Townsend, Tennessee - Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, East Tennessee and Western North Carolina

Welcome to the Fishing Report from the Great Smoky Mountains.  The air is clear and the temperature is 54 degrees at 8:28 am.  I can clearly see the mountains from our front porch.  A concrete truck is pouring it’s load on our upper driveway.  I’m off today and slept later than I can remember in recent times.  It will be sunny today with a high temperature in the upper 70’s.

Little River is flowing at 120 cubic feet per second (cfs) or 1.61 feet on the flow gauge.  Median flow for this date is 88 cfs.  The water temperature is 55.5 degrees.

Fishing is good as you would expect under these great conditions.  Everyone I’ve talked to lately, mostly friends, are doing well fishing in the Park.  Brown trout are active, preparing to spawn.  Someone I talked to said another friend of mine caught a 22 inch brown in Little River last weekend.  Another good friend I talked to yesterday lost a big fish.  It broke him off.  It’s that time of year.  People are catching rainbows too.  I have not talked to anyone who is targeting brook trout lately.  Almost all of my buddies are using nymphs.

We should get some rain tonight and early tomorrow morning.  The weather websites are not mentioning anything significant.

We’ve got a lot going on at the store.  First, Daniel posted our fly tying school schedules on the website yesterday.  Fly tying classes begin in November and run through February.  You can CLICK HERE to learn more about our fly tying classes.  We offer beginner, intermediate and advanced.  They are taught by Walter Babb and Brian Courtney.

If you don’t tie flies, you should think about doing it.  I started tying in 1962.  Tying is my way of participating in our sport from the comfort of our home.  I love it.  Our own research has shown that only 1/3 of our customers buy fly tying materials.  It has always been that way and we know only because we have been using a Point of Sale computer system since 1998.  You know, we write each order in your name on the computer.  So, it’s easy to run through the data and create reports.  I really don’t understand why more of our customers don’t tie flies.

Daniel is also beefing up our fly tying inventory of products, placing larger orders than I can remember.  We know, there will be a lot of fly tyers in town for Fly Tyers Weekend.  But also, the fly tying season has arrived.  Tyers are more active between November and March.

I noticed our entire inventory is much higher than it was last year at this time.  Our payables are higher too. The reason is, last year in October, the Government shut down the National Parks, including ours.  I can tell you exactly how we felt.  We didn’t know if we would survive.  Townsend is a tough place to do business without that external influence.  Closing the Park scared us to death.  We pushed orders further out, cancelled orders and stopped all ordering during that period.  We didn’t know how long the shutdown would last. 

Once the Park re-opened, we started bringing in more merchandise but at the end of October, we were not re-stocked.  I guess we’ll re-visit that possibility in March.  I’m not looking forward to that at all.

Dan Munger was at the Orvis store in Sevierville yesterday, taking one of their beginner fly fishing classes.  No, he doesn’t need to learn to fly fish.  He knows how to do that very well.  He was learning how Orvis conducts their classes.  They are helping us expand our fly fishing school.  They are our friends and they want to help us as much as possible.

After Fly Tyers Weekend, I will be spending all of my time on our website.  You will see some huge changes early next year. 

Gotta go!

Have a great day and thank you for being here with us.

Byron Begley
October 28, 2014

Respond to: byron@littleriveroutfitters.com