S6, Ep 2: East Tennessee Fishing Report with Ellis Ward

EPISODE SUMMARY

Guest: Ellis Ward - Full-time Guide and Fly Tier at Ellis Ward Guides (Johnson City, East Tennessee)

In this episode: East Tennessee guide Ellis Ward shares a regional fishing report covering post-Christmas rain impacts on local waters and winter fishing patterns. Topics include musky fishing strategies in high/stained water, post-spawn brown trout activity, advanced fly tying techniques for Drunk and Disorderly patterns and bucktail availability for tiers.

Key fishing techniques covered: • Musky fishing in high/stained water conditions • Post-spawn brown trout targeting with streamers and dry flies • Low-clear water patterning for musky over multiple seasons • Drunk and Disorderly head design for optimal dog-walk action • Short wedge deer hair techniques for improved fly performance

Location focus: East Tennessee tailwaters (Clinch River, French Broad River), Tennessee River system reservoirs

Target species: Musky, brown trout

Equipment discussed: Drunk and Disorderly flies, Swim Bug patterns, natural bucktails (grades 3-4, 4-5.5 inch fibers), deer hair flies, bunny strip heads

Key questions answered: • How does post-Christmas rain affect East Tennessee fishing? • What are effective musky patterns in high/stained water? • How do you tie shorter wedges on Drunk and Disorderly heads? • Where can I find quality bucktails for fly tying?

Best for: Intermediate to advanced anglers interested in East Tennessee tailwater fishing, musky tactics and advanced fly tying techniques

**Marvin Cash:**
Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly, and we're back for the first East Tennessee Fishing Report of 2024 with Ellis Ward. Ellis, how you doing?

**Ellis Ward:**
I am doing well, Marv. How are you?

**Marvin Cash:**
As always, just trying to stay out of trouble. Was Santa Claus good to you this year?

**Ellis Ward:**
Yeah, I was a good boy this last year, so I didn't get coal, which is always nice. My daughter actually asked me, not why do kids get coal, but what do you do? What's the purpose? I was like, oh man, we'll talk about that next year.

**Marvin Cash:**
The Industrial Revolution, all that kind of good stuff, right?

**Ellis Ward:**
Yeah, I was like, look, you're a good kid. I'm a good kid.

**Marvin Cash:**
Well, we're going to...

**Ellis Ward:**
I glossed over that question for right now.

**Marvin Cash:**
Yeah. And so I know your heart grew three sizes because over the Christmas holiday, you got a ton more rain in East Tennessee.

**Ellis Ward:**
Yeah. Better be careful making Grinch references. That'll also set me off.

We got, there's a pretty cool tool on NOAA.org. There's an hourly forecast that gives you rain or sky cover, precipitation probability, humidity, temperature, wind chill, all that. And it can be good to, that's like one data source that you can use. For me, prepping, if the trip's going to happen one way or the other, people just say, is this a good time to go fish?

And they give these little bars when it says a high probability of rain. It'll highlight that they do it between four and six hours. And when it's a quarter inch over that period of time, that's like a good amount of rain. And for a full day, it was one and a quarter for two or three of those four to six hour segments in a row.

So I know that I've said this before, that amount of rain can cause problems. And we're up at the top of the Tennessee River system and the dams do a good job of keeping everyone safe. It's been so dry since last fall that we need a couple more of those. Obviously not going to hope for anything that does others harm, but just in isolation of our water tables and all the reservoirs, the pressure on just the general health of the wildlife around here, we need a few more of those. It was nice to finally get like a multi-day cold drenching.

**Marvin Cash:**
Yeah. And I would imagine too that you took advantage of the holiday season to spend a fair amount of time probably on your own chasing musky, right?

**Ellis Ward:**
Yeah. I think I got out there. I was out there on Christmas, and that was the day before it started coming down that day and then it really opened the throttles up. And then, yeah, it took a break for a few days.

Had a trout trip, last trout trip of the year, which was fun. Guy's first time actually contacting me through listening to this podcast. So shouts out to Ryan.

And yeah, we just saw the post-spawn activity of the brown trout and got some risers. And I mean, it was a cold day, upper 30s, a little bit windy for nine hours. So it's hard, and I kind of spent the previous day or two taking care of the things that one needs to take care of when otherwise they're off, chasing musky and bouncing around the tail waters at basically 24 hours a day.

So a couple of good days of admin in there. Good trip. And back at it day after tomorrow, and then trips sort of pick back up starting next week, mostly for muskies still.

**Marvin Cash:**
Yeah, and it's interesting too, right? Because I would imagine that having the more sustained flows, right, from the high water and also the fact that it's kind of been colder, I would imagine that patterning the muskie is probably getting a little bit easier than it was probably four or five weeks ago.

**Ellis Ward:**
Yeah, so you get to benefit from your times on the low water. In that low water where the fish can be very finicky, if you're out there enough and if you are fishing enough, it doesn't happen over one season. It certainly doesn't happen over one day. You can stumble into it over the course of a day or just a couple hours.

