S6, Ep 139: Exploring East Tennessee's Changing Waters with Ellis Ward

Hey, folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of the Articulate Flower, back with another East Tennessee fishing report with Ellis Ward.

Ellis, how are you?

I'm doing well, Marv.

How are you?

As always, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble.

And I'll double dog dare you to say that it's going to snow in the next week in Johnson City.

Yeah, it's going to snow.

And we will have fantastic blue winged olive hatches on only the South Holon river from Big springs to Thomas, 2pm to 5pm Just on Friday, though.

Yeah.

So you heard it first here, folks.

You can take that to the bank, but a little bit more seriously.

We don't want to press on your meteorological credentials too much.

What are you seeing out on the water?

It's been interesting, and I don't say that to sound like a redundant guide.

The South Holston has still been running this 400 and that, that gives the waiting angler an opportunity to fish most of the river.

And you can run a boat.

There's, there's a couple areas that are a little sketchy, but you can float the whole river in that flow.

And there's still just a little bit of color, which also tracks with the Watauga, which is still quite muddy.

That's, that's running.

I mean, it's, it's clearing at a very, very slow rate.

But it does look, it's got this.

It's starting to get a little more of a green tinge.

And that process of.

There was sedimentation from Helene from the Freestone rivers coming into Watauga Lake and depositing a bunch of stuff at the bottom that expedited turnover.

So I know we're going to talk about this, but that's been a very interesting thing.

Just specific to the Wataga.

No bugs on the Wataga, but I shouldn't say no bugs.

There aren't hatches that I would be expecting this time of year.

And especially certain conditions.

There are, you know, there are some bugs and you'll be out there and if you ever have a doubt on like vision of trout and why I like to fish higher in the water column when it's muddy.

Um, watching fish rise or, you know, seeing risers when it's.

It's still really, really off color, um, that should give an indication that they can see stuff on the surface of the water.

Um, South Holston has been, it's been fishing.

Well, man, um, I favor the Watauga for a few different reasons, but those all, all of those reasons are now Backwards and south.

Holston's been moving some big fish and getting some big fish to eat.

Streamers and the dry fly game has been it.

It's interesting there you'll have windows where you get a bunch of activity and this is mostly condition dependent but generally when they're eating a bunch on top, you can trick them pretty easily.

And you're just getting these windows of a lot of really small bugs.

And so they're seeing so much food at the same time and getting comfortable pretty quickly.

So you'll get windows where they're pretty bitey and you can get fish to eat most things with a decent presentation.

But a lot of the dry fly fishing has been pretty technical and it can feel frustrating when you're seeing risers everywhere and even casting to specific ones and not getting eats.

But that's just part of the puzzle that I like figuring out.

So all in all, pretty good on the musky front.

Front broad is fishing really well and it's been, I think so cool to see that because you know, one muskie fishing.

So when we're moving fish and, and getting them to eat every once in a while, that's a good thing.

And when we're doing that consistently, that's an even better thing when we're doing those things.

And I really didn't know how much of the, you know, structure was going to be left if it was a one in a thousand years or one in whatever.

It's the amount of water up there that came through was just insane.

I mean it's.

Wow.

I forget what one of the recent estimates was, but just it's not like a one in a thousand or one in ten thousand.

It's like, you know, this might happen again just statistically every 20, 30,000 years.

So it's been really cool to see that the muskie homes are, you know, the specific logs are still there and specific fish moving some in new areas and there's some new log jams that have formed and temperatures are changing so fish are kind of moving anyhow.

But yeah, all things considered, I, I kind of like it because it's just, it's a full new deck of cards and I like that.

I like the, the variation and figuring out, figuring out the puzzles on a day to day or week to week basis as opposed to just going out and doing the same thing.

Yeah, very, very neat.

And also too, you know, I'm kind of regularly checking in with, you know, all the tourism folks and you know, people like you and you know, just a kind of A public service announcement that, you know, quite honestly, folks, at this point, you know, almost all of western North Carolina and East Tennessee are open for business.

You know, 26 is open to get to Irwin now.

You can take 40 all the way across the state of North Carolina.

There are a few road closures still in North Carolina, but you can check the NCDOT site for that.

But I would encourage you to get out into, you know, the support.

These communities got hit really, really hard because this hurricane deeply impacted their tourism season.

And so I would encourage you to come to Johnson City, fish with Ellis and go to the shops and do the same thing in western North Carolina and southwest Virginia as well.

Yeah, I, I appreciate that.

Marv had a couple lost trips there and then not as many bookings right now as I would expect.

And I, I'm not too worried about it just because of.

You can't control everything.

But, you know, I also appreciate the fact that as of a week or two, two weeks ago, like you just said, 26 is.

Is back open.

And so a lot of folks that would have been looking at, oh, how far away is Johnson City?

Or how, how far away is Asheville?

How far away is the French Broad from where I am thinking about fishing with me.

And it's.

Instead of an hour and a half or two or three from where they are, it looks more like five, six, seven.

And that has all largely been for the main interstates.

That's been fixed.

Yeah, absolutely.

And got a question for you, too.

And I didn't realize we were talking before we started recording.

This is one of your old homies.

Fish lacks outdoors.

And he wanted to find out if the lakes in your neck of the woods have started to turn over yet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rita and grew up kind of down the road, but mostly went over to a friend of mine's house and he lives sort of adjacent in the backyard.

Small town.

Ohio stuff.

Yeah.

