Transcript: East Tennessee Fishing Report with Ellis Ward
Transcript
Marvin:
[0:04] Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of the Articulate Fly, and we're back with another East Tennessee fishing report with Ellis Ward. How you doing, Ellis?
Ellis:
[0:13] Doing good, Marv. How are you?
Marvin:
[0:14] As always, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble, and I think I know you were trying to stay out of the weather business, but I think it's safe to say maybe we're on the other side of summer heat.
Ellis:
[0:25] I don't know why you've got to put me in a compromising position like that.
I'm going to go ahead and make the bold, I don't know why I'm doing this.
We're going to get another push at some point.
[0:41] I think in certain places, it'll be on the downward trajectory, but we're just, you know, we get weeks of it being consistently in the 40s and 50s in January and February.
So we're south enough for some hot days to be left.
I will say though that the weeks of the 98 plus, those were rare and unfortunate in the summer.
So I wouldn't say those are entirely behind us, but those steady, what feel like slogging week or 2 at a time of 90 pluses are, I don't know, I don't want to say they're in the rear view just because I don't want to get my expectations up.
That was a number of the last 2 months we had some stretches that were very dry, very hot with very big suns and subsequently very tough fishing.
So I'm thankful for the rain we've had and I'm pretty pumped for the seven and ten day forecast.
Marvin:
[2:04] Yeah, I guess the good news was was at least when it was hot, it was a dry heat, right?
Ellis:
[2:12] Yeah, it's not the heat. It's the humidity. That's some of the office speak that I sorely miss.
Marvin:
[2:19] There you go. So, we've got a cooling trend, right? I would imagine where you are, you're probably seeing nighttime lows well into the mid-50s at this point.
And so, how is that translating to what you're seeing on the water?
Ellis:
[2:35] Yeah, so because of how dry the summer has been, and I think I touched on this last time, but one of the cool parts of tailwaters is that you have a very insulated source of cold, clear water.
But when you get these big rains and it's been dry, high.
The tailwaters, the Wataugan and South Olson, along with the free stones for smallies and musky around here, they're adjacent to land. They're adjacent to farmland. There's little ag creeks. There's tributary rivers.
Those get super muddy.
One of the dynamics that you see with generation going on and off is that you have a muddy river from the ag creeks, and then all the little tributaries.
Let's say all those clear up and between it being muddy from the tributaries and all that clear water coming in, there's been a rise and a fall maybe twice from the dams.
[3:45] And we're talking between nine, it's going from from tens or low 100 CFS to 2,000 CFS.
So the river becomes giant in low water and small. So when everything clears up, it still takes another three or four days at a.
[4:28] Minimum to blown out. So, what that translates to is, in my opinion, awesome fishing opportunities where it's not necessarily blown out, but it is very murky and it's, you know, there's not a bunch of debris in the water.
It's basically like the water's clearing, but it happens over an extended period of time versus, you know, free stones happening with the coinciding with the fall of the water.
So, a little more prevalent on the Watauga.
Less so in the South Holston because there's less influence from tributaries and such.
When the water does clear, and especially in low water, when it's clear, we've kind of seen the the beginnings of fall bugs.
[5:32] On the Watauga, you'll see, you can see, just awesome summertime sulphur hatch equivalents of blue wings.
On both rivers, you can get some good midge action.
High fly fishing's been tough outside of low water situations, so I'll be looking for that to improve as we get a little later into the fall.
And then those nighttime lows are pretty important, especially for small mountain muskie fishing.
I've been getting out fishing for monkey recently with, starting a couple of weeks ago, up in the headwaters, the water's pretty cold up there anyhow.
And with some of the temperatures, even on the hot days, some of the temperatures at night being in the mid-50s, I was looking at peak water temperatures, three o'clock in the afternoon. It's so socked in and sheltered with shade.
Peak water temperatures were 68, 69. So in the mornings, they were like 64, which is a pretty cool dynamic to be looking at in late August, early September.
[6:59] And there's this cooling temps and all that can get fish fired up.
So, yeah, you know, that transition period we talked about a couple weeks ago feels feels like we're getting towards the other side of it.
Marvin:
[7:16] Yeah, and the great thing, right, is that whole transition thing is really, it puts a premium on being local, right?
Because you can't exactly time it, and so when the Browns start moving, you know, you want to be in Johnson City and be close because otherwise you're gonna miss it.
Ellis:
[7:35] Yeah, and there's a lot of different, I think, definitions of movement and what good fishing is and how to do it.
I've had one or two people call about trips, and I tell them that, maybe in different words, we're not going to be nipping in the middle of the river in December.
It's just not something that I agree with and certainly not something I'm going to lean on as a business practice.
[8:14] So that'll be something I'll talk about this time of year every year through December.
But the movement beforehand, the movement after, Lake Bish coming up, big creakers moving around things starting to get a little more aggressive in certain ways.
In my opinion that's already starting. You see certain sections just that were fishing great are no longer really fishing great and then other sections are just turning to complete fire.
I think the important part is that in conditions where otherwise I wouldn't really expect it.
So clearly there's, you know, when you start seeing that it's where other conditions are all the same as when I would say, yeah, I wouldn't really expect that.
That's where you're noticing some of the seasonal changes.
Marvin:
[9:16] Yeah, and to put a finer point on the public service announcement, you know, what we're talking about about fishing in December in the middle of the river is you're basically fishing onto fish that are on reds.
Ellis:
[9:32] To be fishing those, you don't need to be looking at a fish on a red and saying, I am going to fish to that red. You don't need to be snagging.
People have different opinions about using eggs.
If you're fishing in the middle of the river, and in particular tail outs, gravelly sections towards the end of pools right before ripples, If you're floating through that in December in a stream with brown trout in it, you're fishing reds.
