A pretty stretch of Hazel Creek.

In At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman John Gierach says, “…the day you actually begin to wonder why you do this is the day you might as well sell your tackle and buy a bigger TV.” As I shivered under the fifth bridge on Hazel Creek sharing a small Nalgene bottle of rum with Jason Kelley while the 8th straight hour of rain, wind and lightening shelled the remote mountain valley, the thought finally bobbed to the surface. Why do I do this? For a moment I worried about myself. Was I too much of a wuss for this type of thing any more? Was I getting too old? Too soft? Should I go home, buy a bigger TV and become a middle-aged alcoholic and fan of reality shows?

Then I realized I wasn’t wondering in quite the way Mr. Gierach meant. Instead of “Why the heck do I put up with this stuff when it’d be a lot more fun watching NASCAR back at home?”, mine was more like “Why do I love this so much?” Since that’s a question Geirach has explored repeatedly, I decided he wouldn’t be too disappointed in me. But I can’t tell you the answer. I just know that I really do love it. And the rum was pretty good, too.

Hazel Creek is one of those iconic streams. You know the type. Usually overrun with people and the fishing not nearly as good as it was in all the old stories. Still you go because, well, maybe you don’t have to but it sure feels like it, and the fishing usually turns out, if not exactly spectacular, not that bad either.

Jason and I had taken the shuttle across Fontana Lake and hiked five miles to a campsite described by one popular Smokies guidebook as “arguably one of the finest campsites in the Smokies.” That may have been the case before the hemlock woolly adelgid began killing all the hemlocks, but not now. To protect backpackers, the park service cut down the huge rotting trees that once sheltered the site, leaving it with the aesthetics of a forlorn logging camp. To be fair, it only takes a bit of imagination to envision how pretty the site must once have been, and it isn’t without its merits for the fly fisher. Situated on a point between Hazel and a pretty little feeder stream, the site provides access to lots of fishy-looking water. Also, not a point to be taken lightly, the neatly cut sections of the fallen trees make fine seats and tables.

One of the better rainbows at right around 10 inches.

One of the small browns I landed.

We lost little time in setting up camp and managed to hit the water with about seven hours of daylight left for fishing. I came on a section of stream that plunged away from the trail and decided to follow it. After doing battle with the deep runs, waterfalls and rhododendron tangles I guessed that this section is lightly fished relative to other stretches of the creek. It proved to be one of the toughest stretches of wading I’ve experienced in the Smokies, and for my efforts I brought to hand a dozen or so fat rainbows and a single small brown. The roughly twice that many missed strikes suggests my hooksetting abilities suffered a setback during the winter.

The fish rose, I wouldn’t say freely, but fairly well to a variety of dries and soft hackle trailers. There were lots of bugs scattered around: a big tan caddis, a smaller caddis of undertermined color bouncing over the riffles, yellow sallies, giant black stoneflies, small black stoneflies, a March brown or two, a few tiny brownish mayflies, and hordes of bouncing midges. None were present in what you’d call a genuine major hatch. As you can tell, my bug ID skills are rather simple, but then again, so is my small stream fishing philosophy, and it all seems to work out often enough.

If the fish are eating brownish-yellow bugs of a certain size with a down wing, well then, I tie on something that looks close to that. But the truth is, most times I have no idea what the fish are eating. I usually look at the water for awhile, typically not finding any practical answers to the fish-catching problem, I see a few bugs around, mostly not being eaten by fish, and then I end up tying on an old standard. For the Smokies that means some form of parachute Adams, a parachute Wulff or a yellow palmer. I rarely start out with a nymph in anything resembling warm weather, but sometimes I will begin with a hare’s ear wet trailed behind the dry.

Tough stream for wading. Here I am fishing a particularly treacherous section. Photo by Jason Kelley.

