Transcript: Casting Angles with Mac Brown
Transcript
Marvin:
[0:04] Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of the Articulate Flower, back with another Casting Angles with Mack Brown. How are you doing Mack?
Mac:
[0:12] I'm doing great, Marvin. How are you?
Marvin:
[0:13] As always, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble and you know, it's been kind of crazy. We had a little bit of rain move through this holiday weekend and the temperatures have been great for trout fishing.
What have you seen on the water?
Mac:
[0:25] We had a lot of caddis today. We started pretty early in the morning, had a little bit of blue wing action, and that was pretty much it.
It was caddis and blue wings, and the fish were really liking this overcast weather. It stayed overcast until about 1230 here in Bryson.
And a lot of fish up feeding near the surface, you know, so that's always a blast.
And we didn't really get the rain, like east of here got a lot of rain, but we had just a trace of rain Saturday night, just enough to wet the driveway, but not really like accumulation and bring water levels up.
Marvin:
[1:01] Yeah. I mean, interesting too, right? Because I mean, it's been, when we say it's been cool, you've had lows down in the forties probably for the last week.
Mac:
[1:10] Oh, yeah. It's been wonderful to be almost June and to have this cool a temperature.
And even for the high today, I think we hit probably in the mid sixties today.
That's what it felt like anyway, and in the 40s in the evening, it's just perfect.
The water temp's still really cold. It was in the 50s. I took a water temp this morning, and on the Tukasiji, on the tailwater there, it was 53 degrees in Bryson, so that's still a fantastic temperature for this late in May.
Marvin:
[1:36] Yeah, and so, you know, we've got, you know, a week or so, give or take, left on delayed harvest, and so those fish are going to start to get taken, and, you know, it may be cool now, but it's going to get warmer in the summer, and we're going to have less water.
We thought it'd be helpful to talk to folks about kind of how to make that transition to off the DH water or fish in DH water when there are fewer fish and also getting into the park when there's less water and it's low and low and clear.
Mac:
[2:06] One good strategy, like if we get up into late June, once the DH opens up, it'd probably be to go high.
Just go high. A lot of roads you can get high. You don't have to walk 4,000 feet up unless you just want to, but you can access a lot of those high elevation creeks, a lot of them, by driving.
By driving up higher, and you'll have better water temps, and you'll have better action.
A little bit higher and cooler streams. The other thing is look at topos, watch topo maps and look and see which streams get more shade.
A lot of people don't do that, but if you look at the drainages and how steep some of the drainages are, you can have streams that stay almost void of sunlight also.
So it's just about looking at the topo and which way the creek orients.
Marvin:
[2:56] Yeah, so I guess right in an ideal world, you'd want something really steep that faced right?
Mac:
[3:04] Yeah, it faces west or faces east. Because here we don't have many streams facing west because on this side of the national park, Bryson City, so most of the stuff here would be dealing with would be to have steep, really steep gorge that faces more due east.
Marvin:
[3:22] Got it.
Mac:
[3:22] You know what I mean? Because the water comes off the park that direction, so it'll still give you the same benefit. A good example, like up in the park, like Bumgarner.
Bumgarner Bend is a good example, up in Deep Creek. If you look how steep that bend is on the creek and look at where it orients, I mean, you can get in there and not have a lot of sunlight on the water the whole day. So, I mean, that makes it pretty good.
Marvin:
[3:46] Yeah, got it. I understand you're basically talking about fishing really kind of tight valleys and creases, even on the eastern face. was thinking more about the sun coming up and beating on the side of the mountain until it kind of moved over so you'd want later in the day and on the West Side.
Mac:
[4:03] Yeah, and a lot of times what will happen is like on these park streams you'll have a ridge that blocks it from the morning sun, you know, because it's low in the morning and then it gets higher and higher.
So what's really more critical is up around, say, 11 until about 4 o'clock.
What's going to block it at that time period?
Because it's usually, you know, that's where it gets the smokies.
The name usually were cloudy every morning, like on Deep Creek, we're usually cloudy and foggy, you know what I mean, in the morning.
It doesn't burn off usually here till about 10.30 in the morning.
And it's different. Other places like East Tennessee, it's sunny in the morning.
You know, it doesn't have the thick fog.
But here, it's like every morning, it's that way on Deep Creek and the valley.
And so I think that makes a big difference too. Because the morning, it's not as critical because it's not like clear. Like where you live, it's probably clear in the morning, isn't it, in Charlotte?
