S6, Ep 121: Ellis Ward on East Tennessee's Waters: After the Storm

Hey, folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of the articulate fly.

And we're back with another east Tennessee fishing report with Ellis Ward.

Ellis, how are you?

I am doing well now, Marv, how are you?

I'm just trying to stay out of trouble.

And, you know, you were lucky.

You had moved out of town and you're in Jonesboro and, you know, you were spared the worst of it, but, you know, the folks around you weren't really.

You want to kind of.

I know people are kind of, you know, eager to hear kind of firsthand, kind of what are you seeing in, you know, the Johnson City, Elizabethton area where you kind of fish?

Yeah, I'm doing my best not say a tale of two cities, but it kind of is Johnson City proper and, and Bristol Bluff City.

I mean, really, the, the tailwaters themselves.

It's their tailwaters.

They were insulated to a certain extent.

It's the towns and anything around any of the freestones.

And just to give people some context of the extent of this, the degree to which a freestone can pick up and move water.

And I'll just use the Doe as an example.

And this is a river that runs.

I can feel it in when Wilbur Dam, when the Wataka tailwater is running 1700 cfs and below the confluence of the dough, I can feel that.

I can feel the difference.

When the dough is pushing 200, 250, because it's normally in the 50 to 100.

When the Wataga is low and the doe is over 100 cfs, you can tell going over rocks or, you know, the lanes are wider, the super skinny kind of shady stuff.

Some of the drops in the middle river, they're just easier.

And that's at 100 cfs.

And that difference between 102 hundred, 250, that's really, really meaningful.

When it's up at like 400, 500 cfs, that's kind of blown out chocolate milk debris in the water.

When it's at 800, if it's pushing 1000, that's where we start seeing water in some of the boat ramp parking lots and new banks start getting eroded, that type of stuff.

So that's at 1000, which doesn't happen that often.

That river was up to 17,000 cfs.

And it's just not.

It doesn't have the bank structure for that.

It doesn't have floodplains.

And the Watauga tailwater is so insulated and so regular that they just don't have those wide eroding floodplains.

So I know that the sycamore Shoals ballad hospital was being evacuated.

I think that was Friday evening.

And you know, as I'm, as I'm talking about this not having floodplains not meant for this bank erosion.

All that french fraud where I've spent untold hours the last five years muskie fishing in the last couple years, muskie guiding the numbers there.

Just astronomical.

And it's gauges that normally read 100, 200 cfs are reading 10,000, 15,000.

The french broad going through Asheville, people can look up some of the destruction here.

It's just cleaning out anything that was adjacent to the, you know, one story shops and little restaurants adjacent to the river.

It's a parking lot.

It's a mud flat.

I mean, five minutes from me on the Nola Chucky, there's a bridge that looks like some sort of war footage when you drive up to it.

And I went down to the next three bridges, and it's all the same.

They're just, it's just evaporation.

There's just.

There's not even traces of abutments.

It's just fully carried down, you know, 50,000 cfs pushing through there.

And you can see just with dirt marks, you know, it's 2300 yards on either side of what would even be a big flood before.

So it's weird.

It's weird being five minutes from that and we lost power, but we had water.

It's what got hit.

Got hit so hard.

And then other people may have lost power or water, but, I mean, if you weren't in that direct hit, it's.

It's not like a hurricane with, with the.

With the winds.

Like, this was strictly rain and flooding.

And so you have people with complete losses of their home.

And I'm not kidding you, 50 yards away with a little bit of elevation.

The neighbor's house is 100% untouched.

Um, so it.

I don't know, it.

It's.

It's been weird, I would say.

And I think I felt.

I felt okay enough about whatever moral compass that is still left in me to go out and start fishing the south Holsten.

Because, I mean, come on, dude.

The flows were looking great.

I don't want to desensitize it too much, but there's a lot of places that I would say localized and very significant damage that need help.

And I think you were talking about putting some links into the show notes here.

But it's kind of a tough one because it's not like Florida.

Like, you get a hurricane, what are you doing with insurance?

Why isn't your house at stilts, et cetera.

It's, I don't want to say once, once in a lifetime or more, but statistically, that's what we're looking at.

Yeah, it's incredibly devastating.

I mean, loss of life, loss of property.

I mean, you know, it's going to take, you know, years to get back to normal.

You know, I guess what I would say, folks, is last week I put out a blog post and I'll link to it in the show notes that gives you some donation ideas for Southwest Virginia, western North Carolina and East Tennessee that are state agencies and large charities that are funneling money to the people that are on the ground.

One of the things that I've suggested across the board is as it becomes easier to get back into East Tennessee and western North Carolina, tourism is incredibly important to that part of the world and you need to go and do your best to support local merchants.

And that includes fly shops and fishing guides.

And I think one of the things that you can definitely do is you can buy gift certificates and gift cards.

So there's revenue coming into these local communities.

But also, too, if you have trips booked, you know, don't cancel the trips if you can possibly do it and let the guides and the shops keep the money because it is going to be a very, very long road back.

But I will drop those links in the show notes.

And I would also say, too, that our friends at visit Johnson City have kind of shifted from tourism to supporting the community.

