General Conditions for
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Plenty of water makes for happy trout on the wherever you fish! After almost three years of 'exceptional drought' it's nice to have water in the streams we fish, and that's the case throughout the area: here's a nice link covering water levels for the whole state where you can get an idea of how extensive the drought relief has been. The problem emerging now is the heat, and the solution to that is to hike a little higher for your fishing. Take your lightest fly rod and wade wet in the backcountry streams for a cooling off from the hot pavement of town, and don't forget to release those beautiful brookies...
Dan Velinsky with a big Watauga River brown trout
Waking up to pouring rain knowing you're about to spend the whole day in an open boat will test the will of anyone, but Dan Velinsky toughed it out on the Watauga river at the end of March, 2009 and was well rewarded for it.
The flow of water in the background is evidence of the drought-relief we've been experiencing lately in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee.
Let's go fishing!
Compare these two views of the same stretch of the Davidson River, the one on the left taken July 31, 2007 and the one on the right taken in March, 2008: in March, we had water; by August '08, we were in worse shape than the picture on the left...
Here's Dave Gage in the back-country last season with a pretty, wild rainbow (click the image to enlarge it)
Here's an ecstatic young Jon Hoban on the Davison River on Friday, April 13, 2007--not an unlucky day for him, obviously (click the image for a larger view)...
We fished a couple of different back-country streams back in February. One holds rainbows, the other browns, and we rarely see any other species on either stream. Here's an example from each of these two backcountry streams. That's stream A on the left and stream B on the right (click the images for larger views)...
(Altamont Anglers operates on Pisgah National Forest Rivers under USDA Forest Service Permit #PIS6560)
