S6, Ep 145: Navigating Winter Waters: Unconventional Strategies with Mac Brown

Hey, folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly, back with another casting Angles with Mac Brown. Mac, how are you?

I'm doing great. How are you doing, Marvin, as always?

I'm just trying to stay out of trouble. How was your Thanksgiving?

We had a great Thanksgiving and had all the. All the trimmings and things we made up here at the house.

And of course, kids always that there wasn't a whole lot of leftovers with two teenage boys.

Yeah, that's. That's pretty good, though. You know, you don't want to be in, like, Thursday, the following week, still eating turkey, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. They. They pretty much ate all that up. We made a. Made a turkey in a spiral, sugar cured ham. Now, I don't think it lasted maybe two days for all of it.

So, yeah, it went pretty fast.

Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting too, right?

We're heading into the holiday season, which means, you know, more and more DH stockings as, you know, the state's able to get in stock more things.

And one of the things that happens is between kind of the combination of the winter conditions and the fish getting more educated, you kind of have to get a little bit smarter about the way you fish. And we thought it might be helpful to talk to folks about, you know, learning to take what the river gives you.

Yeah, I think that's a good topic. Just because the difference of having. Well, it's unique.

It's unique like in Western Carolina right now because normally, you know, the dh, they don't ever do anything in December. And of course, they did something in December for all the DH programs that are still active.

And so we had some new fish again in December, which normally they just do October, November. So, yeah, taking what the river gives you.

And a lot of times these fish react very differently than what you'll find on like, Hazel Creek or Deep Creek or, you know, a wild. A wild. More wild stream. Of course, that gets tricky when I say wild stream.

But the tricky part is because all my friends at fisher, fishery biologists, I said, well, they're all invasives. Well, I look at it like.

I look at it a little bit different, I guess, because I look at it like the brown trout and rainbow trout that got stocked back in the mid-1930s. I think we can call them wild after this many years, personally.

So, I mean, they might be invasive, but they've been in there and breeding that many years. I just call them wild.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting, you know, to your point, like, there's like native wild and wild invasive. But, you know, I kind of get what you're saying.

You know, if folks have, you know, had hundreds of generations of trout, they probably belong in the Smokies, just like the brook trout. Right?

That's kind of what I'm thinking.

Yeah. And so, you know, it's an interesting thing. Right. So, you know, some.

And we talk, you and I talk about this a lot in different ways when we're together that, you know, people say, oh, well, it's winter. I mean, if you're lucky, they say, it's winter, let's go do this. But sometimes that doesn't work and they get frustrated.

And so, you know, you really have to kind of step back and kind of what we were kind of kicking off the episode with is, you know, take what the river's going to give you.

That's right, yeah. So just take what it's going to put up and give you. And it's like, especially this time of year with new stockings there in December.

I mean, fish do a lot of unorthodox things on those kind of programs.

So like for instance, an egg pattern, I mean, when, when a fish is on a red and there's an egg, a stray fish will come through the red and try to grab an egg pattern off of it. Of course, they're sitting on the bottom in the boundary layer.

And so what I mean by unorthodox is like, and they has no mobility and they can't just swim in the water or be stripped like a streamer. But what people have to remember with this unorthodox behavior is it's all fair game. I mean, they don't know that.

I mean, these fish have come out of a totally different set of circumstances.

So yeah, I mean, you can do things like have an egg or have a worm during high water events, it's muddy water and actually strip it back like a streamer and take fish left and right. Doing those kind of techni. Just because you don't think that that can happen. The fish don't know that that can happen.

So that's what we mean by trying a lot of things out of the ordinary.

I think it gets people in a lot of trouble when they start thinking about the representation that they're fishing and it needs to be fished totally on a dead drift. And I mean, that can get you beat 40 to 1, you know what I mean? But the person that fish is more active and does things that are unorthodox.

And so that's why I kind of like this topic, you know, tonight talking about to do the unorthodox when you know that fish don't have the conditioning to know the difference.

Yeah. And then kind of the bigger piece of the puzzle. Right.

And this goes back to, like, you know, what you talk about, like, working, for example, with the youth team is giving them a process and a progression. Right. So to, you know, what you were talking about earlier, right.

Is like, it's not like it's important to have the skill to achieve a dead drift, but that's just one of many tools in the toolbox, Right. And so you have many different ways you want to present.

And so if you have, you know, multiple presentation tools, then you need to have a roadmap about how to employ those when you're on the water to be consistently successful.

That's right. And then trying to take it a step further and try to do maybe four or five things on a singular drift.

You know, is this because we dead drift, we could still lift and, you know, ascend and descend a fly. We could still jig a fly, we could still swing a fly.

We could still do all kinds of rates of retrieval, or we could just do a hang and have the fly static.

But what I'm saying is what I see over the years is probably some of the best anglers that I've met in my lifetime are the ones that are the most diverse at doing a whole lot of things on each drift to figure out which one gave him that little sliver, you know, of success.

And then once they recognize, oh, that happened when I did this, then they go back and they start copying that instead of doing the whole five to seven things at a time. And I think that that's really important, I mean, is to. That's what we mean by take what the river gives you.

I mean, there's times, Marvin, that we can be out this time of year. And I've seen this so many times over the years that people could actually fish totally static.

In other words, they get tired, they get bored, whatever you call it. They're looking around at the eagle flying by and their rods just sitting down, pointing downstream, and the flies just sitting totally static.

And believe it or not, they'll out fish the person that's doing everything right. In other words, they're just holding static for every. Everything at the end.