My new foam flies failed to float as steadfastly as I’d hoped, but a false cast or two whipped them back into grand floating fashion in no time at all. In a moment of weakness, after an hour of unspectacular results, I resorted to trailing a beadhead nymph. I hate casting the things and was almost relieved when I broked it off on bottom. After that I stayed with a single dry the rest of the afternoon, and that’s what all the fish took. The fishing seemed to pick up later in the day.

Jason had found similarly tough wading but not as many fish nearer camp. I found him napping away the perfect pleasantly breezy evening behind the tent mesh where he was safe from the gnats and flies.

The next day we both decided to search for less treacherous waters downstream. I found some, but I also found the crowds I’d always heard about, who descend on Hazel like locusts every spring. I guess that makes Jason and I a couple of those locusts, but as fishermen we justifiably never consider ourselves part of the “crowd.” The stretch I fished featured several nice little runs and pockets from which I managed to pluck a few more rainbows and small browns. The fish demanded a nymph. They didn’t actually tell me this. It was more of a feeling. So I gave them the standard hare’s ear (not a beadhead and easier to cast) trailed behind a tan neversink caddis. After running into a couple other fishermen, I decided to head back to camp and hit a few of the more spectacular trailside runs along the way. This proved fruitful as I hooked four nicer fish, but I failed to land all but one, a fiesty rainbow of 10 inches or so. These spots looked so good that I had assumed the fish would be too smart for me, a result of higher than normal fishing pressure, but sometimes it works out that the best looking spots really are the best. If I recall correctly, all of the fish came on the nymph.

Jason fishing a good run.

I ran into several more fishermen that afternoon as I neared camp. Things were beginning to feel downright congested, so Jason and I decided to pluck around on the little feeder stream for a couple hours. It’s a neat little stream to fish where the casting resembles cane-poling for crappies more than fly fishing for trout and fly selection is happily reduced to a Carolina Wulff or Parachute Adams. I had caught several spunky little rainbows eking out a living in the harsh conditions of the tumbling little stream when I hooked and landed a brookie. When I realized what it was I yelled for Jason and he crashed over to admire it like it was a rare jewel. I suppose it was. It was then that he informed me that I had done it; I had completed a single day Smoky Mountain Slam. Today I had caught a rainbow, a brown and a brookie. It didn’t occur to me until he mentioned it, but that’s the first time it’s ever happened for me.

That evening I caught a trout for supper from the pool near camp. My head tells me that most Smokies streams can stand to have a few fish eaten, but I still feel sadness any time I kill a wild fish. Then again, maybe that’s the way it should be. Despite the sadness, I was thankful and whispered a prayer in his honor. I always think of that scene near the beginning in the movie The Last of the Mohicans, the Daniel Day-Lewis version, just after they kill the elk. That seems a good attitude to me. So we baked the trout wrapped in heavy duty aluminum foil with black and red pepper, salt and dill. He was delicious, and afterward I wished I’d kept enough to cover our entire supper. Sure would’ve beaten the rice and couscous concoctions rounding things out.

Fishing a small feeder stream. This spot here actually provided some open casting room. Photo by Jason Kelley.

There was plenty of time for conversation. Most conversations began with Jason saying something about the fishing or the weather or good liquor and proceeded with me saying, “Huh?” or “What?” The tumbling and crashing of the creek became the only sound there was, drowning out nearly everything else. When Jason spoke I only heard the creek. When the wind blew, it was with the sound of current crashing over boulders. When the birds sang and the flies buzzed, all I heard was falling water. The sound of it filled my consciousness, and I heard it for a good day or two even after returning home. This is not a bad thing, but the constant roar did make for tough communication. Of course it could just be that I’m getting hard-of-hearing.

Saturday’s forecast called for storms and lots of them, but the morning dawned with beautiful clear skies. We decided to fish together, trading pools. We chose the same tough stretch I’d fished the first day since we reckoned no one had messed with it since then. The fish demanded a nymph once again, and I landed several before the skies darkened and the breezes strengthened and cooled. The storms came quickly and had the feeling of setting in for the evening. Before the creek swelled too high and muddy for comfort, the fish really turned on. My last cast brought a nice rainbow to hand that chased my drowned and dragging dry fly.

