Tennessee Trout
©2005 by Tom Chandler
There's more trout in Tennessee than meets the eye. And more of a lot of other good stuff too...
I first heard about the blanket hatches of Sulphurs on Tennessee's Clinch River tailwater in the late 90's. The hatch reached its height in late spring, when my Northern California fishing was limited by seasonal closures and runoff. When a friend invited me to stay at his place for a few days, the appeal of fishing dry flies to big tailwater trout – at a time when I'd otherwise be heaving big golden stone nymphs -- was too much.
I flew out, we hit a decent Sulphur hatch, caught a lot of fish, and I congratulated myself for being crafty enough to uncover what – at the time – seemed like a secret to much of the fly fishing world.
I went back a year later and the sulphurs were already in decline. The tailwaters were tough, but a bamboo rod freak by the name of Rich Margiotta introduced me to the browns and rainbows of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
I didn't go back the next year (or the next, or the next) as the word on the sulphurs wasn't good. In 2005, I decided the hell with the Sulphurs – I wanted to fish GSMNP again, and I'd take whatever the tailwaters gave me, even if it wasn't big fish eating #16 Sulphurs.
What follows is a compilation of the fishing reports I posted on www.uppersac.com while I was in Tennessee, and hope they encourage you to give this fishery a try.
Tuesday, April 26; Somewhere in Tennessee...
Even Tommy doesn't live by the Upper Sac alone, so this week I'm providing up-to-the-minute fishing reports that are of absolutely no use to www.uppersac.com's readers - I'm writing from Knoxville, TN.
Tennessee is not the first state that leaps to mind when you leave home in search of trout, but between the local tailwaters (The Clinch, Holston, South Holston, Hiwassee, etc) and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (home to native Brook Trout stranded here after the last ice age), there's more than I could fish in six years, much less six days.
Today, my generous host Rich Margiotta (local angler and bamboo rod addict) drove me to his favorite haunts on the Little River -- a small freestoner near the Townsend entrance of the park. It's a stunningly beautiful place, but different enough from my home water that for the first few hours, I felt oddly off-center, at least until the hatch started and fish began rising. That part, at least, was happily familiar.
Typically, the gradients on the main river stems are not as steep as the Upper Sac, the foliage is more aggressive, and the main obstacles to progress aren't treacherous wading and brisk currents, but the fly-eating rhododendrons and overhanging trees.
Cloudy and (sometimes) drizzly weather fired the Sulphur hatch, so we spent most of the day casting quill-bodied #16 sulphur dries to risers, ultimately hooking a gratifying number of fish, including a handful of 12"-14" specimens which qualify as 'pretty good' on this river. Though smaller than Upper Sac rainbows, the mix of browns and 'bows (the Brookies live at higher altitudes) offers its own allure -- you never know what you'll find attached to your fly.
With all the leaves hanging over the river, backcasts can become tense affairs. Later, it would turn out that backcasts weren't my undoing as much as missed fish -- I threw a couple dry flies into the trees on bungled hooksets. These aren't the deliberate takes of an Upper Sac bow sipping BWOs, but the fast, hit-and-run grabs of fish capitalizing on whatever bug happens to be floating by.
Tomorrow we fish a tailwater from a drift boat; the caddis should be thick and the fish should be bigger.
Wednesday, April 27: The Holston River, Tennessee
Today Rich and I fished the Holston -- a tailwater near Knoxville that's a relatively new fishery. Out here the TVA makes or breaks a fishery by controlling flows from the dams and stocking fish, and they've decided to turn the Holston into a prime trout fishery.
It's an oddly synthetic approach to trout fisheries that breeds fishermen with the TVA Flow Forecast phone number programmed into their cell phones, but I guess if anything separates us from the lesser vertebrates, it's our adaptability.
Rich and I drifted the river with Ian Rutter, a slow-talking, fast-witted guide who is simply a joy. The flows were slow and a dark grey #18 caddis was hatching for quite a while, giving us plenty of time to fight the wind that blew all day.
