Whoever dubbed the larvae that skitter around the stones on the bottom of rivers as nymphs had a peculiar sense of humor. This is a proper nymph:
After that this is at best a disappointment, if not a horror:
Unless of course you fly fish for trout, in which case you’re all in with the latter, and wouldn’t know how to tie a proper imitation of the former.
If you don’t fly fish, this takes some explanation. There are, more or less (and ignoring a bunch of important stuff altogether), three ways to fly fish for trout. If you fish on the surface with a fly that imitates surface bugs, that’s dry fly fishing. If you fish below the surface with a fly that imitates baitfish, that’s streamer fishing. If you fish with a fly that imitates larval bugs that swim or saunter along beneath the surface, that’s nymphing.
In North Carolina and Tennessee we went a’nymphing, and over four days’ fishing it was kind of a master class. Nymphing is more often than not the most productive way to trout fish, though historically it was thought unsportsmanlike by some. Frederic Halford, the English Father Of Modern Dry Fly Fishing, said just say no to nymphs, while G.E.M. Skues, the English Father Of Modern Nymphing, would infuriate Halford by tempting with a variety of seamy sinking flies. The residue of that argument hasn’t completely gone away.
Nymphs.
Still, that controversy has mostly gone by the board, but anglers who nymph like to think that they’re doing something mildly disreputable. I don’t fish with dries often, but in some ways it seems the simpler method: to paraphrase Bull Durham, see the bugs, match the bugs, float the fly. That whole match the bug thing is a mystery, bug hatches being a tall tale pawned off on unsuspecting Texans, but still, if hatches did exist one would know one’s task. See the bug, match the bug, float the fly.
Meanwhile nymphing has taken on all manner of unexpected complexity. There’s Euro nymphing and the varieties thereof; French nymphing, Polish nymphing, and Czech nymphing. There are dry dropper rigs, and more different kinds of indicators (think bobbers) than would seem quite seemly. One writer touts New Zealand indicators sheared from the wool of a certain breed of high-country New Zealand sheep, while another swears by plastic globes only slightly smaller than beach balls. Those little foam tape tabs are making a comeback, and a friend makes his indicators from small party balloons. If you want to go online and search, you can find at least a couple of reams of discussions on building nymph leaders using bits of metal, different colored lines of different diameters, human skulls, and barbarous incantations at midnight.
It seems altogether fitting that the high priest of modern nymphing, George Daniel, was at the South Holston River Lodge when we were there. You’d expect that the guy who wrote the book on modern nymphing, Dynamic Nymphing, would be kind of nerdy, but Daniel is a young, handsome guy, tall, tan, and fit, and doesn’t even seem to wear a monocle. All-in-all it was kind of intimidating. If John McPhee can look exactly like a shad fisherman, why couldn’t George Daniel have the decency to look like a nymphing nerd?
***
The South Holston River and the South Holston River Lodge are in the northeastern corner where Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina come together. President Roosevelt built a bunch of dams on rivers up there as part of the TVA projects, giving the lie to those who think government never benefits anybody. In addition to social security, Roosevelt created a fine trout fishery. The 14 miles of South Holston trout river is fed by releases of deep cold lake water from the South Holston Dam, at a fairly constant 47°, so that even in the middle of the summer when water temperatures can otherwise be too hot for trout, or in the middle of winter when water temperatures can otherwise be too cold for folk, the South Holston is fishable, and more than fishable: it is an extraordinarily buggy river with estimates of up to 8,500 fish per mile, mostly brown trout, and mostly wild trout.
8500 is a lot of fish.
Because of dam releases for power production the river flow can change radically over the course of a day. Jon Hooper, the chief factotum, head guide, and general manager of the lodge told us that because it had been dry, flows could be below 100 cfs, but that in high water the flows could be above 2500 cfs. Apparently the river can go from 60 feet from bank to bank to 100 feet from bank to bank in less than an hour, and then do it again the next day. Wading’s not safe when the water’s rising. That was ok with us. We fished from a drift boat.
You can’t fish gin-clear water at 100 cfs the same way you fish gin-clear water at 1500 cfs. We were nymphing, of course: there’s supposed to be an excellent sulphur and baetis hatch from time to time on the river, but I’ve never seen an excellent hatch and I won’t be fooled by the stories these non-Texans tell me. Our guide, Brandon Barbour, was way ahead of us, so in the morning with the water low we fished tiny size 22 midge nymphs on tiny 6x tippet. If you’re argumentative, 6x tippet is in fact split hairs. The water was slow and clear, and the fish educated, so that’s what we used. The indicator was a small bit of yellow foam tape. That was our first method of nymphing during the trip: light tippet, light indicator, tiny weighted flies, and no weight added.
What did we see in Tennessee? We mostly saw a tiny press-on foam indicator floating in a square foot of river, because that’s what we watched to know if a fish took our fly.
In the afternoon Brandon took us higher on the river, closer to the dam where released water would reach first. We ate lunch and watched water rise on the legs of a wader until it made all of us nervous. I guess it finally made the angler nervous too, because he finally left the river.
Brandon liked the fishing better at higher flows. He said the fish had less time to study the flies, and had to react quicker. The problem was that to get the nymphs down in the swift current Brandon had to add weight, and then add more weight, and then add a couple o’ more bits of weight. All of this weight, four or five BB sized pinch on weights, was at the very bottom of the rig, then two nymphs were tied onto the uncut tag ends of surgeon’s knots, about three inches from the leader itself. This wasn’t 6x tippet.
At the top of the rig was a particularly large plastic indicator, a Thingamabobber. The indicator had to be large enough to suspend the hooks and weight below it. The weight would bounce along the bottom, and we’d have to distinguish the bottom bounce from the fish take. You’d think that something involving nymphs and called bottom bouncing would be more lewd than it was, but what it lacked in prurience it made up for with fish.
What did we see in Tennessee? A big orange thingamabobber getting jiggy while we bottom bounced. That could well be a metaphor for the modern world. It sounds meaningful anyway.
Casting the light rig was pretty easy. We weren’t casting far, 20 or 30 feet for the most part. I seemed to roll cast a lot, and every now and then would throw in a fairly standard cast. The bottom-bouncing rig was a different matter. I tried a standard cast once and got a clump of BB weights to the center of the back, hard enough to evoke what I suspect was an unmanly shriek. Casting the rig required a water haul, laying out the line behind and then using the drag of the water to load the rod when I pulled it forward. I expect it wasn’t pretty. No fish were going to come out of the water for my shadow cast, but it was better than a clump of weights to the back of my head.
We fished the Holston with Brandon the first day, low water early and high water later in the day. The next day we fished the Holston with Brandon at low water in the morning and then moved over to the Watauga, another nearby tailwater, for higher flows in the afternoon. Because the Holston was so low, everybody else was on the Watauga as well. That was ok, it wasn’t combat fishing, but it’s a smaller river and drifting along we had plenty of lively and pleasant companions, and caught fish.
***
I always think the same thing when I travel, could I live here? Would I like to come here and stay? I liked where we were, and on the way down the river the first day I got Dolly Parton’s “Tennessee Mountain Home” stuck in my head while I fished. Technically it wasn’t Dolly Parton’s version, it was Maria Muldaur’s version (which I know better, but which honestly isn’t as good). I liked it in my head. I liked the South Holston River Lodge and Jon and Lynne and Brandon and the chef, J.D., and all the other people at the lodge who took care of us. I could live there, on that river. I won’t, but I could.
Plus I really liked the nymphs.