But you can, over the course of years, you can figure out where they're probably going to be, what they're probably going to be doing, pick your weather days, your moon days, and really get those things dialed in. For my own fishing, I get to qualify follows and new zones as wins because if I catch them, it's like, all right, well, if I have a trip in two or three days, I gotta think twice about really wanting to feed too many fish on your own if you don't have other spots.

So doing all that work in low water and getting the follows, and even on some trips, now I have guys putting in so many more casts, so many more presentations than I can do on my own. And I actually get to explore and sort of bank that data from the guys who are paying me to guide them.

Getting all of that and putting all of it together over years, you come up with, all right, I'm going to focus on these areas, and you start seeing more fish. They can be tough on that. It's the same as every other fish: low and clear, they can really need some convincing, and you just might not have too many shots at convincing them by the time they're under the boat and saying see you later.

So some of that stain, when you know where they are, you have the confidence to say, I know I'm fishing over, you're not just saying it to make yourself feel sane. Oh, I can't imagine how many times we've presented to a muskie today and haven't been eaten.

There's places where you know the fish are that when the water's off, the likelihood of them eating and eating pretty quickly, as opposed to following in the boat eight, six times at the boat in clear water and not going, the chance of that happening, of those full commitment eats, is going to be a lot higher. So I'm certainly thankful for that.

There's gives and takes there because this is more on the French Broad, less on the Clinch. You're not able to see more than maybe a foot. The French Broad is just a little sandier, and you lose visibility quickly. There's a lot of structure we're casting into, and so you get the feel of the river pretty quickly, but first couple hours can feel pretty snaggy and you just gotta be pretty heads up with what you're doing with your fly and how you're working it.

So as always, somewhat redundant speaking from me and walking back on my own words, but there are pros and cons to the high dirty.

**Marvin Cash:**
Yeah. Got it. And heading into the full-fledged jaws of winter is also tying season, and I have a pretty good tying question for you from James Culp. He apparently has been watching your tying videos on YouTube, and I guess in one of your previous ones you talked about the value of shorter wedges on Drunk and Disorderly heads, and he was wondering if you could maybe talk about that a little bit more about why it's valuable and maybe some tips for how to tie them a little bit more effectively. And I guess he specifically wants to know about how to make a smooth transition between the bunny strip of the head and the deer hair.

**Ellis Ward:**
Yeah, and I've noted this on all of my tying videos related to the Drunk and Disorderly and to the Swim Bug, and I've talked about it a bunch. I learned this stuff from listening to Tommy Lynch and from tying. I really can't even guess how many awful flies, and then you start getting a little better, and then I still cut heads off sometimes.

The hair is just too buoyant, and yeah, maybe the head just ended up being too long. I'm switching from size 1 to size 1/0s or going down to the 2s for minis. And yeah, so it's a long way of saying whatever I'm talking about with this, it is worth finding a couple of the podcasts that Tommy has been on.

If you just look up Tommy Lynch and Drunk and Disorderly podcast, you'll be able to find a few. And a lot of what he says, I suspect that it can be similar to how I speak. A lot of what he says, it's very clear he's, I fish with him, he almost speaks a different language. But when you understand what he's talking about and he's talking about just your fingers as opposed to even wrist, as opposed to even forearm, just this little light tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, and angles and all that stuff.

He talks about tying a little bit too, and this is the reason I bring it up, because I'm going to quote him on one of the tying components of it. Definitely go try to find those things, and he wouldn't even take credit for me trying to extol his virtues when I was telling him thank you because I got, Larry Dahlberg is the one to tie deer hair in with the intention of carving it for a specific purpose in the water. I was like, all right, you're just not gonna, cool.

But what he had said was, and he said it in two different ways, the width of the head is proportional to the length of the body. And I must have paused and re-listened to that one sentence when I first heard it. I don't know, 20 or 30 times. I was like, all right, so that's completely unhelpful.

Well, after you tie a few, and I mean even one, you tie a few more like that, you start to dial in what that width actually looks like with respect to what is going on with the rest of the fly, and you stay within those bounds and sort of figure it out from there.

The other one he had said is that you start from the eye. So you take that razor blade up from, and you put it flat down against the eye. And you don't want the edge of that, it's not supposed to be a block. There is no edge. It's what the water is supposed to be cut.

And he talks about chucking and jiving and tight cuts and all these different phrasings. It's that front edge is cutting down into the water, and it is not like a crankbait or a jerkbait. It's a little more like a jerkbait. It's not like a crankbait such that you hit it and because the rest of the body is buoyant and because the lip's doing this, there's a bunch of other mechanics involved there, it starts to wobble in a certain way.

It's cutting down because of the way the fly wants to travel, wants to travel in the path of least resistance when you give it a little tap. And then when you give it another tap after it's started to float up a little bit, and Tommy talks about float recovery, you give it another tap. And because of how it's oriented and the shape of your head, which is narrow at the front, wider as it goes in the back, it wants to, the path of least resistance is to go down and back the other way.

