If you do not see today’s Fishing Report, please refresh your browser to empty your cache.

Welcome to the Fishing Report from Townsend, Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains. At 5:32 am, the temperature outside is 41.2 degrees.

It is raining this morning, though not heavy at all. The rain should taper off by noon. Today’s high temperature will be in the upper 50’s. Tomorrow through the weekend will be much warmer. Expect high temperatures in the 60’s to the upper 70’s through the period. Tomorrow through Friday should be sunny. There is a low chance for rain Saturday, and a higher chance Sunday.

Spring weather here again. I saw snow in the mountains we see from our house yesterday.

Little River is flowing at 490 cubic feet per second (cfs) or 2.63 feet on the flow gauge. Median flow for this date is 381 cfs. The water temperature is 46.2 degrees this morning.

The water temps in the Smoky Mountains will warm all week. Fishing is going to get good!

Flows are a little high this morning. The stream levels will fall all week, at least until Saturday or Sunday, depending on how much rain we get this weekend.

Most anglers reported slow fishing this weekend. Tyler from Kentucky sent me an e-mail. He was fishing here this weekend. He said fishing was slow Friday and Saturday, but he and his friends did well yesterday. They were fishing with heavy nymph rigs.

What Tyler did will work for you today. High sticking with nymphs is what I would do. The water is flowing fairly high. The trout are probably a little sluggish this morning. If the water warms today, and I think it will, fishing will get better.

Just about any reasonable nymph will work. Pheasant tail, Prince, Tellico and Hare’s Ear patterns are a few to mention. If your nymphs are not getting down, you won’t be catching as many trout. Get a good drift by keeping your fly line off the water. Cast short.

If you cast long, you will need to mend your fly line and hopefully detect a strike. Strike indicators might work, but I believe you will do best by fishing close.

You may see some aquatic insects, many species, on the surface, especially later this week. A good old Parachute Adams dry fly, in varying sizes, is working. That is what we are recommending to customers in the shop, right now. Other dry flies will work too.

As the water warms this week, the trout will be hungry and looking for food. Presentation and getting a good drift is more important than the fly you are using, unless you see a significant hatch, and trout rising to them. Still, the trout are hungry. If your fly looks like a meal, they will eat it.

Our shop is stocked. Every time I stop by, there are boxes full of new merchandise to be received and stocked. I saw a huge Korkers order, in several boxes, that arrived late last week. Everyone at the shop knows what is coming soon, better weather and lots of customers.

I am still building our new online store, that replaced the old one. The new version looks better and works better. The software is awesome. We had the software customized.  

Last week I worked on Simms. Now, I’m adding more small items, in the accessories department. I have a lot of accessory items to photograph, and some new flies we have added to our selection.

I am dreading photographing the fly boxes. Many of them are clear. They are all subject to almost uncontrollable glare. I will probably suspend them in the air so the background is blown out with one of the big flash boxes. We like the look of our photos, with a white background. You can see, the photos are consistently shown with a white background. Most of our photos do not have shadows.

It takes time, trial and error, moving the flash units around, retouching and clipping the gear from the background.

Some of our manufacturers give us their stock photos to use. That saves time. I often have to cut them from the background too, in Adobe Photoshop. Others are ready to place on our online store with no additional manipulation in Photoshop. Believe it or not, some of our largest manufacturers do not have multiple views of their gear.

The photography studio is located upstairs at the shop. I do everything else here at home on a 27” iMac, with a retina monitor. We just bought a new, super-speed laptop, for me to use at the store to actually see the images that were just photographed, before I bring them home on the laptop.

To run the Adobe Suite of all their applications, and I use several, takes a lot of computer power. I need 16 gig of ram, minimum. Most laptops have 8 gig of ram. We need fast processors, quad core so everything works smoothly. This iMac has that and the laptop does too.

I never thought, 23 years ago, a fly shop would require this much technology. I also thought we would always be printing full color catalogs and advertisements to mail. The internet changed all of that. I had to adapt. Daniel and everyone at the shop had to adapt. Daniel is good at figuring out how to do computer stuff. We have been working together over 20 years.  

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

Byron Begley
April 9, 2018

Respond to: byron@littleriveroutfitters.com