Tag: Nymphs

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Road Trip! Texas to Wyoming, June 9-15, 2025 (46).

We drove 3,783 miles through eight states. We spent $833 on gas. We fished in three states, and we caught fish in all three–well I did, anyway, Kris didn’t fish in Nebraska. We took our dog for protection.1

I love road trips. I let myself eat junk food on road trips.

We’ve taken lots of road trips. To fish we drove to all the states that surround Texas, to most of the next states over, and to all of the next states over from there except Arizona. We drove to North Carolina during Covid, and we drove to the Driftless Region at the junction of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. We’ve seen a lifetime supply of corn, grass, pine trees, and gas stations. We did not drive to Alaska, which still seems an opportunity lost.

Our first food stop after leaving Houston was for burgers and onion rings at Bevos Drive-In, Vernon, Texas, 437 miles.2 You can usually find a good burger in most American towns. It may shorten your life, it may add to the methane load in the atmosphere, it may be inhumane, but it’s going to taste pretty great.

In Amarillo that evening (611 miles), we ate steak at the Big Texan Steak Ranch. Big Texan is that gaudy theme restaurant in Amarillo where, if you manage to eat the 72-ounce steak in an hour, then your meal is free.3 Big Texan is Route 66 incarnate. I ate there first 50-odd years ago, and once when our children were small, but I’ve never taken the 72-ounce challenge. It’s not the risk of failure but the certainty of after-dinner discomfort that’s daunting.

Our first fishing stop, Thermopolis, Wyoming, 1,439 miles, was a three days’ drive from Houston. I suppose we could have made Houston to Thermopolis in two days, but it would have been exhausting, and we wanted to see baseball in Denver. The Rockies have the worst record in the major leagues, and they didn’t disappoint. They led until the 9th inning when the Giants scored four runs.

Traffic in Denver was memorably frightening. Denver may be worse than Houston for traffic, though it’s probably a shade better than Naples or Mexico City. Coors Field, on the other hand, is a great place to watch baseball, even losing baseball, and this season it’s easy to get tickets.

The landscape from Denver to Thermopolis is about as full of empty as any place I’ve seen. I have in my head a notion of where trout are supposed to live, and it involves tumbling clear water, big hunks of granite, and plenty of trees. The water we fished in Wyoming was clear but not very tumbling. The rocks were mostly crumbly ancient sea sediment, not granite. For shade on the river there were no trees. We ate lunch under bridges.

We had rented an AirBnB outside of Thermopolis, a mile or so from the central business district. We arrived during a thunderstorm, and I was reasonably certain that the storm would blow us, the cabin, and the car on to Montana. It didn’t, and by the time we unloaded the car the storm had blown through. In the late day heat for the next two days there were also storms, big thunder, big wind, big rain, but it was for reasonably short durations. The rough weather never stuck around for long.

We fished with Wind River Canyon Whitewater and Fly Fishing on the Bighorn River, downstream after the Wind River passes through Wind River Canyon and becomes the Bighorn. We fished three days, and caught a lot of rainbow trout. We also caught a lot of brown trout. Neither the browns nor the rainbows are native, but they’ve driven out the native cutthroat. The browns and rainbows were still great fish.

The Bighorn is a moderate-sized river, not Missouri River-big, but too big to fish easily wading, and anyway Wyoming public access law is on the extreme side of landowner friendly. In Wyoming the adjoining landowner owns all rights to the river bed to midstream, so while you can float on the navigable water, you’re trespassing if you stand on the private riverbed. A drift boat is not only handy, but unless the river flows through public land, you can only fish from a boat. You can’t get out of your boat to pee without landowner permission.

There’s plenty of traffic on the Bighorn–the first day we launched with a kayaking church group, singing Shall We Gather at the River as they floated away.4 All day there was a procession of other kayakers, tubers, and other anglers in drift boats. The second day we launched below Thermopolis at Hot Springs State Park, and the river was considerably less crowded. The fishing was better, too, though apparently it’s usually better above Thermopolis.

