Transcript: East Tennessee Fishing Report with Ellis Ward
S5, Ep 125: East Tennessee Fishing Report with Ellis Ward
2023, Marvin S. Cash
The Articulate Fly
http://www.thearticulatefly.com
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? Doing well, Marv.
Ellis:
[0:12] How are you?
Marvin:
[0:14] As always, just trying to stay out of trouble and took a look at your weather, and you're cooling off, but not quite as much as other places, and you might have just a touch more rain in your forecast than other places too.
What are you seeing on the water? Yeah.
Ellis:
[0:29] Yeah, I like both of those things and really the note about not as much as other places because it's kind of a, that's the trend throughout winter.
So we get, you know, we get cooler and it's kind of the 30s and 40s or persist as opposed to plummeting.
But yeah, some nights in the 30s and 40s and you know, on the musky waters, the free stones, and that's, I fish and guide on some headwaters of free stone, and then, you know, some of the components and little bits and pieces of the reservoir system.
But those are, you just look on the graph, and.
[1:22] You know, six, seven, eight, nine, ten degrees in the last two days.
So it's gotten chilly, you know, it's gotten into the 30s, and I like those temps.
For that to come with rain at the same time would be awesome, but hasn't necessarily been enough to make a big difference, I would say, and some of the flows.
What we do have on moving back to the tailwaters, the South Holston and Onataga are some pretty consistent releases that are occurring on the South Holston.
It's basically sun up, sun down, if not before and after.
And then on the Pog, They're kind of bouncing around a little bit, but some of the mid to late afternoon releases can be tough unless you're fishing up top or the middle river.
If you want to fish the lower river in high water, that water's just not getting down there until sunset.
[2:30] So a general theme would be that a lot of the bug activity that you're seeing are going to occur on the low light portions of the day, and I've said this before as well but worth repeating, low light portions of the day can include, let's say, all day.
And I'm starting to think more and more about some of these fall and winter days where it's overcast and the river's basically empty and the waters get down to, I want to say low 40s, really mid 40s, and sometimes they'll be lower than that, but you get happy and healthy plant and bugs and hatches, the blue wings that had on those blue wing days were super overcast and kind of drizzly.
That's going to start happening more and more frequently.
[3:48] And on the South Holston, it's really, if you're seeking out risers, I would suggest strongly to either consider a brown trout eating a mouse, a rising fish, or poke around on the lower ends on foot.
Before the early morning release has an opportunity to get down there.
There are some pockets of risers, but the bugs are just getting real small, and those pockets are...
They can be tough and they're only accessible in high water on foot.
[4:36] And then on the Watauga, yeah, it's sort of a mix bag there where really the atmospheric conditions are going to dictate how much of a hatch you're getting.
You're really seeing most of the larger yellowy bugs go away, sulfurs, PMDs, things of that nature, and it's more of the 18 to 20.
2020 starts to become home about this time of year and I'm a big supporter of fishing two dries mostly because that second dry I like to fish something real small like a 24 and just small and also really sparse just a little bit of gank hanging right in the film and and you can't see it.
And if you're casting a little too violently or with too much of a downward angle, Q, you and Matt Brown talking.
[5:44] I mean, to hell with spooking the fish, you're just gonna put your fly out of the water when they're that small.
So things in a certain sense become more focused on finesse.
Traffic on the water is reduced significantly so that it certainly helps some of the spook.
But yeah, lots of, lots of blue wings on the good days and, and looking to, to get those bugs down, down into the low twenties.
Marvin:
[6:18] Yeah, there you go. And got a, got a question from my, I would arguably say, maybe your spirit animal friend from, from fleas and meat. I saw this question.
I was like, this is the one, this is the one.
And, uh, and we've been getting a bunch of those. And so we love it.
Folks keep sending them in that, uh, Napoleon dynamite mojo work for us.
And, uh, fleas and meat wants to know, you know, what is your first fall technique for converting follow fish into biting fish? Yeah.
Ellis:
[6:51] Uh, that, that, that dude ties, you tie, you tie some good stuff and you tie some swim bugs and some other stuff that I've shared.
So I always appreciate that. if nothing else, for the feedback that what I am sharing in content isn't just going out into black holes.
I think it's up in Michigan, so it's probably getting pretty nippy.
So in my experience, I would say that fishing in the fall, all, once you get to a following fish, I'm just going to qualify this as like a general rule them. Um. Om.
[7:38] Because there's only so much you can do, right? You can't switch flies when you get the follow and just press pause on the trout and be like, oh, you know what, I'm just gonna, and then go back to fishing it again.
So you gotta go with what you're fishing already. The reason I say that is that, unless you're getting swipes and nips, so I guess I can touch on that briefly too.