Cooking a freezer bag dinner under a bridge. It had only been raining for five or six hours at this point...photo by Jason Kelley

That evening found us under the bridge, the only place where we could effectively cook our supper out of the rain. A trio of fishermen from Maryville told us stronger storms were expected later. Only later did we discover that the Southeast was experiencing one of the worst outbreaks of tornadoes in years. All told it rained for nearly twenty hours straight, with the strongest storms charging through a couple hours before daylight. Neither of us slept well with the lightening bombarding the surrounding ridges, but we were happy just to make it through with a dry tent.

The hike back down to Proctor only took an hour and a half, so we explored a bit before the shuttle was due. I made the walk to the Proctor cemetery (no easy stroll, by the way) while Jason enjoyed the area around the Calhoun House. Before Fontana Lake was created the Hazel Creek watershed was heavily settled. The town of Proctor was the largest settlement on the creek and was home to over 1,000 people. They even had a movie theater. The whole area has been pretty much reclaimed by nature with only a few structures remaining. The history of Hazel Creek makes for interesting reading if that sort of thing interests you. Horace Kephart temporarily made his home in a cabin along one of Hazel’s tributaries.

Down at the lake we ran into a couple of fishermen up from Georgia. They were Texans, but like almost everyone else these days, they’d found themselves transplanted to new lands. The day was perfect, sunny and pleasantly breezy, and they shared a couple beers with us while we waited for the shuttle and talked about the fishing, our jobs and families. These fellows had done the standard Hazel Creek trip with lawn cart piled high with provisions: coolers, tarps, lawn chairs, frying pans, etc. Didn’t look like a bad way to go, but it did make me appreciate my simply-loaded 30 lb pack.

I don’t remember who started it, but on the boat ride back to Fontana Marina we got into a conversation about how tough it was to get around on the stream. The creek was high at spring levels, and it seemed every little stretch featured a treacherous channel of deep, swift water blocking upstream movement. One of the guys told how he’d carelessly stepped on a sloping rock that shot him into a chin-deep pool, ruining his iphone. I told how I’d narrowly avoided breaking my ankle when my right foot became wedged between two upwards-slanted rocks during a fall. We spoke of innocent-appearing stretches concealing deadly beds of rocks roughly the size and shape of bowling balls. Yes, it was a darn tough stream, we agreed. In some strange way, that pleased us all.

Take care,
Nathan

A few more pics:

Jason lays down some line in a beautiful pool.

Jason fishes a section of large plunge pools just as the rain began falling.

Jason at the Calhoun House.

Another typical Hazel Creek rainbow trout. Photo by Jason Kelley.

My little brook trout. Photo by Jason Kelley.

I wrote this essay about the one good day of fishing we had in Glacier National Park last summer.

I was hiking to fish a high cutthroat lake inside Glacier National Park with my father and my wife. Not the most orthodox of fly fishing parties, but then again I’m not the most orthodox of fishermen and fly fishing’s not the most orthodox of subcultures, so it all seemed natural enough.

When we finally scrambled off the steep hillside and down to the lakeshore, we brushed the limbs to the side for our first close-up look. At least half a dozen cutthroat trout were scattered around lazily sipping something from the surface. Unfortunately for us, a gentleman was already there casting to them. He appeared to be the only other fisherman on the lake, so we worked our way around the west shore, the eastern side being a shear slope of loose talus that we didn’t feel like tackling. Besides, the west side appeared to hold most of the shallow water when we took our first look from high above.

I found it tough to contain the jitters. Every fisherman must know something like this when there are big fish right there, and you don’t know if you can catch them. And I was far from certain. I don’t know why I have so much trouble catching trout from a lake. I mean, my whole life I’ve been catching bass and bluegills from ponds and lakes, and from streams so sluggish they might as well have been lakes. What’s so different about trout?