I was pretty certain that we had arranged to fish the Wind River in the canyon when we booked the guides, but apparently I misunderstood, or the outfitter misunderstood what I was trying to say, and fishing Wind River Canyon wasn’t happening. The Wind River through the canyon is part of the Shoshone and Arapaho Wind River Reservation, and the outfitter is only permitted to fish two boats in the canyon a day. That was two boats other than our boat.

The canyon is famous for its fish, but so is the Bighorn below the canyon. There were plenty of healthy, 16- to 20-inch fish, and maybe even a few bigger–Kris says that these were the largest trout she’s caught. We fished with three different guides over the three days. I usually think it’s better to fish with the same guide, but the guides were good and it probably didn’t matter. We caught fish.

We mostly fished with tiny underwater trico nymphs5 under some sort of attractor fly and an indicator, but on the first day our guide found a single rising fish and switched me to a dry fly, a bit of white fluff that floated on the surface. I made the cast and the drift, and there is nothing like watching a good fish take a dry fly on the surface of a river. The current adds to the drama, the fish comes out of the water, and then everything is working towards failure until the fish is finally landed. Or lost. Or never hooked in the first place.

The second day we found a deep hole where rainbows were stacked and feeding. Kris was busy taking bird photos, so I didn’t have to trade off after each fish caught, and I pulled one good fish after another out of the river. I’m still surprised I didn’t find an excuse for us to stay there the rest of the day.

The third day I got tangled, and then I got tangled again, and then I got tangled some more. When I did manage to cast I had a few strikes, but would promptly lose each fish that struck. Finally, late in the day I caught an unremarkable rainbow. I was so grateful to catch that fish.

Even as great as the fishing was, I don’t think that I had managed my expectations for Wyoming. We had purposefully left Wyoming and Montana until the end–unlike say, New Jersey, which we’ve left to the end for no good reason. Unlike Montana, I had never fished in Wyoming before. Wyoming is famously good fishing, and it was good fishing. The Bighorn is a famously good river, and it was a mighty fine river. That said, it never felt like enough.

So we’ll go back to Wyoming. Not, I think, to Thermopolis, great as the fishing was. And maybe we’ll fish some without guides if Congress hasn’t sold all of our public land. I’d like to see the other side of the Wind River Range, and further south towards the Green before it flows into Utah. I’d like to go further north towards Yellowstone. In fact, when we fish Montana in September, we’ll spend a couple of nights in Wyoming, in Yellowstone at Old Faithful Inn. We’ll fish in Yellowstone for native cutthroat, and it still won’t be enough of Wyoming. There is so much of Wyoming to see, and with the Bighorn it feels like we barely got started.

Western Meadowlark

You know what I liked best though about fishing in Wyoming? It wasn’t the fishing, it was waking to the morning bird chorus, and listening to the songs of the Western Meadowlarks. I’ve never heard anything more beautiful.

I guess I’m finally old enough just to listen. Of course I’m also old enough to spend a day getting tangled, but I’ve been that for a long time.

  1. Roo is a mostly chihuahua rescue who as a puppy seven years ago showed up collarless and chipless on our daughter’s front porch. Kris took her to the vet, nursed her through heartworms, and she’s been with us since. She is an excellent travel companion, and is reasonably well socialized for a mostly chihuahua. She did bark at the lady in the Kansas toll booth. ↩︎
  2. I lived in Vernon, Texas, for my first 17 years, and Bevo’s was owned by my cousin James. They have the world’s best cheeseburger. Bevo is the name of the mascot at the University of Texas, but my cousin James didn’t go to the University of Texas, or as far as I know to any university at all, so I’m not sure why he picked the UT theme. Still, hook ’em. ↩︎
  3. There is a livestream of the Big Texan 72-ounce steak challenge. It’s oddly mesmerizing to watch. If you do the challenge, remember that in addition to the steak you have to eat the baked potato, shrimp cocktail, salad, and bread. ↩︎
  4. Not really, but they should have. ↩︎
  5. Tricos are a tiny mayfly, Tricorythodes. Trico nymphs are the nymph phase of the trico mayfly’s life cycle. Trico hatches are common in summer, and bigger mayflies apparently hatch earlier: May is a great time for bigger mayflies. Since we were in Wyoming in June, this was a variant of the common guide explanation that we should have been here last week. ↩︎