But the first thing that I do always is shorter and faster.
[8:10] Bigger kills, faster movement, faster twitches.
And so when you're stripping, that's going to, I guess, sound like, instead of strip, strip, strip, it's going, then you get a follower, it's gonna sound like strip, strip, strip, strip.
So the period of time that you're letting it hang, you should try to make that a little more pronounced relative to the period of time that it's moving.
And during the period of time that it's moving, you're using fingers.
You're not using, you're not pulling your line. You're really just tapping your line.
And it does a couple of different things. You know, once you get a follower, right, you guys are in the friend zone and you want to be aiding.
So you need to, your current moves are not enough, right? You got to break, show up in a Camaro with ACDC.
You got to do something a little different. And then, so that's kind of the cadence change.
[9:18] What I refer to as the kills, that pause between your strips, giving you the bigger kill, exploring your kills, changing that kill cadence.
That's when they eat, even on the two-hand burns, they're eating when there's these little brief moments where they have their opportunity.
So you need to give them an opportunity. And this is why.
You hear so many, oh, I was just at the boat and you should have seen this mondo trout.
Well, yeah, because you finally gave it a kill. You were just stripping it back and maybe your line wasn't tight. It was just pulling through the water.
It wanted to eat. It was just waiting for an opportunity.
[9:57] So most of the time when this is all going down, either on foot or on a boat, By the time you see you have a following trout, you have maybe two rod lengths, but probably one rod length from tip to fly, which means ideally you're fishing under two or three feet of leader.
You're only working with six, seven feet of fly line to be stripping, and that's assuming that your tip is in the water.
So with your tip in the water and you have a fly being retrieved eight feet away from the tip, at that point you can't do any more, you just run out of real estate.
So effectively what you're doing is getting more of those kill triggers or the eat triggers within the kills.
You're trying to maximize as much of that as possible and then you're going to be stopping it more abruptly before, during, and after your strip cadence starts to become faster and shorter.
[11:07] And that just buys you time. A lot of the times you're just going to run out of real estate because you don't want to stop moving it entirely.
You just want to give it those there's more pronounced pauses as you're doing faster twitches.
I think that if you're going, if you're looking at this more like I'm getting follows and let's say I'm fishing a dungeon and I want to get eats, that's where you get to, you have data and so you get to to work with your data and start switching flies.
I mean, and this is where it's not going from a white dungeon to an olive dungeon.
Go to a peanut or a Creolex. The Creolex is tiny and flashy.
Peanut is a little bigger and sort of muted. And then, you know, start fishing a changer and just recognize that.
[12:06] As you're going through that spectrum, I would say rule of thumb would be that as you size down, you may start getting more of those followers converting to eats.
You are also probably going to encounter, if it's bitey out, you're getting a lot of followers anyways, you're probably going going to start converting eats from fish that aren't giant.
I will always say that if you're going out and getting 10 inch ground trout to stream out of structure into a streamer, that's a good day.
If you're out hunting and you want that special fish, if you have some bitingness, fall, spring, winter, I really don't care.
[12:56] Making sure you sort of stay within reason and kind of deviate from what you know is sort of working and not just say, oh, I got some followers, now I'm going to fish musty flies.
But yeah, I mean, I've done it. I've had days where you work up to that and say, well, what can happen now?
And if you start going down more towards the Creel X or even the Clouser, you may be getting commitment, but you also may be getting commitment out of fish that would otherwise, you know, once you go up to six, seven inch changers, those fish are probably not going to show themselves.
So it's a bit of a pick your poison there.
And yeah, I'll just, I'll just summarize by saying this again, I know I'm at my, um, Marv's going to put me down with a train gun soon, but shorter and faster movements.
Once you see that follow and let them eat.
Marvin:
[13:55] Yeah. Do you see the little red dot on the laser scope?
Yeah, there you go. So, uh, so the, uh, so folks, we love questions on the articulate fly. You can email them to us. You can DM us on social media, whatever's easiest for you.
And if we use your question, I will send you some articulate fly swag.
And then we're going to enter a drawing for two days of fishing with Ellis and a night at the Watauga River Lodge. And, uh, Ellis, before I let you hop this evening, you want to let folks know where they can find you so they can book in fish with you?
Ellis:
[14:33] Yeah, Instagram is a good way to follow with a little more detail at elliswardguides and website is elliswardflies.com.
And And the best way to just contact me, ask questions, book a trip is my cell phone at 513-543-0019.
Marvin:
[15:01] Well, there you go. Well, folks, as I always say, fall is my favorite time to get out on the water. Yield it to yourself to get out there and catch a few.
Tight lines, everybody.
Tight lines, Ellis. Appreciate it, Marv.