I suppose a lot of it boils down to me still being a swamp water bass fisherman in fact if not at heart. I just can’t get it out of my head that catching a fish from water that still, shallow and clear is impossible or at least highly unlikely. Most friends would call me an experienced fisherman, but the majority of that experience has taken place on the aforementioned ponds, lakes and muddy streams, and with conventional bass tackle instead of a fly rod. Trout are still a beautiful, exotic species. A handful of trips for trout every year just doesn’t saturate you with the confidence that comes from living and breathing fishing like I did for bass back during my early college years.

And it’s not just the lakes that continue to bother me. What is it about the bugs? I mean, with bass, you just toss something big, gaudy and meaty out there and wind it back any way you want. Eventually you’ll find a bass hungry and mean enough to eat just about anything. I’m beginning to think all that crap about the confident fly fisherman calmly identifying the correct insect, tying on an imitation and catching trout is just that. Crap. Here’s how it happens this time, which is fairly typical of my experience:

I climb out on a rock and look over the lake. There are several fish rising. What are they eating? I don’t see a thing on the water. If I didn’t know better, I’d say these fish had gone mad from hunger and were sipping at nothing, convinced they were dining on fat green drakes. Nothing’s flying in the air either. I try an old trick, that did actually work one magical day on the Lamar River, and brush the grass trying to stir any clinging insects to flight. Nothing other than a few scrawny grasshoppers, and I’m certain the fish aren’t feeding on those. I take my hat and use it like an aquarium net to seine the surface of the water. Nothing shows up in there either. So, I tie on an Adams. (more…)

In life you sometimes get a reminder, if you’re looking for it, of how good you’ve really got it.

A few days ago, I drug my son out to the beach to do some surf fishing. In all honesty, I think the only reason he went with me was because he’d been in trouble and was restricted from his lifeline – the Xbox. With nothing to do at the house, he probably figured watching Dad cuss on the beach was more entertaining than checking out the latest House episode.

We tossed some shrimp out, and even gave a topwater plug a useless twirl or two in the subdued surf of the early evening. Christian’s first hook up was a ladyfish – think of a tarpon, but instead of 50 lbs it’s 2. The fish jumped and ran like a sport fish is supposed to and, even though it was small, it lit up the afternoon. He immediately claimed superiority over me in fishing, loudly proclaiming me as THE Loser on The Beach, until I hooked a drum that probably would’ve gone 6 or 7 lbs. Then his competitiveness ebbed…

It turned out to be a mostly un-eventful outing. We caught a few more fish but really had nothing to come home and brag about. Rapidly running out of daylight, we left with sand all over us and a rumbling in the belly. I couldn’t tell then if he’d actually enjoyed himself, but I didn’t think it was all bad. Teenage boys are very difficult to read, and they oftentimes don’t even know how they feel themselves – they’re too busy trying to figure out how they’re supposed to feel.

Flash forward a few days. My son’s had a bad go of it at school, and my job hadn’t been much better. He came downstairs and plopped on the couch to catch an episode or two of Dirty Jobs with his old man. A couple hours pass, and we laughed at Mike Rowe fighting bed bugs in mattresses and cleaning out God-knows-what from the latest sewer pipe he’d decided to crawl in to. When the eyes started to get heavy and the hour grew late, he popped up off the couch to head to bed.

Just before making the right turn to head upstairs, he spun around and asked, “Hey Dad – you wanna go fishing Saturday morning?”

Now, I don’t care where you’re from our how you were raised, what your background is, how you get your jollies, nor where you fall in the political spectrum. But there is nothing in the world that feels better than having your kid WANT to spend time with you.

In this cynical world, with all the bickering and fighting, with all our problems and all we have to worry about, my son wants me to take him fishing.

Kids sometimes get a bad rap in our society. We see them through the jaded eyes the media paints them with, and too often come to expect them to be the apathetic, angry jerks we just KNOW they are. But every once in a while, every so often, a kid turns aside from the movies, video games and cell-phone texting and chooses to simply spend a morning with Dad. You can rest assured that unless God blows the whistle and we’re all asked to get out of the pool beforehand, Christian and I will be hitting the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, surf fishing in Satellite Beach, FL, during the early morning hours this Saturday.