There's really no other way. You can just say you're fishing, but there's reds below you.
So it's a reason, weight fishing, you see it a lot.
I think there's some play on the don't tread on me, but, you know, washing water, wading, starting this time of year, free stones, places that are a little more north, that process starts happening a little sooner.
You got to be mindful of what's, there's so many ways to fish, there's so many different places on the river, there's different species, you just don't need to be doing it.
Marvin:
[10:54] Yeah, and we'll leave it there for now because we're going to, I'm sure, revisit it a couple more times before we get to Christmas.
But got a really interesting question for you from Justin, and we were kind of debating before we started recording whether this was more of a skull crusher than the last question you had, but we'll see how it all shakes out.
So, Justin wanted to get your thoughts on how barometric pressure and moon phases impact targeting big fish.
Ellis:
[11:24] Yeah, I'm going to make this, I think, easier, on everyone and limit my answer to brown trout. Is that fair?
Marvin:
[11:41] That's fair. It's your fishing report too, by the way.
Ellis:
[11:44] Oh yeah, that's right. So it doesn't matter what you think. There's much doubt.
The reason why I'm saying that is the angling community for musky and the moons, there's a whole...
That's a different can of worms, I think, for the purposes of fishing reports.
So barometric pressure, I think that there's a lot to it.
I started to see this before I realized what I was doing, but while wade fishing in Pennsylvania and Virginia, Maryland, I would seek out the prefrontal conditions more out of comfort because I found, especially in the winter, I found that when there is some humidity in the air and cloud cover, it coincided with less wind and ice doesn't form on your guides as easily when it's humid.
[13:06] Even, you know, 33 degrees and humid, you don't have ice on your guides as easily as when it's 33 degrees and dry, dry 33 degrees. And there's less wind.
It's just more comfortable.
And, you know, then I started noticing fishing is a whole lot better.
And so, is it the cloud cover?
That has a lot to do with it. It's kind of hard to disentangle parts of this equation because when you have a falling barometer, generally speaking, it coincides with some cloud cover relative to less cloud cover when the barometer was in the position it was in before it's falling.
And when you have a plummeting barometer, generally means the front's coming in and you see fish activity for sure.
I'm going to stop myself short of proclaiming any sort of truth or real knowledge in this one, but I will float it.
[14:13] The barometric pressure, so how much air is, how much the air weighs, right, at a given time.
Would or can influence the behavior of anything that would have to either fight against it or use it.
And so when you look at bug activity, and this is where it's like, am I a burnt out trout guide or is there some simple correlation in this observation?
When you look at a falling barometer, and you're also out in the trout stream and it's a buggy time of year, you see far more bugs coming out while that barometer is falling and when it's low than you do when it's high.
So whether or not that's some sort of implication on surface tension of the water, I'm not sure.
[15:17] I don't know if I'm going to be around long enough or pay enough attention to that to get measurable data, but I do know from experience that being out there during falling barometers, during low barometers versus high, you effectively are looking at chummed water versus when the bugs aren't moving around a lot and there's a big sun, bay fish are weary.
Things are getting eaten by ospreys and herons all the time, and that's why you should be fishing under trees.
More bugs start coming out when the browners are falling, more fish start eating those things. It's just the whole system starts moving around a little bit more.
And yeah, I mean, absolutely. For big fish, when there's just like saltwater or any other, food chain, you got smaller things getting eaten by other things, and then other things eat those sort of bigger things.
[16:28] And yeah, you're going to have a set of conditions where where a big trout is more inclined to feed, and that very much goes into two other things.
Sets or two other conditions, one of which is, is it going to die?
Does it think it's going to die? And so that's cover and water clarity and cloud cover.
So falling barometer aside, outside of really very rare situations that I don't think are worth even exploring, Fallen barometer aside, that big fish hunting time can be capitalized on when you also have, some of these other conditions.
So, it's not like a fallen barometer is just going to have two-foot trout swimming around the stream in broad daylight, low clear water.
So you need some water clarity, ideally elevated flows, ideally some cloud cover or other inclement weather happening.
And then the last one is your fishing.
So falling barometers aren't free fish and bitiness, you know, when it's just sometimes they're just after it.
[17:51] And none of it means that fish are going to jump on your line.
So you still have to be working in order to capitalize on that stuff.
And you'll still find, I mean, some of the most frustrating days I've had are when everything is lined up.
And maybe that's because the only fish going at that point are the big ones, and so you're not going to see very many.
But it happens where all those conditions are right, and you just can't get them to go.
[18:24] Way to do that is to continue to fish as though they're going to be next to impossible to catch, which means you're casting, you're retrieving, your thought process, the sections you're fishing.
None of that should change, and you should assume it's going to be really tough.
Because, yeah, just you have all these perfect conditions.
That just means that things are sort of tipped in your favor. I'm going to stop there.
Marvin:
[18:58] ISKRA Yeah, it's kind of like Joe Dirt says, you can't have no in your heart, right?
Ellis:
[19:09] SABLUDOWSKY There is way more truth to that one than I'd like to admit.
Marvin:
[19:12] ISKRA Yeah, there you go. And so, you know folks we love questions on the articulate fly you can email them to us you can dm us on social media Whatever is easiest for you.
And if we use your question, I will send you some articulate fly swag and We're gonna enter you know drawing for two days of fishing with Ellis and a night at the Watauga River Lodge So folks you got to get us your questions Instagram is probably the best way but we'll take them in any social media channel or email address you want to use and you know I'm maybe more optimistic than Ellis.
I think we're getting into the cooling front where he's starting to see trees change leaves. I think trout season in the southeast is gonna be great if we can get a little bit of rain. So, folks, you owe it to yourself to get out there and catch a few.
Tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Ellis. Appreciate it, Mark.