And, you know, if you're in need, you can go there, charge your phone, get water, get help finding hotel rooms.

You know, Alec Castro is my contact there, but the whole team there is ready to help.

And as we have more information, we will certainly push it out in our social media channels and on the website and in the podcast and well kind of shift a little bit.

I did have a question for you, Ellis from Brenner.

And hes getting ready for Muskie season and he wanted to get your thoughts on kind of the best materials to incorporate into your musky fly so that you get good kills when you strip the fly.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well do a hard pivot.

We can talk about the other stuff for a long time, but very, very briefly.

I'd also say John at Tailwater Glyco has been reaching out and I know you've talked with him as well.

So there's, there's a bunch of good resources there, too.

All right.

Pivoting to phishing report question answering.

So for fly time, I love this question.

And we didn't get a chance to talk about it before this call.

So, thoughts coming at you live here.

The, I mean, two materials that I like the most for what he's talking about, which is getting a pronounced stop of the front part of the fly so that you get.

Or you can get some form of dog walk, I would say, with, with some of the smaller, musky flies, you can.

If you're, if you are going to add weight using something like brass dumbbell eyes, you really don't need to do that.

I like to do it occasionally if I'm tying with shanks and, you know, with the, with a small trailer hook.

Because if you think about the difference between, like, a five odd yemenite hook and a shank, there's so much more metal, so much more weight in that hook.

So if you're tying on a shank, you know, to put in some lead wraps or something actually helps with that, the momentum and then some of that castability.

If it's a pretty big fly, and then if you shift that up front, then you can, depending on what type of material you're using, you can get a little bit of a jig, I'm guessing what he's talking about.

And something that I focus on much more is bucktail or the synthetic that I love for this strong fuzzy.

And I would throw another option in there.

And this is kind of a sort of a curveball, but crafter with, um, either a.

A flexible uv coating.

And, you know, if you feel like putting eyes on it, great.

But, but if you, if you shape it in a way that encourages movement side to side.

So saying that another way, if you shape it skinnier on the sides of and taller on the top and the bottom, that encourages side to side movement.

Cause that kill happens when you remove your pulling force and the fly is left in the water.

And so you get the kill when the force against that fly, which can come through friction, it can come through buoyancy.

Um, when the force of the water against the front part of that fly is much greater than it is against any other part of that fly.

And so, you know, with the swim bug, for example, which I have some versions that I fish for muskie, you have a bunch of buoyancy up front with the deer hair head.

And it's like trying to put a, you know, an exercise ball underwater.

Something that's really buoyant, it doesn't want to be in there.

And it gets moved very easily by the water because it doesn't want to be in there, you know, on the other side of the spectrum would be a bare hook that would just fall through the water.

So the more buoyant you get, the more sensitive the head shape is.

And then you look at, you know, that craft, for example, is that's just surface area.

So if you have looking at the front of the fly, like looking at its nose and it's skinny on the left and the right, but tall on the top, tall on the bottom and maybe even wider on the top, you're going to have the most friction wherever you have the most surface area.

So that would be at the top.

If you're just looking at it straight on, once you stop stripping that, it's going to get pushed one way or the other because it's not a perfect system when it gets pushed one or the other.

If the sides are markedly a bigger surface area than the top or the bottom, it's going to get slammed sideways and, you know, it'll look like it's, it's tail is kicking out and it's, it's heads going back.

So bucktail, honestly, same, same deal.

And it's why the bulkhead, the Buford, that platform can be so effective because when tied properly, just having something buoyant, it up front is going to give you that dog walking kill and then strong fuzzy.

I'll encourage people to watch some of the videos that Gunnar Brammer has done.

I've done a couple flies with it on YouTube, but you can get that stuff pretty dense and shape ahead that responds with that kill because there's a lot of friction, but it doesn't come with the buoyancy.

So some trade off.

And sometimes you do want that.

And I'm going to be appreciative of our time here.

Marvin, stop talking.

Well, that's good.

I'll tell the snipers to stand down.

Folks, we love questions on the articulate fly.

You can email them to us or dm us on social media, whatever is easiest for you.

And if we use your question, I will send you some articulate fly swag drawing for some cool stuff from Ellis at the end of the season.

And you know, Ellis, before I let you go, you want to let folks know where they can find you and book you and all that kind of good stuff.

Yeah.

Best way to reach me is my cell phone at 513-543-0019 Instagram is Ellis Ward guides and trip information.

You can send a booking request, email, look at fun pictures at ellis wardflies.com dot.

Well, folks, you know, we're, our thoughts and prayers are with everybody in east Tennessee, western North Carolina and southwest Virginia, they've been impacted by the hurricane.

And, you know, if you're, if you, you know, need help, there's some resources.

Johnson visit Johnson City.

If you folks want to make a donation, I'll drop the link to some, some options in the show notes.

And if you have information that you would like for me to share on the podcasts or in my social media channels, just reach out.

I'm happy to do that.

And, you know, we hope that everyone's able to kind of move forward the best they can.

And we're thinking about you.

And, you know, again, if you can, you know, support the local communities as they sort of come back to life, that would be terrific, too.

Tight lines, everybody.

Tightlines Ellis appreciate it.

Marvin.