And I’ll be smiling.

Matt

The Problem of Pain: No this isn’t another article about whether or not fish feel pain…

For a long time, I’ve thought the so-called Problem of Pain was the most persuasive argument against the existence of God. It’s certainly not the most rigorously logical argument, but it’s the one that strikes most deeply at whether or not I feel that God exists. In case you’re not familiar with the problem, it basically states that, given the amount of needless pain and suffering in the world, it’s highly unlikely that God exists, or at the very least, that an all-powerful, all-good, etc god exists. If He did exist, He would not allow these types of things to happen. I have found that I’m not alone in the assessment. I have heard from many that they could not believe in God solely because of all the evil and pain they’ve witnessed and experienced.

There are philosophical arguments, some of them very good ones, that attempt to explain why pain is necessary even if God does exist, but to some extent all these arguments feel “cold.” When we feel pain, we don’t want to hear an abstract argument. We want answers. We want to be comforted. We want to know that there is a reason, a point to all this. The problem of pain is such a difficult dilemma that, did the available evidence not lead me personally to the inescapable conclusion that God does in fact exist, I would probably have never become a Christian on the basis of the problem of pain alone. As it is, I have been forced, both by argument and personal experience, to accept that God exists and that the problem of pain is just something I am not allowed to understand in this life.

We all experience pain in this life. Some much more than others. I have not personally been subject to an abundance of tragedy. I have been very blessed. When most people talk about the problem of pain, they speak of overwhelming examples such as the Holocaust or severely abused children or terrible natural disasters. But when I think about the problem of pain, I see my uncle. My mother and her brother were raised in exceedingly tough conditions. I will not go into details, but it was not a good life. From what I knew of my uncle, he was a good man. He became a Baptist preacher. He was always jovial and loud and kind. He was a big man. That’s one reason why I was so struck when he developed liver cancer. For two long years, the cancer tore at him until he was only a shell of a man. My grandmother and mother were broken right along side him, and neither has fully recovered. This happened many years ago, and I still recall much of it. Even then, as a child, I questioned God angrily. How could He let this happen to someone like my uncle? But He did let it happen. And one day, my uncle died, like so many others.

Before he died, he wanted to go fishing one last time. He had his youngest son take him down to the lake, and he fished for awhile during the late evening. Somehow, perhaps miraculously, my uncle hooked and landed a four pound largemouth on a plastic worm. We have a photograph of him holding the fish with this enormous grin stretched across his face, his son standing beside him. For two years my uncle was in unspeakable pain, and I rarely saw that jovial side I had known all my life. But in that photograph, there he was again.

I don’t have all the answers. Anyone who tells you they do is lying. I don’t know why the world has so much pain. I don’t know why God allows terrible, nightmarish things to happen to innocent children. But I can tell you that I believe there is a God, and I believe he was there with my uncle that day at the edge of the lake. I thank Him for giving me so many good times on the water with my family and friends. I have seen Him in their faces, in the morning sky, in the storm clouds, in the trees as the wind whispers through them, in the beautiful colors on a trout’s side. He has blessed me so much through fishing and the places fishing has led me. All fishermen can be thankful that, despite all the pain we feel and witness in this life, fishing can do a bit to ease the pain for a time. For that reason alone, we can be confident that this sport we love holds at least some intrinsic value.

There are moments when God has granted me peace and a certainty that there is a reason to it all. Even if I can’t see the reason, I can see Him. For whatever reason, a hefty number of these moments have occurred in the outdoors.

My uncle never lost his faith. In fact, his faith was so strong that it carried many of us through his illness.

Take care,
Nathan

The first time I saw the Flint River I had a 60 year old real estate agent and an overanxious, but young and pretty, sales lady hovering over my every step. I’d like to say that sealed the deal on the house – the Flint, not the attractive sales lady – as I immediately envisioned fishing in my own river, but the yammering about the neighborhood, interest rates, and why NOW was such a GOOD TIME TO BUY affected my imagination and fantasy neurons.

