Transcript: Casting Angles with Mac Brown
S5, Ep 148: Casting Angles with Mac Brown
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 Casting Angles with Mack Brown. How you doing, Mack?
Mac:
[0:12] I'm doing great. How you doing, Marvin?
Marvin:
[0:14] As always, just trying to stay out of trouble, and I imagine a few folks in western North Carolina had to build an ark last weekend.
Mac:
[0:21] I believe they did. We had quite a bit of rain Saturday, and the majority of it Saturday.
Probably another half of a Friday, but yeah, it was good.
We brought the river up from, I looked at it the other night.
It was 500 CFS all last week, and then that rain event brought it to 6,000.
So that was a, a 12 fold increase of water level on the Tuxedege.
Marvin:
[0:46] Yeah. And I guess, you know, there are kind of two things. I mean, we'll talk about this cause we feel like we were been talking about fishing midges and blue wings a little bit too much.
We'll talk about, you know, fishing, rising water, high water and falling But, you know, to get there with a rain event, you, you know, you basically had a low pressure system come in and that affects the fishing, you know, before the storm, during the storm and after the storm, you want to kind of let folks know kind of what that does to the fishing.
Mac:
[1:11] Sure. It made it really tough when it, when it dropped, when it dropped big, it dropped a lot of millibars there on, I think it was Wednesday is when it did the big drop. And we were out on the water and it was just like really tough.
No matter what you did, it was tough. A bunch of other boats out there and everybody was going through all the motions and fish were just not wanting to play on the dropping barometer as big as it dropped.
And the next day after it was stabilized, it stayed at that same low level, fished a lot better once it wasn't moving around.
Once it stabilized, then we had the overcast weather and all the attributes of saying good, you know, good hatches and fish ought to be happy and they were happy.
And then we had the rain. So then it's a whole different tactic.
And I guess the reason I kind of thought it'd be a good thing to talk about with fish, a drop in barometer, a stable low barometer, then it starts going up and you got the floods.
So you've got basically every kind of condition off of that four or five day window that you'll have, you know, time and time again, and it really changes the game.
Marvin:
[2:17] Yeah, and so, you know, what do you, I mean, obviously we see the fish sulking, you know, when you see them becoming a little bit more active, you know, once the barometer kind of settles out, you find it under like chase streamers, I mean, what's the behavior that you see?
Mac:
[2:32] What worked good for us, and we were up in some wild, just wild trout water, from a freestone that's pretty close by, is going into those deeper winter holding spots, you know, the waist-deep water.
I mean, when I say waist-deep, like in a little freestone that's coming out of a national park, I mean, that's about the size of a deep hole.
And so, it's relative. I mean, out in the Cocosilla, it might be 11, 12 feet of water in a deep hole, but on a mountain stream, five to six feet is a pretty much considered a deeper hole.
And I like doing a lot of the the jig action flies like the crayfish patterns.
I use those a lot to jig those in the winter holding spots.
Little tiny sculpin patterns.
Really small. I'm not I'm not talking three to five inch type sculpin.
I'm talking about sculpin like the width of your thumb.
Like the ones that hatched out in September and then also some of the leech patterns, you know, I like to throw some of the different leech colorations like that in the winter.
And so just to get in those deep spots and just get real active and proactive with your movement of those flies, that can be really a good ticket.
Like once they're happy, you know, and they're willing to play ball again, that's, that's one of the real good tactics in the winter time.
Marvin:
[3:53] Yeah. And are you fishing those flies on like a jig hook or not?
Or, you know, are you kind of doing that or are you just fishing kind of regular flies and, and jigging them?
Mac:
[4:03] No, they're all on jig hooks and some of them are on balanced, like some of my tie balanced, um, like the balanced leech that we use on the lakes in which it basically taken another appendage off the front, you know, still on the jig hook, but in other words, the fly doesn't go down with the bead first and the tail up in the air, it goes down totally, you horizontal, which a lot of times, I've seen that, you know, it definitely makes a big difference on lakes.
I think a lot of times that makes a big difference on moving water as well.
So I think the jig hook game, a lot of fish start seeing a fly, dive, head, farce, that's not really how a lot of those types of patterns go up and down.
I think a lot of times it's more of a horizontal configuration of going down, sinking horizontal, which gives it a slower sink rate, which can be pretty, just for mixing it up, I think, because you can't get that with a regular jig hook.
You'll never get that horizontal appearance, you know, because you lower it.
Marvin:
[5:07] Yeah, and I would imagine too, right, as you're jigging, you're probably jigging relatively slowly because you want to try to maintain contact on the up and on the drop, right?
Mac:
[5:18] Yeah, when we're going back down, we're trying to go back down, still in contact.
The thing is tough, I mean, it sounds like real happy jigging, like really a lot of movement. It's really not. It's really, really subtle.
You know what I mean? It's real subtle. You're just giving that tip enough action to translate that to action that's a slower action, because especially in the winter, the water's colder.
