in the 1990s, I started more than two dozen sporting titles (plus one on NASCAR racing and polo). Some of them, such as Whitetail Journal, remain in publication.
During the last 20 years I have dedicated well over half of my effort to ghost writing for so-called celebrity hunters and fishermen. It’s a quick buck, no hassles with young editors, and I don’t have to kill or catch every damned critter that I write about under the names of others. Additionally, I have hosted a number of television shows, my favorite being Bassin’ Mexico, which we did for four years. It took about six weeks of fishing in Mexico per season of television. On one morning trip there between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m., Wild Bill Skinner and I caught and released over 40 bass that topped ten pounds. The largest exceeded 16 pounds. There is a clip on YouTube of Wild Bill wrestling what was surely a new-world-record largemouth bass. I can be seen behind him. The guide knocked the fish off the bait at the side of the boat. The last time I looked, that clip had over 200,000 views.
Over the years I have hunted and fished everywhere from Alaska and Africa, to Chile and Scotland. I have fly-fished for Atlantic salmon with Ted Williams on the Miramchi River, bowhunted with Fred Bear at Grouse Haven, hunted caribou and mountain lion with Bob Foulkrod, and drank whiskey around campfires since I was 12. For a while I was not as ever-present in the Smokies as I was in the old days. However, everywhere I went, I measured it against these mountains. My epitaph will read, He went there, did that, and sold the T-shirt on Ebay.
When it came to being a topnotch fly-fisherman or archer, I even disappointed myself most of the time. I have grown as accustomed to being told, “I thought you could fish or shoot better than that.” When it comes to fly-fishing in the Smokies, I apply the same reasoning that I have long used for sex. It is less consequential to be the best angler, so long as I get to go as often as I am physically able to do so. Fishing is fun. Writing this book is fun. Neither requires the brilliance of a rocket scientist, or for that matter, even the ability to rebuild a carburetor.
One last word. Insofar as I have outlived most of the people I acknowledged in my past fishing books on the Smokies, I have decided not to list any this time. Greg Ward can repay his debts via that bit of print.
Tight lines,
Don Kirk
Montevallo, Alabama
(it’s a damned state …)
2010
chapter 1
Smoky Mountains Trout and Bass
THE MAJESTIC GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS National Park is a rugged half-million-acre wilderness sanctuary located on the border between Tennessee and North Carolina. Encompassed in the park are several steep, tree-lined ridges, separated by deep valleys. There are more than 1,000 miles of cool, crystal-clear streams.
One of the most diverse biospheres on earth, the Smokies range from an elevation of 850 feet at the mouth of Abrams Creek to 6,642 feet on Clingmans Dome. The flora are incredibly diverse, with several trees reaching their record growth in the park. There are 13 major watersheds in the Smokies, as well as a number of smaller ones. These streams range in size from the largest, the Little River and Oconaluftee River, which during periods of normal flow are big enough to float a canoe down, to an almost endless number of small headwater rills. Living in these streams is a wide spectrum of aquatic insects and invertebrates, as well as more than 70 species of fish, including darters, suckers, dace, shiners, chubs, sculpin, bream, bass, and the native brook trout. Since the turn of the century, two other species, the rainbow trout and the brown trout, have become part of the ecosystem of the Smokies, although they are considered “exotics” by fisheries biologists.
The Brook Trout (Salvelinus fontinalis)
THE BROOK TROUT, known affectionately to the mountain folk of the Smokies as the “spec,” is not a true trout, but a char. The world’s trout—salmon, grayling, and whitefish—are members of one homogeneous group. The trout, in turn, are divided into two technically separate groups, the true trout and the chars.
This classification is arrived at principally through skeletal structure, teeth, and scale differences. This is of little importance to anglers, as the more apparent differences in coloration are obvious. Chars always have a dark background color with light spots. True trout, such as the rainbow and brown, always have a light background color with dark spots.
The brook trout is distinctive from other fish with its “worm like” markings on its back (known as vermiculations) and white-edged lower fins. The brook trout, like all chars, spawns in the fall. The brook trout of the Smokies are most closely related to lake trout, Dolly Varden trout, and Arctic char. They are the most handsome of all of the trout found in the park, in coloration and appearance. Only the ruby-flanked Arctic char that I’ve caught in the rivers and lakes of Quebec, Labrador, and the Northwest Territories are more visually stunning (and more tasty).
I grew up boulder-hopping headwater streams for brook trout. In 1978 I caught my largest brook trout in park waters. It was a 15-inch specimen taken while fishing with Vic Stewart at Meigs Creek. I have chased brook all over the South and Northeast as well as western waters where these bejeweled fish have been introduced. Once while caribou hunting along the Leaf River in Quebec, we fished the quarter-mile-wide river where every cast resulted in latching into a 5-to-7-pound brook trout. The first day of this was fun, but after catching and releasing scores of these leviathan brook trout, it occurred to me that it was far greater fun to ambush an 8-inch brookie in a rivulet in the Smokies.
In the Smokies, the brook trout feed on numerous forms of aquatic insects, including stone flies, mayflies, and caddis flies. Terrestrial insects are also an important part of their diet, and include bees, wasps, beetles, ants, jassids, flies, and grasshoppers. Crayfish are important daily fare, as are minnows. The brook trout is capable of digesting a stomach full of food in less than half an hour, a fact that prods the brookie to constantly look out for almost any edible morsels.
The brookies of the Smokies were “marooned” here after the glacial epoch. Originally an ocean-dwelling fish from the Arctic, the brook trout migrated down the eastern seacoast, fleeing the freezing onslaught of the ensuing Ice Age. When the rivers had cooled sufficiently to offer suitable habitat, the brookies moved upstream and established themselves. As the rivers began to warm, the brook trout were forced to retreat into the cool mountain headwaters.
The brook trout was once abundant in the Smokies. Accounts of fishing trips made into the mountains prior to 1890 tell of fish being caught by the hundreds. Large-scale logging operations came into the Smokies in the late 1890s. Whole watersheds were logged out, dams were erected on the streams, railroad lines were built up alongside many streams, and fires fed on the slash left behind by the timber-cutting operations: these were but some of the devastating problems the brook trout faced. All logging operations ceased in 1935 (approximately two-thirds of the Smokies were logged during this period), and better land management helped heal the wounds left by the previous forty years.
Estimates of the total amount of original brook trout water are speculative, but most agree that it was between 400 and 440 miles with the present boundaries of the park. There is reasonable documentation that when the park was officially established that brook trout had disappeared from over 150 miles of their former range. By 1980 these fish are believed to have lost an additional 130-to-140 miles of stream.