Besides, I had to pee.

Now, four years later and on the verge of moving yet again, I look back and realize how blessed I was…

In May of 2005, I was toiling away for Citrix in Ft. Lauderdale, Fl., when I got a call from an old friend. He offered me a position working for NASA (through a contract) on Redstone Arsenal, so long as I was willing to ‘get up here’ within 2 weeks. I pondered the situation. On one hand, this was sunny South Florida, and that was, uh, Huntsville, Alabama. On the other, I and my family had a much greater chance of making it in to and out of any given store in Huntsville without getting stabbed than in Ft Lauderdale. Decision made, we made the call, pulled the trigger, and settled in New Market, with the slow but steady Flint gurgling a few hundred yards away from our front door.

At the time things were very surreal. So much so that – believe it or not – it took me a couple months to actually make it to the Flint for a fishing trip. Initially I wasn’t even sure it even held fish. The river was so slow and low – little more than a creek – I wasn’t sure anything worth catching would be in there. Then, one day, my neighbor across the street was sticking a rod into the back of his truck. I yelled over to find out where he was headed and, 10 minutes later, two relationships were born: my eternal lust for catching fish out of the Flint and a sincere friendship. Zack has been a great friend, neighbor, and fishing buddy for 4 years now, and continues to be – in my opinion – the most entertaining fishermen to go out with ever. *

That first fishing trip was nearly disaster. I had old line on a spinning reel that kept twisting itself into bird nests, and was totally unprepared for wading a river – something I’d never tried before in my hometown of Theodore, Al. My only saving grace was Zack was just as unprepared (and unskilled) as me, and carried along with him two very cold adult beverages.

I told you he was a good man.

We wound up catching, that day, everything but a smallmouth. Two largemouth, a few bream, some crappie and a freshwater drum Zack went ballistic over. I think, to this day, his “What the ___ is THAT??!?” continues to echo somewhere on the river. I still had no idea smallmouth were even in the river, but was pleased to know there were some fish worth going after.

Not long afterward I purchased a couple of tandem kayaks, and the wife and I decided to take their maiden voyage down the Flint together. The idea was to scout everything out, making sure it was ok for the kids. On that trip I, of course, took along one lone ultralight spinning outfit, ‘just to try’ while we were paddling. Among the many fish I caught that day was my first smallmouth. Ever. He would’ve gone 3 lbs on anyone’s scale, although to my adrenalin filled arms and endorphin soaked brain he felt and looked like a State record.

Pardoning a pun, I was hooked.

I’ve spent the better part of the past 4 years trying to pull smallmouth out of the river. Sure I’ve done battle with the other species, but I just can’t match the addictive rush I get from smallmouth blasting a topwater. Cocaine? Heroin? Supermodels? Forget it – THIS is the drug for me…

OK, I’d take a super model too, but you get the picture. (more…)

As a fisherman, you probably hear a lot about how some run of salmon isn’t meeting commercial fishing standards, how some particular subspecies of cutthroat trout out West faces extinction, how all the oceans are being depleted, etc. I suspect that for the average Alabama fisherman all this feels pretty distant. Our streams and rivers are full of the same fish they’ve always had, aren’t they? The talk on fly fishing sites about endangered fish got me curious about our area. I wondered how many of our fish are in trouble. I was vaguely aware of a few cases that have made the evening news, but in truth I was pitifully ignorant on the topic.

The Alabama sturgeon. Photo courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife Service.

