It’s 7 a.m. on a foggy Blue Ridge Morning
“I’ve got him! Ohhhhhh, man…don’t go into that log….come on, baby….come on….hold tippet! Hold!” It was fourteen inches of angry brown trout in two feet of clear, cold creek. The thing wasn’t giving up without a fight, even though Tommy was putting on the pressure as best he could. “Whaddya got on there? Is that 6X?” I yelled. Tommy was too busy fighting him to reply, but I knew we’d both decided that 6X was the only way to go in this gin clear water.
“He keeps trying to drag me into that log!” Tommy shouted. “Hang on, I’m comin’…”
“Bring the camera!”
“Almost there…”
” Aaaaaaahh…man…he’s off. He’s off….”
And so it goes with summer trout fishing in the Appalachians. Early to rise and fish until your feet get numb. It’s not that the trout “turn off” come mid-day. They really don’t. It’s that you know darn well how hot it’s going to be later on, and any extra time you can squeeze into the early morning hours well worth the effort of doing some squeezing. We pushed further up the little creek, dodging hornet’s nests and spider webs the size of dinner plates. “No one has been through here in a while” I said has I gently pulled line out of a reel three times as big as anyone could possibly need for this kind of water. Under my breath I told myself…“There should be one under that far bank, near the rock…”
The fly sailed through the air in a perfect little loop for all of six feet. Exactly one inch into the drift a slender, dark form sliced up from beneath the overhanging rock ledge and slammed the fly so hard it flew up and into a tree branch hanging overhead. It was stuck solid; wrapped around that limb twenty different ways. “Now what?” I thought. Tommy nudged me with the butt of his 3 wt. rod and extended the handle. We traded rods and he held the still attached line out of the way so I could make another cast under it, just inches off the water.
Another small, tight loop… another plop…and that son of a gun rose again. This time he sucked it in, and the fight was on! It took me nearly twenty seconds to land him. Nine inches of green, wormy-backed brook trout with a mouth so big it looked as if it belonged on a smallmouth bass. “Nice” said Tommy. “Yeah, he’s pretty big for this creek” I replied.
“Yep. This is why we do this, isn’t it? The pre-dawn drive and the hike and the bushwhacking…”
“And the climbing. And the snakes.”
“You know it.”
” Alright…the next run is yours…gotta be another big one hiding ”