Dry Fly Summer Daze
By Phoneix Brown (River Raider)
Small ripples of water push outwards from the raindrop that landed next to my size 12 DJL Brown Drake, which is drifting next to some cover on the outside of a deep seam. I had noticed a monster brown trout moving from under a hickory limb deadfall, caught up on the creek bank, to eat a nymph in a feeding lane just behind the deadfall.
My heart pounded as I fumbled with my mono leader, trying to pick up slack for a soft roll cast. It had been a while since I’d tangled with a fish of this caliber, and my ego couldn’t afford to mess it up. I flicked the rod forward, the weighted nymph unfurling neatly from the 6x tippet before landing in the slack pocket of water first, then the dry.
The DJL drake hovered in the slack current before moving slightly past the final tree limb. I saw a golden brown sliver moving upward through the water column, nose to the sky in hot pursuit of my extended body mayfly imitation.
He sipped the fly, tucked under, and I lifted the rod up expecting to feel the vibration and tug of a trophy trout on the end of my line, only to find nothing but slack. I had missed him. My world narrowed for a second as my heart beat out of my chest, and I took the moment in. On creeks like this, you don’t witness this every day, especially not in this state. Seeing a 24”+ wild fish eat a fly, whether or not you land it, is a beautiful sight.
It was a cooler than usual day in June for North Georgia, as a small rain front hovered over my father and I while we waded a local freestone in search of hungry wild trout. After fishing my way up from our starting position and catching 3-4 good wild rainbows, I was satisfied. To be fair, a good trout in this stream on an average day is anywhere from 6-10”. The state mandates its slot limit at 16”, meaning anything below that length must be caught and released immediately without hesitation. Paired with the fishing being a little more technical and the stream a little more wild in terrain, you’ll usually have large portions of the stream to yourself.
The rain started off as a faint sprinkle before turning into a constant fall of droplets, creating just enough of a disturbance in the water to either blind the trout’s judgment of my flies, or kick up every other insect in the woods. I kept working seams and pockets upstream as the morning and rain carried on, picking up fish every 15-20 minutes or so, sometimes multiple in bursts out of the same hole. Just as the fishing was getting good, I decided I wasn’t mad at the trout anymore and traced my way back down the magnificent bottom lined with rhododendrons and hardwood stands on either side of the 20-yard wide stream, in the middle of some of the most beautiful country below the Mason-Dixon line.
Pondering how I could pick up an additional strike or two before we headed out, I tied on a double nymph indicator rig to run some of the deeper pools I’d waded past. With a size 14 soft hackle hare’s ear and a size 10 black biot stonefly, I cast at the mouth of the seam and found contact on my tight line system before swinging to a 45-degree angle downstream of the flies. Guiding them just enough to keep them in the feeding lane, it didn’t take long before my bobber shot underneath the water and my efforts were rewarded with another 5” rainbow trout.
Quickly unhooking the trout, I admired the juvenile briefly before letting it swim off my fingers back to the depths below. The raindrops were getting bigger and time between them shorter. I figured the last trout must’ve sent out word to his friends about the tantalizing forbidden black stonefly as I was getting more wet than bites. The thoughts of the big brown stealing my hopes and dreams still lingered in the forefront of my conscience as I navigated my way up the steep trail back toward the vehicle.
The big ones hurt to lose, but it seems we always lose them. I’m fairly certain if we didn’t lose big fish and we landed everything that tugged our line, the most die-hard, hopelessly addicted trout fiends would hang up their rods and pursue other ventures. It’s the fish that got away that brings you to the vise after 12 hours of fishing and 3 hours of driving. That same fish makes you wake up at 4 in the morning after working all week, in hopes that you might shake hands with an old wily beast of the water. We’re all searching for that moment in time where all else halts, the dry skates across the top of the stream, a huge mass of muscle and fin rises upwards and smashes your fly before taking you on the ride of a lifetime through the rocks, logs, and mountain laurel of a southern Appalachian trout stream. A part of me hopes I never find it, so I have a reason to always come back.