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Nymphing, North Carolina, July 31-August 1, 2020

Last November I mentioned to a colleague that we were trying to catch a fish in each state, and he invited us to their house in North Carolina, in the heart of North Carolina trout country. Their house is near Sapphire, which is eight miles east of Cashiers in the Appalachians in Western North Carolina, about an hour and a half southwest of Asheville. I suspect it was country once populated with hidden stills, but now there are probably more cute shops than stills. It’s pretty wild though, and their house was by far the nicest fly lodge we’ve stayed in. It was just as well it was their house, because otherwise we couldn’t have afforded a three nights’ stay.

Brian booked our guides through a local fly shop, Brookings Anglers, and it may be the prettiest fly shop I’ve seen, not that I’m overly impressed by pretty fly shops. I wouldn’t suggest driving more than a couple of hundred miles to visit. In addition to me and Kris, Brian and Jane had invited other work colleagues and their spouses, and we fished together one day and then the next day Kris and I floated the Tuckasegee River, the Tuck, while they went elsewhere.

The first day, the day we fished together, the Brookings’ guides had access to private water, which was small enough that I won’t give the name; Brookings has the access if you’re interested, and if you’re within three or four hundred miles of Brookings you really should drop by. The problem with the private water was that it was artificially loaded with huge trout that weren’t wild trout. The good thing about the private water was that it was artificially loaded with huge trout that weren’t wild trout. Sometimes that’s just fun. We caught huge trout.

We fished with Roger Lowe, who may be a bit younger than me, but who Brian described as the dean of North Carolina guides. Roger has the peculiar fate of looking exactly like my friend Jim from Austin, who I’ve talked baseball with for the last 20-odd years. Jim was a college pitcher and high school coach, and is a wee bit opinionated about baseball. Sometimes Jim is a bit brusk. Here is a recent response by Jim to something stupid:

“Go the fuck away . . . . Away.“

Which for Jim is pretty measured. In appearance Roger could be Jim’s twin brother. From the time we started fishing I expected Roger to invite me to take my stupid opinions and fuck off. I don’t even know if Roger follows baseball, but I will tell you there is nothing more charming than a guy with a North Carolina accent announcing that we’re going to Euro-nymph, and who then never once responded with expletives in exchange for my casting. If Roger and Jim are long-lost twins, Roger is definitely the more civil of the two.

The private water we fished wasn’t very big, maybe 20 feet across, and its runs are crammed under every overhanging branch in North America. Most of the day I fished Roger’s 10-foot Hardy two weight, with a long mono leader, 15 feet of 20 pound leader at the butt, 5 feet of 15 pound, and then a two foot stretch of Rio Two Tone Indicator Tippet material, finished off with 4 or 5 feet of tippet. What X tippet? I can’t remember, but there are plenty of descriptions of long mono leaders around the internet. I know this: Rio two-tone indicator is the bomb. Alternating hot pink and fluorescent yellow, it looks like the love child of fishing line and Christmas candy. The fourth time I went back to Brookings–not that I’m overly impressed by a pretty fly shop–I bought a spool. I’ll probably never use it, but I sure do like it.

All I really fished was the leader, and I don’t think I ever once had the fly line off the reel. The long 10-foot rod is for better line control in drifts, but I’d never heard why for tight-line nymphing two- and three-weight rods are preferred to the usual four- or five-weights. Roger explained that when a fish takes the fly, if it feels any resistance it will immediately spit the hook. The two weight’s limber tip delays resistance long enough to set.