Fishing small flies on choppy water is hard enough without the wind blowing your cast back in your face, but after a bit the windy-day reflexes come back, and without even thinking about it I started driving my casts into the water to pile up the leader for a longer drift, and started realizing that fish are less spooky in those conditions so the long "hero" casts you can't make aren't necessary anyway.
Again, this is a relatively new fishery and the fish were healthy, stocky... and pretty much all the same size. It's a reasonable thing to expect since the fish were only stocked over the last few years, but it's an admittedly odd feeling to fish a river that's in the process of being "created" instead of the evolved-over-the-eons fisheries I'm used to in Northern California, most of which also feature dams, though without the extreme "full on/full off" generation schedules implemented by the TVA.
In the end, we caught a lot of fish on dry flies, had a lot of fun, and decided that fishing a just-hatched, artificially created fishery is a lot better than not fishing at all, especially since new, naturally evolved trout water is being created far more slowly than it's being destroyed.
Tomorrow I'm heading back into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where it's possible I'll drive a few extra miles to fish for brookies. I always say I'd take a few extra steps to catch a brookie (ah, they're cute), and tomorrow we'll see if that's true.
Ian Rutter and Rich on the Holston. Many fish were caught on this interesting new fishery.
Thursday, April 28: Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee
After two days of great dry fly fishing -- the kind that comes with an "it isn't always like this" disclaimer from the locals -- I headed out to a tiny Appalachian mountain stream to fish for even tinier Brook trout. Outside of a few alpine lakes in my area, I don't have much opportunity to catch Brookies, so I fished the "Chimneys" stretch of the Little River in the Great Smoky Mountains park, a trickling freestoner where stealth is crucial and the fish are tiny.
Armed with a map and a 7' 4wt Heddon cane rod loaned to me by Rich Margiotta, I caught lots of small Rainbows interspersed by the odd Brookie. The fish weren't tough and a decent drift was the real challenge, though perhaps the overriding memory of the day was the constant stream of traffic on the road alongside the stream.
Even stranger were the number of people who pulled over and immortalized me on film like I was little-seen wildlife. I felt like a character in a diorama at the natural history museum -- instead of "Prehistoric hunters chasing a woolly mammoth" I was "A hideously over-equipped fly fisher chasing small trout in an overpoweringly beautiful setting." Sounds about right.
After I bagged a handful of Brookies, the skies clouded and the drizzle started -- perfect for the Sulphur hatch I'd been warned not to expect again -- so I ran to the main stem of the Little River and fished the quill-bodied dries I'd tied to fool the selective fish on the local tailwaters.
It's the tailwaters where the Sulphur hatch can be cosmic, but hadn't been so far. In fact, it was rumors of blanket Sulphur hatches on the Clinch that first lured me out here more than seven years ago, and though I did experience a couple good hatches, the word is that they simply aren't what they used to be.
Fortunately, the flies worked just fine on the Metcalf stretch of the Little River, though the fish responded much better to 6x tippet instead of the 5x I was throwing earlier. Rich later confirmed that Metcalf might receive the most pressure of any place in the park, so leader-shy fish aren't exactly a surprise.
My favorite fish was the 14" Brown rising just downstream of an overhanging tree. I made a short hook cast and followed the drift by hunching down to water level and peering through the four-inch gap between branches and water. The fish took, the rod lifted, and we were off to the races in a confused, heaving tangle of branches, fly line and fish -- a Keystone Cops kind of moment was probably a lot more amusing for me than the Brown.
I quit after the hatch slowed, the fish got bored, and I got soaked (my old, old wading jacket was apparently passing onto the next plane of existence, leaving its water repellent capabilities behind), but I'd had another cosmic trout day in Tennessee.
Thankfully not the biggest trout I caught all week, but still pretty.
Friday, April 29: Holsten River, Tennessee
Most good guides can put you on fish even when the conditions suggest they can't (if you learn even one of their "get-the-clueless-client-into-a-fish-tricks" then it's worth the price of admission), but some rise above even that difficult standard to make a trip an event, usually because they're fun people, thoughtful observers, and interesting storytellers.
