out.

I was on the verge of packing it in but thought, just one more cast, and I punched the fly upstream 25 feet into the gust. The water was a little choppy with the wind, so my sloppy cast didn't scare anything.

And a trout smacked that fly.

Another few minutes and I would have been out of there and that brown trout would not have a sore lip.

Talk about timing.

Fly fishing in Tennessee

Found a cheap cabin to rent on the hottest Sunday of the year. Didn't catch many fish and missed the evening sulpher hatch because the TVA was generating and the water was scary high.

Thought I had the biggest trout of the year Sunday afternoon before the water came. Took about 5 minutes to horse him in. Quite a battle. For a little 12 inch rainbow. I had foul-hooked him in the tail, so he felt like a monster brown at the end of the line.

Nice trip, anyway.

Another fly fishing camping trip

The black sky outside the camper window slowly faded like a pair of old jeans to a shade of gray. The rising sun added a bit of blush. An eerie mist shrouded the beasts mulling about in the field.

It was my third weekend camping, and the newest spot was nestled under a clump of shade trees beside the South Holston River in Tennessee.Unlike the other campsites I had tried, this one was wide open as the Serengetti in Tanzania, though the beasts that surrounded this site were mere beef cattle, not wild rhinos. And I was thankful for that, despite the plethora of flies that lent their incessant buzzing to the natural melodies of summer.

It was the flies that drove me inside the camper early in the night. I usually sleep with just the star-sprnkled sky for a roof. It it rains, I can fit the sleeping bag into the back of the Troutmobile, like I was forced to do the previous weekend.

In two and a half days I got in a lot of fly fishing, managing to catch tons of brown and rainbow trout. They were hitting little sulphur flies, little yellow things the fish seemed to like floating on top of the surface or below. I fished a CDC dry up and across, then let it swing downstream until it dipped under the surface. From there, I stripped the fly back slowly until I felt that familiar jerk at the other end.

Sunday evening was awesome. After a long lazy lunch, I rigged up the new rod. From my seat at the campsite, I could see rise rings spread over he mirrow-smooth water while the feeding trout taunted me. I could not turn away from such a challenge.

During the recent hot dry spell, trout have been stressing out. Warm water can be lethal to the fish, and many fishermen avoid low-altitude, and hence warmer, creeks and rivers. Instead, they search out trout in the higher elevations. Or they find a tailrace river, where the coldest of the cold water in a lake is released from the bottom of a dam to generate electricity and make a lot of trout downstream happy in July.

It is never dry on the South Holston. The water gets a bit rough when they open all the gates, but it's always a healthy cold temperature for trout.

I was catching a few and missing a few when a fellow in a big 'ol cowboy hat hollered from the bank. Names were exchanged; dinner invitations were offered.

The fellow, who has the same name as one of my first cousins, said they would cook the steaks around 6 and return to the water at 7 for the evening hatch.

Sounded like a plan. My luck was looking up.

And after dinner we slayed 'em, mostly with little yellow spinner flies, and fished until the biggest moon of the year peeked over the treeline upstream. Sparkling trout held in the glow of a midsummer moon left one of those indelible images forever etched in my brain. Who needs a camera?

The next day, there was a late-morning frenzy of hooking, catching and losing trout, almost all bulldog-strong browns. The fish returned for an encore later in the afternoon, just before the dam gates opened and the rowdy river chased us to shore.

I slept like the proverbial log that night to the tune of Carolina Chorus frogs and the river's steady beat.

The flies stayed outside.

And as I left, I recalled the campsite owner mentioning an empty home he would let me use, which would certainly protect me from bug attacks.

But I would miss the water buffalo wading throught the early morning mist, awash in a golden sun.

What's a few bugs?

Trout like bugs.

Fly fishing on the South Holston River