But every time they do that, they're picking up a fish, and the person that's actually doing really more advanced techniques and actually what I would call fishing harder, they're struggling and it's like, that's what I mean by take what it gives you is there. There is times where we're holding a fly. Static downstream will give you more fish because there's a lot of advantages if you think about it.

If the line's totally static and it's pointing straight down below you in the current, the line's already dead tight, solid takes is one fish to put its. You know, if a fish eats, the fish has already hooked itself. You didn't have to do anything. You're not even part of the equation.

Basically, you do duct tape holding the rod in the river at that point, but the fish hooked itself. And that's what we mean kind of by there's. There's times where that usually is the high person on the river that day. I've seen that.

I've seen that happen multiple times when it's early. Early on with new stockings on.

DH and just because it's a egg pattern or a squirmy worm or whatever, it still is still going to be the high, even though it's sitting totally static in the water column. So I think that kind of puts it in perspective. Yeah.

And so I would say, I guess a couple things. Right. I think the important thing is to have a process. It doesn't have to be my process or your process to kind of work through things.

And then I guess a couple other things I would say, and I mean, I know you probably do this in the boat all the time, is, you know, if you're fishing with a buddy, don't fish the same flies the same way. Right. Try to kind of bracket in and figure out what's going on.

And, you know, that's another way to kind of get to the right answer a little bit more quickly.

That's right. That's what it's about. It's time just trying to crack the code a little bit quicker each time out the door.

And then after a while, if it's too easy to crack, then you want to go somewhere where it's a little harder to crack. But yeah, it's always fun cracking that. It doesn't matter what type of water you're on doing that. It's.

It's really the figuring out part that's the fun part about it.

Yeah. And then I guess the other thing I would say is, you know, there. I mean, there just are differences between hatchery and wild fish. Right.

And so, you know, hatchery fish are used to eating from above, basically, either, you know, from a machine or somebody going in and throwing pellets on top of the water. So, you know, they have a tendency to look. They have a tendency, right. To look up a little bit more.

And, you know, that's another reason why a really big hare's ear works on freshly stocked hatchery fish.

No, that's a good point. Yeah, I think they look up. Yeah, definitely. And it's. It's.

Tell you, it's been nice up here having it turned mild again the last couple days because we were down this past week in the single digits and it's been really nice. I think we were up our 50s today, had a little bit of rain. And just by being a little bit more mild, of course, it makes it a lot easier to think.

I think I'm going to saddle up and go, you know.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I would say too, I did want to give folks, I saw an email over the weekend from the North Carolina wildlife resource Commission on the situation with the hatcheries and delayed harvest and I guess, you know, the hatchery.

And I'll just tell you where it is because it's easier to try to do that than to remember for folks to remember the name and then remember where it is.

Originally, the plan was the hatchery in Pisgah near Davidson River Outfitters was going to get shut down for multiple years and get renovated and remodeled. And so that was going to have an impact on stockings.

And as a result of hurricane Helene, there was severe damage to the Armstrong hatchery and they lost all of their fish. And so that plan to renovate the hatchery in Pisgah has been delayed.

And they've actually been ramping up fish production so that they can stock from that hatchery.

And what the state said is watch the website, the hatchery website page on the North Carolina Wildlife Resources source commission page, and they'll give us more current information. But that's currently kind of the state of play. And, you know, you can watch. And they'll also tell you where they're stocking.

Although I think most fly shops in western North Carolina have been doing a pretty good job of putting that chart out for themselves.

That's right. And there's a lot of good. They put a lot of good brood fish in, at least up.

Up on the upper the Tucka CG through Bryson, the tuck of CG up on Webster to late harvest a lot of the brood fish.

What people don't realize is when those fish get old and they're starting to be basically at the end of their life cycle and they want to get rid of them because they don't want to feed them all through the winter. So they really put a lot of quality brood fish in this last one in December. So there's a lot of big fish.

I said, I mean one pool we were in the other day, we saw four fish on a trip with some folks from Augusta. But just in one spot we ended up, they ended up having like four that were 20, 22 inch fish in the one little area.

So, so I'm, I'm positive they just put a lot of the, the brood fish for the year and those didn't really happen the first go around in November it seemed like down here in Bryson anyway and up on the upper. So Upper Nantahala. So. So I'm sure there's a lot better quality stuff in there now.

And they won't do it again until I think it's March is when they'll start back because it'll be shut down. January, February, the program will still be open. There won't be any new fish until, till March again. So.

But yeah, it's, it's, it's a healthy, it's definitely a healthy environment right now to be out there playing, playing with the technique. Playing with your favorite technique, whatever that is. Yeah.

And I would say too, as I've been saying, you know, every fishing report that I've been doing with all my folks, kind of in western North Carolina, east Tennessee, southwest Virginia, you know, virtually every part of all of those regions, they're open and easily accessible. And so, you know, all those communities lost a ton of tourism money in October. It's a huge part of the driver.

It's kind of like how retailers get all their money right for Christmas shopping, you know, so try to, if you can, over the holidays to get into those communities and spend some money or buy gift certificates or gift cards because it's going to be a multi year journey for all those folks to kind of get back to where they were before hurling hit. And you know folks, as I always say in February when it's cold and miserable, you're going to wish you were out fishing now.

And you know, Mac, this is the last time we'll talk until 2025. So we need to wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Tight lines. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, everybody. Same to you, Matt.

Yeah, tight lines and happy New Year to everybody as well.

Take care everybody.