Ian Rutter qualifies as one of the above, an easygoing guide with a natural, predatory fish sense (I'm tempted to say he "thinks like a fish" but don't want him hunting me down for painting him with dumb cliches).
Again I floated the Holsten in his drift boat, and -- oy vey -- hit another hours-long caddis hatch, complete with steadily rising fish in almost every likely spot. I lost track of the fish I caught to the point that I quietly sat and ate my sandwich while a couple trout rose two rod lengths away (two 8.5' Phillipson rod lengths). I didn't even whine endlessly when an electrical storm kept us bank-sitting for an hour, though I probably did whine after I got soaked through my ever-more-porous wading jacket.
After deciding my wading jacket was more freezer than protector, Ian broke out one of his emergency ponchos – a bright orange affair that made me look like I'd been abducted and released by aliens with little fashion sense or a very, very bizarre sense of humor. My arrival at the take-out made me thankful I don't live in the area and therefore didn't know any of the people trying hard not to stare.
Still, the fishing was good enough that I was willing to fish a medium-action bamboo rod when the gusting winds suggested I use the stronger cane rod I had in the boat. If I missed a couple fish because I couldn't make the cast, there was always another nearby.
If you're ever in East Tennessee and looking for a good guide, remember this name: Ian Rutter. He's a wonderful guide, and his Tennessee fishing guides are among the best written guides I've read, qualifying him as not only a keen observer, but a good writer too.
Sunday, May 1: Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee
The prior week's fishing had been cosmic to the point that I felt I had nothing left to prove, so Sunday I opted for beauty over fish size, and hiked to the upper reaches of the Little Fork River. This is pocket water interspersed with the occasional pool, and it's beautiful to the point that I'm reminded I love fly fishing because of where it takes me.
It was a weekend with great weather and there were a lot of fly fishers out, but they uniformly ganged up on the pools and longer runs, leaving the in-between pocket water entirely to me. A quick walk up the trail also put most of the competition behind me, and it turned into a day largely free of the tensions that surface when you're constantly bumping into other fishermen.
The fishing itself was simple -- the rocks were crawling with little yellow stones, so I tied on a yellow stone dry. Bingo. I was fishing an 8' 5wt cane rod built by James Beasley that was based on a Leonard 50DF taper – a butter-smooth, light-tipped rod that's perfect for this kind of water.
Big fish of the day was a 12" brown, followed by a handful of 9"-10" rainbows and many smaller fish I hooked doing what my guide friend Wayne Eng calls "picking pockets" -- a state where I assume the role of predator (as opposed to effete dry fly/bamboo snob, though I simultaneously occupied that niche too) and pick fish out of the short runs and slicks.
The rhythm of pocket water is hypnotic; every cast requires some kind of adjustment, airiel mend or slack-line sleight-of-hand, and if you're distracted by thoughts of your annoying co-worker, the new rattle in the transmission, or any of the million other things that we trip over daily, you're going to do poorly.
Fortunately, the only real distraction was the scenery. It wasn't necessarily prettier than what I see along the Upper Sac, but it was less stark and different enough that I'd sometimes see something "odd" in the periphery of my vision. Glancing up, I'd realize there was nothing odd about it – my constantly churning subconscious just wasn't expecting a truck-sized Rhododendron at river's edge.
The Little River. Pretty, but watch that backcast...
It's been a rejuvenating trip: I was fortunate to enjoy the competence and laid-back enthusiasm of Ian Rutter, the hospitality and friendship of Rich Margiotta and his entire family, and all the other nice folks I met along the way.
It's a different world out in Tennessee, but if you're willing to drive a little, not a trout-starved one. Tennessee offers visitors some impressive trout fishing, though finding it gets a lot easier once you realize the Southern tradition of storytelling applies even when the locals give directions; every road has four different names and a story, and you're likely to hear them all. It's heartwarming, but I advise bringing a good map.