So I did a little online research. As it turns out, we have quite a few fish facing serious obstacles to their continued existence, some to such an extent that we probably can’t halt their extinction even were we to try. Some of them I’m familiar with, some not so much. Our fish might not get the publicity of the salmons and the trouts, but that tends to endear them more closely to my heart. They’re like the poor little orphans of the threatened fish world. Some of the larger fish, like the sturgeons and spoonbills, have always fascinated me. As a child I heard whispered rumors, tantalizingly short on details, uttered by my father and his fishing buddies under the street lamp at the Mud Creek boat dock. There were big fish hooked deep in the river that couldn’t be moved with bass tackle, something large bumping a flatbottom jon boat during a night fishing trip, stories passed down from old-timers. Could they have been big sturgeon? Was that big fish you glimpsed rolling on the edge of the river a spoonbill? Maybe even a sturgeon?

My goal here is simply to make you aware of some of these cases. You may or may not care, but I think you should. Each one of these fish is a part of us, a part of what makes our state unique. It’s not just fish, either. There are some pretty cool plants and other animals that are in trouble. We lose a little bit of ourselves whenever one of these vanishes forever. The way I see it, God put them here for a reason, and even if that reason is for His own good pleasure, that’s plenty good enough for me to want to save them. Even if you don’t buy the God argument, I’m sure you’d agree that even the tiniest part of an ecosystem can have profound impacts on the whole, and, therefore, that all parts are deserving of our care and good stewardship. I figure the biggest reason many folks don’t care is because they’re simply unaware. If you have knowledge of something, it seems you’d be more likely to care about its continued existence. Like I’ve said many times on this site, there are rarely easy solutions to problems like these, but half-way to a solution is knowing there’s a problem. So with that goal in mind, let me quickly acquaint you with a few of Alabama’s threatened and endangered fishes. Links are included in the footnotes for further study. (more…)

We’re taking a day off from the Yellowstone Photoblog series to make space for this essay from Matt. Matt’s father passed away a year ago Sunday. Matt told me not to post the article if it wasn’t “in the vein of the site.” I replied that it’s exactly what this site is all about.

Today would have been my father’s 61st birthday. On Feb 1, 2008, cancer took him away from us 3 days after his birthday.

I’ve wept more tears and anguished too long over the loss of the hero of my life to adequately put into this – or any – tome. But writing this, even if it takes you a while to get to it, seems appropriate.

I tried to think, “What could I write or do today to honor him?” I’ve started this at least 3-4 times already and, each time, every effort seems fruitless and unworthy. Then it occurred to me that, if my Dad were standing right here, and we could do anything at all in the world, he’d probably hitch up the boat, throw the bream poles and some crickets in, and take me fishing.

I know, to some, that seems like a ridiculous thing – to have every worldly opportunity, yet go on a cane-pole fishing trip to a mudhole in the Mobile Delta. But, I’ve gotta tell you, if I could do anything at all with Dad right now, that’d be it…

We would climb into the truck, sipping coffee out of McDonald cups (Dad always said McD’s made the best coffee), and motor off, with the boat safely secured behind his single-cab Toyota. More than likely we’d go to Dead Lake Marina, just off I65 to put in, or we’d drive a little further up and launch in Mt. Vernon. Either way, he’d back it down and go park the truck while I held the tow line.

Throwing on a life vest and bracing for the cold run upriver, I’d stifle a laugh or two as he cussed the motor for not starting on the first key turn (we gave up the pull string long, long ago). Now flying upriver, boat up on plane, I’d hear him yell, “I LOVE THIS s$%#!”

And shivering a little bit with the wind passing by me, I’d agree with him. (more…)

No, this is NOT a map to my secret stream.

So. I’ve discovered this little trout stream that I suspect could be a real find. I’ve found excitingly few references to it in the literature. It’s got all the prerequisites of the “Secret Honey Hole.” It’s either a good nine mile hike through the backcountry or a perfectly short jaunt across private property on its lower end. The stream lies at a low enough elevation that it’s liable to be marginal trout habitat and full of suckers, or it could get enough spring-fed flows to make it ideal. It lies in an area often overlooked due to its lack of pretty much anything noteworthy. The only photo I’ve found of the thing is an old one featuring a guy holding a four pound rainbow.

