It’s a tiny trickle of a stream that cuts through neighborhoods, trailer parks, RV campgrounds and golf courses before swelling larger as it leaves town. One of my favorites is Waynesville’s Jonathan Creek, affectionately known to locals as “J” Creek. In fact, many of the best trout rivers in the area are just glorified creeks. Unless you’re willing to trek a few miles into the woods, though, the fish have probably seen most of the contents of your fly box before, which further compounds the difficulties of trying to cast under a tangle of rhododendron. Streams like the North Mills River and the Davidson River provide incredible opportunities to sight-cast to large pods of trout hovering in tiny, overgrown pools. I’ve heard plenty of guides complain about rich customers with Missouri-sized egos who just can’t get it in their heads that a person can catch good fish without casting 120 feet, and that even attempting such a cast would be foolhardy around here. Of course, Casada is biased (he grew up here), but that doesn’t stop him from being right. Jim Casada, a well-known outdoors author who has fished the streams of the Southern Appalachians for half a century, recently told me that if a fly fisherman can catch fish in the Smokies, he can probably catch fish anywhere. Tight, cramped streams and shallow, fast rivers combine to form water that is perfect for trout and often devilishly difficult for anglers. Western North Carolina offers loads of fly-fishing opportunities for the hardcore angler. So in this column, without giving away any secrets, I’m including some basic information along those lines. I haven’t really gone into any of the stuff that most people want to know. In my occasional fly-fishing columns for Xpress, I’ve stayed away from offering much in the way of specific information about where to fish and what to use. I released it back into the water, only slightly miffed that there wasn’t someone around to witness the impossible: a massive wild fish, on par with a good Yellowstone brown, inhabiting a space roughly the size and depth of a backyard kiddie pool. The trout’s sides and underbelly were a collage of the same rich colors the Appalachian woods turn in October: red, yellow, silver and a dozen shades of brown. Five minutes later, I landed a wild brown trout in the 25-inch range with a mouth that was hooked like a salmon’s and big enough to fit my whole fist inside. I walked up quietly and flipped my beetle onto the surface about 10 feet in front of me, since the overhanging branches made a long cast difficult and the stillness of the pool made a roll cast inadvisable.Įven a hack like me gets lucky sometimes-the eaten-up beetle had barely hit the water before there was a swirl in the pool and the fly disappeared. It was late in the season, and I was fishing a foam beetle that’s seen the insides of the mouths of more fish than the rest of my standby flies combined.Īs I headed upstream, I reached the bottom end of a long section of slow, glass-smooth water-the kind of pool one comes across from time to time in shallow mountain streams where decent fish can usually be found. I was working through the brush along a little stream in a remote part of Pisgah National Forest.
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