water you are attempting to challenge. If you cast to water that has few crosscurrents, or limit yourself to extremely short casts, drag will be minimal. If you prefer to make long casts across broken pocket water or exposed rocks, you will be forced to mend your line constantly. Proficient fly-casters who attempt long shots into distant feeding lanes across such barriers and who have experience with an ever-constant drag will catch considerably more fish. When concentrating your efforts on short, easy casts, you often risk getting close enough to the fish to alert them to your presence.
One thing I did not discuss in previous books that I should have was the deadly effectiveness of fishing a nymph dropper-style under a dry fly. Two flies are permitted in park waters, and by using this dual-presentation approach, you more than double your odds of a strike. Many fly-fishermen have difficulty detecting light takes on nymphs. The dry works like a bobber, or strike indicator, for those too bashful to admit what they really are. The added benefit is trout also will prefer the dry over your subsurface offering. It’s my opinion that dry/nymph-dropper fishing takes a little advantage away from a strictly dry-fly approach, but the tradeoff is pretty handsome.
Several things facilitate dealing with the fast, swirling currents found on many runs in the streams of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The instant your fly is on the water, begin mending line. By holding the tip of your fly rod aloft, you can get more line off the water, thus less line is exposed to the current. The result usually is less drag. A leader that is at least 9 to 10 feet long also can reduce the headaches nearly every fly-fisherman experiences dealing with drag on these waters.
Picking an ideal fly rod for the streams of the Smokies is a job comparable to picking the ideal wine. Long fly rods (9 to 9.5 feet) have been the choice of a number of highly successful, long-time patrons of the region; but an almost equal number of noted fly-fishermen prefer extremely short fly rods (6 to 6.5 feet).
Those favoring the long rod say the added length allows them to keep more line off the water, thus helping to eliminate drag. Greater casting accuracy is also cited as a plus for the long rod. Those who favor short rods cite the use of light lines (No.3 to No.4) and maneuverability on the stream as solid advantages. The short rod is easy to work on small streams, where overhead growth can hinder casting.
Regardless of your choice in the length of your fly rod, it should be of good quality. For dry fly-fishing, fly rods should be engineered to cast fly lines in the 2-to 4-weight class. Weight forward lines are recommended on these waters, where you are not always afforded the luxury of traditional, power-building casts. When fly-fishing using streamers, wet flies, or nymphs, heavier fly lines in the 5-to 8-weight class work well on these waters. My personal fly rod is an old, early graphite designed to cast 4-weight line. It is light and responsive, yet extremely powerful. I use it for 90% of the fishing I do. Several years ago, while black bear hunting in New Brunswick, Canada, near Juniper on the headwaters of the Miramichi River, I carried along this rod in the event we might prowl some beaver ponds where brookies are thick as fleas on an old hound in summer.
My host, Frank MacDonald, had taken me fishing for Atlantic salmon there in previous years. On my first trip up there we drove to Doaktown to attend Ted Williams’s birthday celebration, and there I met the famous Yankees baseball player for the first time. A couple of days later I fished with Ted on his favorite reach of the Miramichi, and I marveled at this casting ability. At lunch we talked about old fishing tackle. He collected Creek Chub Bait Company (CCBC) dingbats in the musky size, and at the time I had perhaps the largest collection of CCBC lures in the country. Even at that, I only had half a dozen or so CCBC dingbats in the rare musky size.
On two other occasions I fished with Ted, who had the biggest hands I have ever seen, and he was certainly the gruffest person I ever knew. Except for the conversation about old dingbats, he had little say—especially when I refused to gift one or two to his collection. On one particular trip, the regular salmon season had yet to open on the Miramichi, but where the stream passed his lodge in Doaktown, the so-called black salmon season was open.
Unlike Pacific salmon, Atlantic salmon generally survive their upstream spawning rites, and most return to the sea. Some get caught upstream during the winter, where they remain until the ice leaves the Miramichi, and they return to saltwater in late spring. While I was unprepared to fish for salmon on this trip that was predominantly meant for hunting, I certainly did not say no when Frank asked if I was interested in making a trip. The fact that he promised a shore lunch—a washtub full of lobster—was not lost on me either.
Smelt were running the shoreline much the same as gizzard shad do in the impoundments surrounding the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It was pretty mundane fishing, more or less trolling smelt flies on the outside of their schools, which stretched as far as you could see under the surface in a 5-foot-wide ribbon. I caught a couple of salmon and discovered black salmon are not quite the incredible battlers as their brethren fresh up from the North Atlantic. I had almost nodded off when the fourth salmon struck, but I immediately knew it was a considerably larger fish than those I’d caught earlier.
We engaged in a tug-of-war for a few minutes, and then when I worked the fish closer to the boat, it leaped forth from the water. The salmon was almost 4 feet long and cleared the water skyward at least 10 feet. The closest thing I have ever seen to this was when Spencer Tracy in the movie, The Old Man and Sea, first saw his great marlin erupt into the air. For the next half hour I tangled with the leviathan salmon, which took me to the shoreline before I landed it. There must have been 100 people around it while we measured the fish before releasing it.
Without a word, the crowd parted to allow Ted Williams to come see the fish. I was unaware that his lodge was 100 yards behind me. In his typical gruff fashion, he walked over where I was knee deep in the river, and said tersely, “Biggest one caught here in a long time.” Without another word, or letting me know if he remembered fishing with me in years past, he turned and walked away. The salmon taped 46 inches long, and we estimated its weight at around 43 pounds. The incredible part of the story is, though, that this fish was landed on the same rod I used a week earlier when fishing Abrams Creek.
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