Transcript: East Tennessee Fishing Report with Ellis Ward
S5, Ep 142: 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?
Ellis:
[0:12] I am on the other side of some sniffles, so I'm doing good, Marv. How are you?
Marvin:
[0:17] Yeah, well, you got to give yourself a little bit more credit than that.
They're not sniffles. I know those kids, they're like little Petri dishes.
They bring home like the bubonic plague, right?
Ellis:
[0:25] Yeah. This one was special, but not as bad as times in the past, so on the other side, feeling okay.
Marvin:
[0:36] Yeah, and you've kind of got that post-almost-eat hangover, from a good day of musky fishing too, right?
Ellis:
[0:43] Yeah, I had a great angler, first time fishing out here.
Kind of hard to call it, and a lot of people associate fishing in the southeast with either the reservoir systems or the new slash the James, which are very different, as you probably know.
But folks tend to lump those things together, and there's a bunch of rivers in between western North Carolina and East Tennessee that either feed into and are part of the TBA system and then there's some free stones.
So it was cool fishing a guy. I mean, when you have someone who's from the upper Midwest fishing a river, he's never fished before.
There's a big leap of faith to spend the time and the money on me in a river that is, you know, relatively, uh, we'll, we'll say quiet and like the musky population density documentation.
And so that, that moment's pretty cool. Um, watching the transition from, is that a carp?
Do you have a lot of carp in this river to, you know, keeping the fly in the zone, a couple more pop pops. And then, uh.
[2:12] Then we're we're on the bull ride there for a second um Just put puts a lot of things together from you know, he's he's casting he's working and didn't get to the boat, but, Uh a saying I hate that is so accurate sometimes is that's the way she goes, Yeah, it's uh, you know, I always say to be a successful musk angler.
Marvin:
[2:37] You have to find the joy in the little things Oh, yeah.
Ellis:
[2:41] And this guy is a great example in this goes to a lot, a lot of the podcasts and conversations you and I have were, you know, he brought his own rods and backup reels and, um, I tried a new line and after about an hour he's, he's going back to the other line.
Cause when you're, when you're casting, you know, not even the giant flies, but bigger rods and it has to be fun.
If you don't like casting and retrieving flies, it might sound redundant to a lot of people, but musky fishing to a large extent, streamer fishing as well, probably not your ideal activity, but it is those little things.
Marvin:
[3:27] Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing, right? Because I mean, I always say musky fishing is the most physically demanding fishing that I do in a season.
And, you know, the perpetual Casting and retrieving is one thing and it's always kind of a bummer, right? Because you bring that fly all the way back to the boat.
So you got a lot of work to do to get it back out again, but I would also say, you know, the thing that consistently wrecks me is I get more fatigue doing the figure eight than I do casting and bringing it back every time.
Ellis:
[3:54] Yeah. And there's, I'm going to take your phrasing with some of those brown trout eats and just getting reps.
You know, you can't replace trigger time. And so, you know, doing that eight and starting to change your angle a little bit so that two strips before you start going into your eight, you're actually teeing yourself up mentally.
And then that The whole time you're thinking, what if a fish eats now?
What if a fish eats now? What if a fish eats now? What if a fish eats now?
Get into your eight. What if a fish eats now? What if a fish eats now?
And it starts to make things a little less taxing because you're positioning your body a little more naturally than you would if you're kind of just.
[4:47] Man, what feels like stumbling through it, or it can feel that way.
But yeah, that transition into the eight and getting low, I mean, you add in 40 degrees and windy, it's a lot.
So one of the things with rotating through line and just finding stuff that works for you is trying to make it as easy as possible because at the end of the day, you do have to have something that might look appetizing to a muskie in the water in order to catch them.
So, if you can make it, just so everything you can do for each step to make it a teensy bit easier.
Six, seven, eight, nine hours into the day, it really builds up.
