Tough Fishin'
Nearly ruined by thunderstorms, a Saturday on the water with my brother turned out better than I'd expected.
The weather did not inspire optimism. Scattered storms had been in the forecast for days. But with a predicted start time of around noon, my brother and I headed out to the Tremont section of the Great Smokey Mountain National Park regardless. Because any decent fisherman knows to reserve judgment until they’ve seen the conditions with their own eyes.
We arrived at the trailhead around 8 a.m. Four cars were already there, two with competing fishermen gearing up, ready to screw our odds of catching double-digit brook trout on a day menacing enough to keep the casuals at home. The sky was gray, with little sunlight seeping through the cloud cover. As we hustled to get started before the rain did, an old-timer passed in front of the minivan and asked two things: whether we thought it’d be worth it to put on a rain jacket, and if we planned to start at the wooden bridge on the more popular of the three trails ahead of us. Seeing as Victor and I were already jacketed, I said yes and reassured him we’d start fishing a quarter mile past the bridge—about a 45-minute walk from the trailhead—so as not to get in his way.
The downpour came only five minutes into the hike. I crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t last long enough to muddy the stream, which would turn the color of chocolate milk and, hence, become unfishable. I’d already had bad enough luck. Three weeks earlier, I’d fished nearby with the Fish Whisperer and caught just two or three rainbows about the size of my middle finger. Then, last Monday, a retired businessman who works part-time with the supply chain institute invited me to join him for a day of bass fishing on Watt’s Bar Lake. He expected we’d hook 15 or 20 largemouths a piece. But after six hours, he’d only brought one into the boat. I didn’t even have a bite.
As the sound of the rain turned to machine gun fire and the droplets became as thick as small hailstones, my optimism bottomed out. By the time we reached our starting point, the water had turned to Yoo-hoo; the sun was stuck behind so many layers of gray fog that we couldn’t see our leaders to tie on flies. So we headed back to the minivan dejected.
It was past 10:30 a.m. when we pulled into Little River Outfitters, expecting to spend money on gear we didn’t need before heading back to Knoxville to watch a movie or walk through McKay’s until meeting up with Haley and the kids. “There is one place you could try if you’re really desperate to get into some fish,” said one of the store’s older employees at checkout when I shared my sob story. “The rain barely touched the North Carolina side of the park.”
The man pulled out his radar as the other employee beside him pulled up the USGS water gauge for the Oconaluftee River. He then grabbed an official park map and pointed to a stream that wasn’t listed by name but that I knew because I’d fished it twice before, the first time under similar conditions. It was an obscure stream accessible only via a pull-out about 20 minutes past Newfound Gap—an hour-and-a-half drive out of our way—with the nearest exit point about two miles from where you waded in.
The asphalt was wet and our bodies shivered when we got out of the car at the spot I’d barely remembered. I had bought a new shirt to replace the soaked-through one I’d worn in the morning, but even that didn’t help as the wind blew strong beneath sunless skies. It had been more than two years since I’d fished this particular stream, and one of the few things I knew for sure was that if it were to start pouring while we fished, real danger followed close behind. Most of the stream was no more than three or four feet across, with myriad obstacles blocking the way through and no side trails or cover. Once in the water, you must stay in the entire time, moving above and around boulders, logs, and Rhododendron shrubs that envelop you on every side.
Victor and I bushwhacked our way to the first hole, where the water was high and moving quickly. On his first cast, a brookie broke the surface but missed his dry fly. He turned back with a big grin. Alright, let’s trek ahead–no regerts, I told myself.
Over the next three hours, we army-crawled past, scrambled over, and squatted under all kinds of hazards. Our clothes were muddied and soaked, our skin scraped and red, our blood possibly poisoned from the flying bugs and serrated flora of the Appalachian forest. Victor’s brand-new Orvis hat looked like it’d been sourced from an archaeological dig site, and I could no longer feel my toes. But the action was non-stop. Almost every place we cast had a fish in it.
Despite their small size, brookies are aggressive and beautiful. We saw many and hooked into nearly a dozen each. The best of the day was about eight inches long. Victor caught it out of the middle section of a deep hole and I nearly faceplanted into a log trying to get my net to him. We didn’t take many pictures, choosing to soak in the beauty and preserve it for our own memories, but we had persevered, finding fish and eventually sunlight on a day that could’ve easily been ruined by bad weather.
If I were a less selfish person, I’d encourage you all to go out to the mountains and try your hand at fly-fishing for wild browns and rainbows or native brook trout. Risking body and mind for fish the size of a roll of quarters on the off chance you catch the big one makes little sense unless you’ve already been afflicted with the fisherman’s curse. I’m glad this is something I get to share with Victor, both of us learning it from the Apocalyptic Cowboy in June 2020 and getting a chance to spend a few days each year on the water together when he visits Tennessee or we go on our yearly family vacation to the North Carolina coast.
I hope you all either have or find unreasonable pursuits that forge relationships or deepen them with people you care about. At the very least, these hobbies, whether pipe tobacco, disc golf, knife making, ping-pong—whatever—will leave you new stories to tell and feats to celebrate.
Read previous The Weekly Big Head columns::
May 20 - Living with Foreigners
May 13 - An Ode to Useless Information
April 29 – Naked Old Dudes at the YMCA
April 22 – What Color is the Grass in Alaska?
April 15 – Restlessness on Weekends
April 8 – Adventures with the Apocalyptic Cowboy
April 1 – Free Barabbas
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