Rose early to rain in the mountains on Saturday morning. I had spoken with a friend of mine (and much more skilled longrodder than me) in Greenville last week and mentioned to him how well the fishing had been on the Green River. It’d been a while since he’d fished that stretch of water, so he eagerly agreed to meet me to see how they were biting. We started a little farther downstream than usual, in hatchery supported waters. After fishing hard for 30 minutes, I finally caught a small brook trout. I continued walking with the current, hitting every ripple and seam I could find, but only managing to catch 2 minnow/mullet looking things. I have no idea what they were, but I bet the spottails would nail em’. Anyway, my friend was having the same luck, so, figuring the corn fishermen:stuck_out_tongue: had cleaned the place out, we moved upstream to the delayed harvest section. Unfortunately, when we got out of the car, what downstream had been a nice, clear, green stream was now a raging brown chest-high river. We were obviously blown out, so at 11:00, we made an executive decision to head further west to the East Fork of the French Broad.
The rain seemed to be keeping the normal Saturday fishing crowd down, so we cherry-picked a narrow chute that I liked. Immediately, we both were hooking up and giggling like little school girls. Brooks, Browns, Rainbows; they were feeding on our nymphs and wooly buggers with abandon. We moved to several different areas and the result was the same-hook ups!!
Around 3:00 we noticed a hatch coming off. I have no idea what it was (dark caddis’?), but one of these days maybe I’ll get around to studying these insects. I pulled a dark colored elk hair caddis out of my flybox, tied it on and instantly caught a huge (by my standards) rainbow. Then I shot the caddis under some rhododenrons and nailed a brown. This went on for another hour before we realized that the “wife units” were probably going to neuter us if we didn’t get back to the cabin to take them out to dinner.
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