Don’t ask me because I won’t tell you its name. I won’t even name what state it’s in. Could be Virginia, North or South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia or even Alabama. Somewhere in Southern Appalachia. Let’s just call it Little Two-Hearted Creek for the sake of easy reference. Another thing, when I say that I’ve discovered it, what I mean is that I’ve located it on a map and performed the required research on it’s fishing. There wasn’t much to be found. Basically it’s a small stream in not-that-great-in-the-first-place trout country that most people don’t bother to fish. There are a few intriguing points on it’s downstream end, but truthfully I can’t find much information at all. It goes without saying that I’ve already got a trip planned, as would any fisherman worth his salt, coinciding with prime spring conditions, or as closely as I can guess when that’ll be. Spring is always unpredictable. (more…)

I haven’t written anything in a while, so forgive me for the rambling take scribed below. Between my own work, sickness, the drought, a horrible display by my football team over a couple of months, and the onset of cold weather, it’s a miracle I’ve written anything at all.

One hundred and forty two years ago, we supposedly stopped fighting each other and the Civil War, mercifully, came to an end. At least that’s what the history books tell us…

In reality, the actual war may have ended, but the perceptions (and animosities created by them) that started the whole thing in the first place were never displaced.* Take the following little excerpt from a Los Angeles Times column in 1946:

“Columbia or Pennsylvania would make a much better game with the Pacific Coast Conference representative for the 1946 Rose Bowl than would Alabama and, in addition, such a game would have that intangible thing called ‘class,’ something it can never have with a southern club being one of the participants.. As for me, I’m kinda tired of hillbillies and swamp students in the Rose Bowl.”
* Dick Hyland, Los Angeles Times

I read this article a while back in an SI story about Alabama’s new football coach. I enjoyed the SI piece and was really in a good mood until I read this one paragraph, and instantly I was angry. And confused.

This article was written in 1946 – a full 23 years before I was even born. The War of Northern Aggression (the name true Southerners use to refer to the Civil War) occurred before my GRANDADDY was born. So why does it bug me? At all? Why do I feel the need to fight back, defend against, and verbally accost those who would say anything derogatory about the South? Is it genetic? Am I hard-wired to pull on the gray every time someone uses the word redneck, hillbilly or backwoods? Why, why, why? (more…)

Cable Mill in Cades Cove amidst autumn colors. I'm including a couple shots of the autumn colors in the Smokies last weekend, even though they really have next to nothing to do with my write up.

This weekend, I was up in the Great Smoky Mountains again. I’ve come to think of the Park streams as my home water, even though I live four hours away. It was a family gathering, so I wasn’t able to do much fishing. However I did manage to escape for a few casts at a popular picnic area just inside the park. This spot is known for smart, leader-shy, larger-than-average brown trout. I’ve mostly avoided the area due to the presence of lots of people, my past experiences with “slow” water in the Smokies, and the fear of failure such places have inspired. This spot has long, slow glides of smooth, crystal clear water. To top things off, the water was extremely low due to the ongoing Southeastern drought. My typical set-up (7.5′ leader with bushy dry fly) does little but frighten fish in such spots. I didn’t have waders, so I stayed on shore, which is actually best anyway.

Suffering from optimism, I tied a tiny blue-winged olive hairwing dun to a 6X tippet and went clumsily after them. I spotted a couple nice trout right away, but they weren’t actively feeding. I soon spooked them. I crept as stealthily as I could manage upstream toward the next glide, scanning the whole time for any sign of a big brown. There was one small “blind spot” in my vision where the glare was too great for my glasses to overcome, just in front of me and near the shore. As luck would have it, this is where the trout happened to be. A nice brown shot out from the bank about 10 feet in front of me. Appeared to be about 13 inches or so. That hopeless sense of despair set in that fly fishers sometimes get when the situation feels too great for them. But then I noticed another, even larger trout near where the first originated. This thing looked to be around 18″, a real monster for the Smokies. It already appeared antsy, but I thought maybe, just maybe. Before I could flip a cast, the trout exploded from the pocket, leaving a submarine-like wake stretching across the river. The despair settled back in. (more…)