And so in order to, I would say, maximize that, that what I just described is the dog walk. It cuts one way, it starts to float up, you hit it again, and right when it's done going the other way and starting to float, tap it again and it goes down and over to the other side. That right there is one left to right, and when you're out fishing these things, and it took me so long to get there, you're watching it go left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right.

You can control that dog walk really well, and in order to, one way to maximize that I think is to just view the edge, the front edge of that fly, as the driver of that entire motion. And so you worry less about that float recovery and getting this big head. Tommy's quote was, once you have that edge, it matters very little what is behind that edge.

And so if you just think about the mechanics of what's happening in the water, you can give that line a tap. It's not being told to go down into the left because of what is behind the front edge of the deer hair. There's a lot of helpful stuff that can be encouraged as that happens, but when you start, when you start going longer heads during that kill, so as it's supposed to be floating up and you're about to hit it again to go back down to the right, if you have a longer head, there's more surface area and it can actually get pushed down.

So instead of floating back up, it sort of folds over onto itself. And for those folks listening that this makes absolutely no sense to, I completely understand that. I'm sure it makes sense to James. I'm sure it makes sense to however many people are listening that have tied a Drunk and Disorderly and said, why is this thing boiling up on itself as I'm stripping it?

Shorter and faster strips. And then, yeah, go with a shorter, wider head. It tends to not be that long head that is driving the dog walk. It's those short, compressed heads that really focus on that tight cut at the front, starting at the eye without anything, without any width to it. And then a nice beefy collar.

You can cut that thing down if it's adding too much buoyancy, but that collar adds a lot of stability and actually stops it from folding onto itself along with some other things. So I'll start getting into flash selection and getting the right mallard if I don't stop myself now. I do think that will be helpful for James though.

**Marvin Cash:**
Yeah. And James, hit us back if you want us to dig into this a little bit more. And I just called off the SWAT team, so you're lucky.

**Ellis Ward:**
Oh, appreciate it.

**Marvin Cash:**
Yeah, you bet. So still in the holiday spirit, and folks, we love questions on The Articulate Fly. You can email them to us, you can DM me on social media, whatever is easiest for you.

And Ellis and I will put our heads together and come up with what we're going to do for our drawing promotion for 2024. But I know from talking to you before we started recording that you may not be up to your elbows in borax, but you have plenty of bucktails still.

**Ellis Ward:**
Yeah, I did a little bit of a push there, and all the grade 1s and 2s, so the super long and also super expensive tails had sold. And most folks got a lot of, a number of tails, and not just the grade 1s and 2s, but I have a lot of the grade 3s and 4s, which next to the 5, 5.5-inch, I mean, for anyone who ties with bucktail, if you go to whatever your largest tail is and look how many 5, 5.5-inch fibers there are, when you're getting a tail that is mostly 5-inch fibers, it looks insane.

And the ones that are mostly 5s with a lot of 6s in there, it doesn't look like it's a genetic anomaly. So I have a lot of the, we'll say like, 4, 4.5-inch, which they're really nice tails. And those are the grade 3s and then a lot in the grade 4s. Those are the $15 and $20 tails.

And basically, I just want to say that those are there and available. And let me know if you have questions or want to see pictures on some of them. I'll keep them for quite some time, and I'll keep some for myself, but at some point I'll probably end up dyeing a good number of those, and naturals tend to be hard to come by.

So yeah, for those interested in getting some good natural in the 4, 4.5-inch and up to the 5, I will have plenty of those for a little bit, and a bunch is still in the freezer. So bucktail season is not over by any means.

**Marvin Cash:**
There you go. And folks, we're in the process of The Articulate Fly building out a Patreon community. And one of the benefits we have, we have two different tiers. And at one of the tiers, you get 10% off of Ellis' bucktails. And there's another tier where once a year, you get $100 guide credit with Ellis.

So great way for you to support Ellis. It's a great way for you to support the show. And you can find the link to that in the show notes. And Ellis, before I let you go, I know you're getting ready to kind of get back in the water kind of full bore here. But you want to let folks know how they can reach out to you so they can get on your guide calendar?

**Ellis Ward:**
Yes. Website is elliswarsflies.com. You can send an inquiry, email me through that. Texting me is always, texting, calling is always, I would say, a better option at 513-543-0019.

And mostly for entertainment, you can follow on YouTube at Ellis Ward Fishing, and Instagram is at Ellis Ward Guides. And I tend to not put up, I'd say, 90% of what goes on in my life. They're good indicators of what's happening, but if you are interested in, specifically now for the next month or two, post-spawn browns, fishing streamers, still have a lot of great dry fly activity, and fishing for muskie until the spawn in late April, give me a shout.

**Marvin Cash:**
Yeah, or if you just need a suggestion on your next vape pack, that works too, right?

**Ellis Ward:**
Oh, yeah. I've been, I'm the one on the ground doing the legwork, and I don't know what else you need from a guide.

**Marvin Cash:**
Yeah, well, here you go. Well, listen, folks, just want to wish everybody a happy new year. Happy new year, Ellis.

**Ellis Ward:**
Happy new year, Marv.

**Marvin Cash:**
Tight lines, everybody.