Like I said, the Watauga.

I mean, you measure the temperature of that water and it's 60, which is wild.

I mean, that's.

It feels like that's warmer than it is in the summer.

I mean, there was a massive shift in water columns and just.

That's the sedimentation process that caused that.

And I'm saying that it expedited turnover.

It could be something else entirely.

I have to every once in a while just say, I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole right now.

So I haven't quite done it with that also.

You got to go out and fish it and just see what Happens anyway, regardless.

And the South Holston I have not seen the typical turnover.

That said, because of a new addition to my family who is now a month old, there was a couple weeks there where I wasn't getting out.

And that coincided with.

It was real good beforehand.

And a couple things that I can really notice when the lakes turn over is that on the tailwaters you see a.

I mean it's not precipitous, it's 0 and 1.

It's a cliff function, not just the bite.

You know, you could be fishing good conditions and you're not moving anything, but you're not seeing bugs, you're not seeing herons, you're not seeing kingfishers, osprey.

It's just not there.

And so we're seeing a little of that life return to the Watauga despite all of the mud still being there.

And I actually, I have to plead ignorance.

On the South Holston having turned over.

Not.

There were a couple little snaps.

So it would have made sense, honestly, as far back as a couple of weeks ago.

It's kind of been unseasonably warm for the last few weeks, but there was enough of a snap to, to cause things to move and hopefully that was it.

And I missed it because the fishing sucks.

And so, and so just kind of walk folks through that process about, you know, kind of what happens kind of during that fall turnover.

For like up, up in the lake.

Well, just to talk about why the fishing sucks.

Oh, sure.

So you have basically if you think about lakes as those are our feeders to the tailwaters and there's a hole, those are, that's a bowl with a drain at the bottom of them.

And that bowl typically is stable.

It's colder at the bottom, warmer at the top.

And dissolved oxygen is stable as a.

That is relative to temperature.

So water has dissolved oxygen capacity.

That it mostly is, has a linear relationship with temperature.

So as temperature drops, the capacity to hold oxygen increases.

As temperature rises, the capacity to hold oxygen decreases.

So that's why warm water is a problem for trout, which are fish that require higher amounts of dissolved oxygen.

Bass, not so much.

That's why you can catch a, catch a large mouth in an 80 degree lake and it's not a problem.

But they are a little more slovenly and happens in salt water.

It's, it's just because, you know, they're running on a, a treadmill and instead of just breathing they have a little bit of a, something more of their face that, that's the human metaphor.

They're just for the same amount of effort, they're not getting as much oxygen.

And so what happens with the tail waters is that bowl that I was talking about is just stagnant.

And you have.

As you get lower, it gets.

It gets colder.

And that water has a higher capacity to hold oxygen during turnover, where that bowl starts to move, it's not stable.

It's.

It's not the same picture that it was.

And you end up getting water at the bottom of the bowl draining down into the tailwater that has a.

It's warmer, it has a lower dissolved oxygen content, which just means that the water now coming in is for fish going out and eating for.

For bugs, for anything that relies on that.

Which is why tailwaters are stable and packed with fish and bugs and plants.

All of that is just upside down for a week or two.

And, you know, lake, Lake turnover, people talk about shad kills and heck, I hadn't even heard about it when I was here for a couple years.

It just, it took these couple weeks of the tailwaters themselves all the way down into the next reservo, fishing like junk.

And then starting to observe that the only thing I'm seeing around here is ducks.

So you're not seeing any of these.

Like that entire ecosystem of bugs and fish and birds, like that's.

It's just dead.

And you can go out and fish really well, go out in conditions that should have great rising trout and fish eating streamers.

And I mean, you can just feel it out there.

That's.

You don't see ospreys flying.

There's no herons waiting around.

So it's.

It happens in the fall, it happens in the spring.

Sometimes it's only a couple days, other times it's a week or two.

You can still have a good day out there.

And I've been kind of toying around with ways to get around it, but just part of the deal, man.

Well, there you go.

And you know, 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.

And we're in a drawing for some cool stuff from Ellis at the end of the season, which is quickly approaching.

And Ellis, I know looking at the calendar, you know, you're probably, what, 10 days, two weeks away from gun season, which equals bucktails.

You want to talk to folks about that and you know how to get on your guide calendar and all that kind of good stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

Gun season opens in five days and it'll be a couple days before that first batch is out and we'll just push that to a week or so.

But the guide calendar can be found along with bucktails at ellis ward flies.com and by calendar I do mean you can just shoot me an email, ask for available dates.

I've been trying to put some updates there with what's going on, what I'm focusing on, and best way to reach me is my Cell phone at 513-543-0019 and follow along with neat pictures on Instagram at Ellis Ward Guides.

Yeah, there you go.

And remember folks too, you know, we host our articulate flock community on Patreon and there are two great ways to support the show and support Ellis.

And at one level, you get a discount on bucktail.

So if you're a bucktail freak, it's a good deal.

And then another is actually an annual, I think hundred dollar guide credit to get out on the water with Ellis.

So two great opportunities.

And you know, I always say we've had a unseasonably warm fall and you know, winter I guess will be here in about a month.

But I'll tell you, you know, as I've been saying, you know, unless you're out chasing steelhead or muskie in February, it's probably going to be cold and miserable and you're going to regret not being on the water in, in November.

So I encourage you to get out there and catch a few.

Tight lines, everybody.

Tight lines.

Ellis.

Appreciate it.