Marvin:
[5:36] Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, I know I spoke to, I guess, to Matt Riley last week, and he was saying that, you know, the kind of the muskie were kind of almost everywhere, right?
That it was cooling off and it was definitely muskie weather.
The smallmouth bite was kind of drying up a little bit, but it hadn't gotten cold enough, long enough to really kind of make it a lot easier to pattern the muskie?
Ellis:
[6:01] Well, Matt's got a, he's got muskie following his boat, I think.
You fish with that kid and he knows his water so well.
[6:15] I would say that the rivers that I'm fishing and where we're seeing them, And there's some holding, I would say, where they should be, but yeah, it's the, when you said there's muskie everywhere, I was just thinking of Matt being surrounded by muskie to just left, right and center, but everywhere as in they're not in their winter pools, they're kind of spread out.
And we're seeing a little bit of that pretty interesting dynamic on the French Broad, which is a free stone.
It is low. I mean, this area is in not record drought, but upper percentages is of driest and lowest that it's been in 40 or 50 years, and lowest rainfall totals, top five somewhere in that in the last 80 years.
And so when you're starting to look at...
[7:31] Pools, wintering habitat, and then you get into water that is very low, I mean, there's places I was saying today that, this is another redundant muskie observation, you look out on one side of the river and it's pretty shallow and it's a sandy bottom with a good amount of visibility, and if there are no musky there, that means there are no musky there. You can see everything.
And so if that is the case, and also it is known, or at least we think, that there's musky in the river, then they're to your left.
And so there's, again, sounds That's kind of silly, but if you know where they are, if you got the general location and as they move to the wintering spots, they're not going miles and miles downstream and back up and then missing you halfway in between.
And you can start to piece together with enough time in the water and bouncing around a little bit too.
So we did two different sections today.
[8:56] And would have thought the first one paid off, but that wasn't the one that did it.
So I don't want to necessarily say they're spread out right now just because the water is pretty low, but it's also in the fluctuating between lower 50s and upper 40s, and also the behavior of today's eat is telling me that we are sort of approaching that, float some things down.
I'm going to be hard pressed to say that there's an advantage to the fly as a rule, but when you're fishing structure like we're fishing and the response of some of these fish and how they're following and when they're eating, it can be pretty difficult to do that with some of the conventional baits.
So, um, it's, it's always fun to, to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
And, you know, I've got, got some more trips coming up in the next couple of weeks and I'll be out a bunch on my own and hopefully piece it together a little more.
Marvin:
[10:12] Yeah. And, uh, I've got an optimistic question from Brenner.
He, uh, we just talked about how low the water is.
He wants to get your thoughts on targeting fish in high water.
Ellis:
[10:23] I would pay the TVA, I don't know how much money I'd pay them, but I'd probably pay them to release some water during some of my guiding days.
It's been low.
So the high water, I would say there's a couple of different types.
One is going to be, we'll just say tailwater, where you're getting a consistent release of high water over the course of, let's say, four to eight hours. Sometimes it's all day.
The longer that release is, generally speaking, the more clarity that you're going to have in the high water.
So that is both high and relatively clear, which is very different from a non-tailwater setting.
[11:16] So for the tailwater setting, a lot of similarities here, but going to where there is, we'll say the bottom of the funnel, where within that funnel is all the food, And so if you think of, and some of this stuff I really, I had heard and kind of struggled with just believing blindly, but, you know, some of the faster rifflier stuff, sure there could be fish in there.
When it's ripping, if you're fishing a fly.
[12:01] It's going to be, you're going to be hard press to get a presentation in a fishy way in big water that is really fast and has direction changes within your cast.
And so another way to phrase that would be casting into a back eddy or an upwell.
You just, you really can't do a whole lot within the period of time that your line is sinking and coming back to the boat, and you know, you're casting 30, 40 feet.
You might only have a strip or two in there that would be a bite eliciting strip.
And even then, you're asking a fish to expend a lot of energy and come up closer to the surface through a bunch of these cross currents.
