Saturday we decided to hit wild water again, however this time we headed somewhere new, to a stream that I’ve yet to fish in the Cohutta Wilderness. It was a bigger body of water than the previous stream and one that we could only access by hiking in, which is always appealing because it keeps most of the riff raff off the water. We stopped at Blue Ridge Fly Fishing on the way in to see if we could re-stock our supply of flies that had been working at the cabin. They were also able to offer advice on what might work where we were headed. We continued on our way and parked at a trailhead along a headwater stream.

The trail was a gently sloping downhill which took us two miles to where it met the river, then it was just a matter of finding a good place to start fishing. When we got down to the river there were some folks camping streamside and even a few other fishermen, so we hiked a bit further downstream before we began fishing.

The river was beautiful and had more vertical water than I thought it would, no complaints here, that is something we were use to fishing on our smaller streams. Water levels were great so holding water was everywhere. It didn’t take long to catch fish either, I believe Blake had a hit on the first spot he fished while we were just crossing. We started with dries, throwing yellow bodied Adams, per the advice of the guy at BRFF, and that’s all I fished the whole day, I was getting hits relatively consistently. Blake switched it up and started nymphing the deeper runs and having success as well. The combo worked well since he could work the deep water and I was picking apart the pocket water. Fish size was slightly larger than the day before and I had a solid fish rise at the end of the day, but still no above average fish brought to hand on this day.

 

 

We stopped in Blue Ridge to get dinner and pick up more beer before heading back to the cabin. A couple things to note: the food at the Black Bear Bier Garten was good, but the portion size of our sandwiches left us wanting more – in Louisiana it is generally the other way around, maybe I’m jaded. Also, for a “Bier Garten” the selection of beer was quite lousy, though I did have an excellent Mother Earth Dark Cloud, something I wouldn’t have been able to get back home. One would think that the “Beer Barn” would be an excellent place to find a selection of beer however that wasn’t the case, according to Dad we should have went to Ingle’s. Lessons learned.