The more we jig into the wintertime, when the water starts to get down in the upper 30s, We're not there yet, we'll get closer if it gets like this next, we're supposed to be cold, you know, this week, but we're still like 45 degrees, but we still got like 10 degrees to go before it's really going to be cold in the water taps.
And so, yeah, the colder the water, it's always a good idea to go even slower, you know, because fish aren't going to move as fast when that water gets down in the upper 30s, they're going to want a lot slower action.
Marvin:
[6:15] And so as you basically, you know, you've, you, you fish that kind of leveling off of the barometric pressure, and then it's going to start to rise right as the storm in the front goes through, how did the fish behavior change for that?
Mac:
[6:30] Now that was a really good brown trout day. We did really good with the wild browns, or wild invasive browns, I guess you call them here.
Because, I mean, they're all invasives, aren't they, I mean, except for your native Appalachian brook trout.
So I kind of get in trouble saying that. If you say that around a fisheries biologist, they'll call you out, Marvin, and say, well, you mean the invasive brown trout?
Because they all came from Michigan hatchery here back in the mid-30s, but yeah, the brown trout like to play once that stabilizes and the high starts to come in, and I've noticed that over the last 38 years.
That's usually when the brown trout come out and play at their best.
They love that condition when it's starting to get hot. Rainbow trout, not so much.
Even on the talk, even if it's a D8, the rainbow don't do as well when that barometer's swinging up how as a species as brown trout do.
And I think, I don't know if it's, I just know it's that way here where we live.
And it seems like it's that way all over the Southeast. I mean, I've seen that happen a bunch on the Halston over the years, the Watauga, a lot of the streams in this part of the country.
I think that's pretty common.
Marvin:
[7:40] And so when you say they wanted to play, were you fishing streamers?
Were they chasing those or were they just more active?
Mac:
[7:47] No, they're just more active. I like to stay in closer and do a lot of the slow jigging like that I'm describing just because I mean that the spots are so small.
Some of them, if you're on a small freestone, a lot of them are like the size of maybe a couple of bathtub, lengths, you know, so you're only talking 120 inches by three foot wide in a hole, hole, you mean a deeper hole, and you might have 15, 20 fish sitting in that length of a rod.
So you want to be able to just really focus and control in doing that jig, like where you've got total control of it, because your sensitivity then is just much greater, you know, not being far, far away.
Like when I think of regular streamer, like bombing it way out and pulling it, I mean that's kind of fishing out of control when you get right down to it.
You're not in control. So if you're throwing it way out, I mean, yeah, you're still streamer fishing, but I think that's why the jigging does so much better as a control aspect.
You've got total control over what's going on because we're not doing that a long ways away.
It's like 25 feet, maybe 30 feet and closer usually.
Marvin:
[8:59] Yeah. But also, you know, if you're fishing a bucket that's basically, you know, three feet by 10 feet and waist deep, I mean, your fly's not going to get down until you're halfway or two-thirds of the way, finish pulling it through the run anyway, if you fish it kind of that traditional, you know, long pitch and retrieve strategy, right?
Mac:
[9:17] Yeah, that's right. One thing we'll do a lot is be up at the upper end of it first.
I like to fish it from the upper side, and then you can do a lot of it with rod control angles.
You know, by putting it in the water, reach the rod way upstream, wait for it, wait for it, then as soon as you start to move the rod downstream, the fly drops way quicker than a tuck or anything because it's going to the bottom right away.
So I like to fish, when I'm talking about jigging, you really have to have that upstream advantage because You can't, I mean, you can think you're jigging from a downstream position, but you're not ever in contact to the same extent as if you're up above when you're up above, you're in control up or down.
And so I know that sounds kind of silly, but you can't do those, that same level of control from being way down below it.
Marvin:
[10:05] No, got it. And you know, folks, we love questions at the articulate fly.
You can email them to us or DM us on social media, whatever's easiest for you.
And we would love to answer your questions. This is actually going to be our last casting angle of 2023 and before we go drink some eggnog and wait for Santa Claus and all that kind of good stuff.
But one thing we wanted to remind you guys of is that we're going to be having three virtual online casting sessions, one in January, one in February and one in March.
And we're trying to kind of give an opportunity to folks that can't get to Bryson City to see Mac or can't, you know, get to him on the show circuit to have a chance to kind of spend some time with him online. And we're going to do these three sessions.
If you can't make them live, we're going to record them.
And you can ask questions if you're there. But basically we're going to kind of start with the basics and try to give people a new foundation a way to think about things so that they can get better faster and also help troubleshoot their casting. You want to kind of add a little bit to that, Mac?
Mac:
[11:06] No, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.
And I just want to say happy holidays and Merry Christmas to everybody out there.
And I appreciate you, Marvin, for having us on.
Marvin:
[11:17] Oh, well, I appreciate you making the time so that I could have you on and I want to wish everybody a happy holidays and a Merry Christmas.
Tight lines, everybody.
Mac:
[11:26] Tight lines, Marvin.