Marvin:
[4:55] Yeah, more or less.
Mac:
[4:57] And here you have like this fog that you can't see 60 feet in a lot of the mornings.
You know, cause it's that foggy in the morning early. So, so yeah, I think, I think a lot of times if you can have a ridge, I used to study topo maps a ton, even in the winter time.
I mean, we do it for the opposite reason, actually in the colder seasons to where we want to have some thermal exchange from sunlight, you know, to have better water temperatures.
And so we can use it both, both directions. You can use it in favor and all the seasons, you know.
Marvin:
[5:29] Yeah, and if we head high, right, those fish are going to still be pretty opportunistic because they don't get a lot of opportunities to see the dinner bell getting shaken around, but you probably are going to at some point need to go longer and lighter on your leaders, right?
Mac:
[5:46] Yeah, and probably a lot of surface. I mean, I mainly, when I go up high, I really throw dry flies pretty much exclusively still.
If I go up high, I don't really find any need to try to wet fly or nip fish up high because they're so opportunistic.
You take a couple of plain common, you know, take the two most common dry flies in the universe, be it parachute an elk arachnidus, you can do all kinds of damage with just those two patterns.
I wouldn't overthink the dry fly. Literally, if you want to narrow it to one, just say take an elk arachnidus.
Marvin:
[6:22] Yeah, and then if you wanted to make it a little more complicated, do yellow and orange.
Mac:
[6:27] Oh yeah, you want to be like diverse, you know. But yeah, I mean we throw a lot of yellow elk arachnidus this time of year, just because of the pearly stones, you know, the little yellow And there's still a lot of things that are, that are yellow up in June, you know, so that's a, yellow is a really good, good color throughout June, July.
That's a really a fantastic coloration. Yeah.
Marvin:
[6:49] And so if we come back down the mountain and we're talking about fishing the tuck, I mean, we've talked about this before, you know, that river is big enough that, you know, it's not like some smaller pieces of DH water where the first weekend people are going to clean it out pretty well.
Pretty well. So, there are going to be fish there kind of throughout the summer and one way you beat the heat is you fish early and you fish late, but what are some other tips for folks?
Mac:
[7:11] Also, rain. In the summer months when it gets hotter, the rain actually has a huge thermal exchange to cool it down quick.
So, I fish a lot. If we get an afternoon rain, boom, hit the water.
Hit the water during the rain and even right after the rain, it's going to bump it up several degrees and make it cooler and you'll find activity jump every time with a rain shower when it's getting hot.
But yeah, the tuck's going to get, main thing that'll trigger the tuck to where it's time to no longer be out there, is once you start seeing the water temps hit around 67, 68, it's time to go somewhere else.
It's going to be slow. You're not going to have, even if it's all the regulations, anything goes kind of thing, it's still not going to be well.
It's not going to do well after it's about 67, 68. It's not worth it.
Marvin:
[8:01] Yeah. Any point for folks to kind of try to fish the cool pulses of water when they get released? Because you'll get to that time of the year where the cold water is going to be whatever Duke Energy's releasing on the tuck.
Mac:
[8:12] Yeah, that would be more significant, like where the east and west fork come together, which is about, you know, from Bryson, about 25 miles upstream.
And that's where that would really pay off. But I don't think that really helps that much this far away, like this down, you know, we're really downstream from where the east and west fork come together.
And it's not like the nanohalotype temperatures, you know, it's not like in the low 50s, upper 40s. By the time it gets 5, 10, 15 miles downstream, it really doesn't matter because it's already warmed up like everything else.
I don't think that helps us that much in Bryson because we're so far downstream, but I think it helps immensely above the campus there at WCU.
Marvin:
[8:57] Got it. Folks, we love questions on the Articulate fly. If there's something you want Mac and I to talk about, just shoot us an email or DM us on social media.
Mac, that you don't have any, well, you got weekend schools, I guess, skill schools during the summer, but you don't have week-long schools until the fall. If someone wanted to get information on your summer schools or book you for a day on the water, where should they go find you?
Mac:
[9:21] The best place would be macbrownflyfish.com. That's the easiest, you know, email, phone number, all that contact info is on there.
We have a, you know, Mike Brown fly fish for Instagram, Facebook, and that kind of social media stuff too.
But most of the time I'd rather get a phone call or a text or an email.
So I don't look at the other.
Marvin:
[9:43] Well, you know, folks, yo it to yourself to get out there and catch a few.
Tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Mac.
Mac:
[9:50] Tight lines, Marvin.