I really don't like going down very far. 18 inches is kind of as deep, or honestly deeper than I tend to go.
[13:16] And Marv, you've fished for me now a couple times. The ability to put a fly exactly where you want to put it, and in higher water, you're talking about rowing to the outside.
I don't care which river and what section you are, if you just fish it from the middle and you fish towards the bank, you might end up with a fish or two trying to eat a streamer.
If you approach each section and take away the rest of the river, including the other side of the river and the middle of the river, and you just look at that side and you think, All right, there's a bunch of brown trout here wanting to eat our flies.
We need to get it close to them because they're just not going to be out in the middle of the river expending energy.
Or if they're towards the bottom, our fly's not getting down there, unless you're talking about doing some sort of jig retrieve or ...
Basically, at that point, you may as well be drop shotting that thing.
So, to hunt the browns that are in predator lies in big water, it's almost like you're doing a pinch and zoom on your phone.
As you're going down the river, I mean, pick apart all of the good looking water.
So below riffles, great place in some of the poolier areas.
[14:44] Like the frog water that would normally be very unappetizing to the fly angler to get right up 20, 30, maximum 40 feet from the bank and just recognize that that one weed bed or this little depression against the bank.
[15:06] Relative to the next one that might not be as big, the weed bed might not be as big, the depression, the bank might not be as deep.
Maybe there's some structure above it that a heron or an osprey can't be attacking from.
You gotta look at all those spots and put your fly there.
I mean, get some grass on it.
We lose flies. is I'm getting flies out of trees in frog water almost more than I am in fast water because it's not a coincidence, oh, why are we getting into a tree when there's only one tree in this flat?
Of course we're getting into that tree. There's only one tree in the flat.
There's only one root ball in the flat.
There's only one osprey blocking structure in the flat. that's where we're going to cast there and we're going to get it in the worst places imaginable because that's where there's fish.
[16:05] So treating everything like there is going to be a fish there ready and willing and then for the fly angler, making it easy on yourself.
Man, I have so many more thoughts on fish in high water in both off-clarity, and in some of the tailwater clarity, but I think I'm going to reserve those for time on the boat with people and just say that even in the muddy water, when you can't necessarily see structure underneath.
You look at current breaks and slack water and you treat that as structure.
[16:50] Structure friction from where structure is against the water is what slows it down.
So banks, mid-river structure, those are all going to be where effort is low to, to hang there and if it is adjacent to current, that means they're close to the buffet line.
With all this fishing, you got to go in with faith and you got to recognize it might not happen, but you keep doing it and it will.
Marvin:
[17:25] Well, there you go. You know, folks, when we love questions at 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 when you're in a drawing for a two days of fishing with Ellis and a night at the Watauga River Lodge, and that's coming up, we'll probably do that maybe next time, or maybe the, uh, the first fishing report of the new year.
And, uh, Ellis, before I let you go, you want to let folks, uh, you know, know where they can find you to fish with you.
But I also know that you're probably, uh, up to your elbows and bucktails and Borax, right?
Ellis:
[17:59] Yeah, through some elbow latex slash neoprene gloves.
I'm trying to be, I forget to wear them all the time. That borax really dries you out.
Um, yeah, it is the website's elliswardflies.com and Instagram at elliswardguides.
Uh, best place to text, um, for, for booking.
Call me about whatever questions if I have bucktail and you know not that hot yellow but that sort of muted pale yellow that you've been wanting for a couple years or anything in between it's my cell phone at 5 1 3 5 4 3 0 0 1 9 well there you go well folks as I always say fall is my favorite time of the year to get out there and catch a few and since it's the season I want to wish everybody a happy Thanksgiving.
Marvin:
[18:58] Happy Thanksgiving, Ellis.
Ellis:
[19:00] Hey, happy Thanksgiving, Marv.
Marvin:
[19:02] Tight lines, everybody.