As for casting, it didn’t matter. We weren’t casting far. With a 25-foot leader on a 10-foot rod on a 20-foot stream there just isn’t very far to cast. My best casts involved letting leader stretch out on the water behind, then using the water tension to haul the line forward, quartering upriver. I wasn’t much good at it. Most of my casts were big overhand lobs that ended with the fly hung in a tree. The flies themselves were weighted, or maybe Roger added weight, but we were fishing with all the classic flies: mop flies, squirmy worms, I think I fished an egg pattern at some point. Forget the fly though, what was fun was high-sticking the leader through the runs, and keeping enough of the Christmas candy indicator out of the water so that I could see any hesitation. It was mesmerizing, and completely successful. I am now one of those cosmopolitan fly fishers who has Euro-nymphed.

Late in the day my shoulder told me that high-sticking might be a young man’s game, but I kept at it. Like I said, leading that tight-lined bit of colored fly leader through a run was mesmerizing. Plus we caught fish. Roger was pretty entertaining too. Roger told a great story about a client who complained about rain on her fishing trip. Roger told her that sometimes you had to put up with a bit of rain. She was in the back seat, and he said she leaned over the seat, got in his face, and told him that he should shut up, that she could complain all she wanted.

Roger said that he shut up.

The story I won’t share is our next day’s guide’s, Matt Canter, who is manager and a part-owner of Brookings. Did I mention Brookings is a really pretty fly shop? Anyway, the story involves how Matt came to manage and then own part of Brookings. If you’re within four or five hundred miles of the shop, you should visit and get Matt to share the story. It’s a great story, and a really pretty fly shop.

What wasn’t so pretty was that day’s fishing. We were fishing small nymphs under big dry flies, dry dropper rigs, which wasn’t what was wrong. Here is what went wrong with that day’s fishing:

Kris had the greatest day fishing ever.

She caught brown trout, she caught rainbow trout, at some point she started catching nice-sized brookies. After her first brookie I mentioned to Matt that Kris had an Appalachian grand slam and Matt said yeah, but then a few minutes later Kris caught a smallmouth. Matt, whose gloat was very unbecoming, said that now she’s really got an Appalachian grand slam.

Why was Matt gloating? What was I catching? This.

Matt said it’s a kind of sucker, known locally as a knottyhead. That picture’s of a big one. After we got home I searched around on the internet a bit, and never could quite match the fish to a genus and species. For all I know God created them that day just to keep me humble. Kris and I would fish the same fly, same depth, same drift, and Kris would catch a lovely wild brown or a tarpon up from the Gulf or a steelhead come south on vacation and I would catch . . . a knottyhead. Ok, they weren’t the only fish I caught. I caught some nice browns and some nice rainbows, and even got a brown on the dry fly once, but I must have caught 20 knottyheads, one after another, while Kris was having the fishing day of her life.

I said Kris didn’t really have a slam until she caught a knottyhead. She immediately caught her one and only knottyhead. Next time I’m in Brookings I’m complaining to the manager.

Not that I’m jealous.

That night over drinks we were comparing our day’s fishing, and somebody asked if any of us had ever had a double, a fish on each fly?

I answered. “Kris has. Today. Twice.” As my friend Jim would say, a double-fucking-double.

I could have had a double if knottyheads just took dries. And she didn’t land both fish, either time. So there.

Not that I’m jealous.

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Nymphing at the South Holston River Lodge, July 28-29, 2020

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:

John William Waterhouse, Hylas with a Nymph, 1893, private collection, oil on canvass.

After that this is at best a disappointment, if not a horror:

Jim Rathert, mayfly nymph (or naiad), Missouri Department of Conservation, https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/mayfly-larvae

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.

John William Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896, oil on canvass, Manchester Art Gallery.

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.

Jam-stop Thingamabobber

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.

John William Waterhouse, Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, 1900, oil on canvass, private collection. I think this was on the Watauga, not the South Holston.