S7, Ep 28: Warming Waters and Active Fish: A Spring Fishing Update with Mac Brown

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

I'm doing great. How you doing, Marvin?

Just trying to stay out of trouble and adjusting to no more life on the road with fly fishing shows.

Oh, yeah, no, that was, that was fun. That was fun. I'm glad you got to come up there to Lancaster and hang out a few days.And we did a little school up in Wisconsin and wrapped it up in St. Paul at the Great Water show. And that was a, that was a really fun event too. Yeah.

I've got one more thing on my calendar, I guess in about, actually a little bit less than a month, I'm going to go down to Lefty's High Fest down in Vero Beach. It's a.They're bringing that event back and ASGA is, is putting it on and they're having a big fundraiser to support Jack Creval Research and you know, a bunch of OGs and young guns and fly fishing are going to be down there. So it should be a good time.

Yeah, that sounds like fun. That'd be a good time. And one thing I really liked about that Great Waters.It had a lot of families show up with kids and, you know, had a lot of whole family unit. The women were there in big numbers with their husbands and kids.And I think the booth that Lith Hartz ran there for Fly Fishers International, I think he said they ran close to 460 people that two and a half days, which is incredible.

Yeah, I'm pretty impressed.I mean, I've been to several fly fishing shows kind of in the, in the Midwest, and I'm always impressed at how passionate all the people are that are there, even though those are, you know, by kind of what we would consider kind of on. By east coast or west coast standard smaller regional shows.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's just he definitely went after, I think, you know, marketing to those, to that audience.And I was just impressed how many in the seminars like Jason Randall and I both did a bunch of seminars and I did a lot of casting demos.But when I'd look at the audience during the demos even, I mean, I'm seeing kids like second grade to fifth grade and the husband, wife standing there. I mean, it was really kind of cool. That was a cool, cool vibe going on, for sure. Yeah.

And then of course we get to come home and fish and you were telling me you've been chasing the spring dry fly hatches up in the. Up in the park.

Yeah, we got to do that this weekend, which was a lot of fun. And I had had a couple of mornings I could go up there and that was the big opening day, I think, in Cherokee as well.And there's a lot of people calling, asking questions about what they should do up there. And I'm not. I'm not really sure up there because I mostly go up in the park usually when I'm off.So I know in the park we're still getting pretty good March brown hatches and we had a really good black caddis hatch, few Betas still going off. And so it was fun. I got to play a lot with some wet fly technique and dry fly technique is pretty much all I did on Saturday and Sunday.I didn't really nymph fish at all up there because it's too good up in the middle column. Yeah.

And the great thing, right, you know, I've been watching, you know, you know, I would tell you folks, you know, the real trick to watch when the fishing is going to really turn on is look at the lows at night, right. And probably, I don't know, in the last week to 10 days, at least here, kind of in the Piedmont, the lows have started to.They're significantly warmer, like 15 to 20 degrees warmer. And so, you know, that just means that the water is going to warm up even when the sun's down and the fish are just going to get a lot more active.

That's right. Yeah. That really made a difference. We had a lot of.Well, I guess people had seen probably on the news about Table Rock down there, the fire there, and we have a big one here in Larca. And I'm just thankful today. Rained a bunch today, early this morning. So we got probably two inches of rain.So hopefully that's going to help put out a lot of these wildfires that are around. And I think it'll help put out a Larka for sure.I don't know how much water fell down towards Greenville, South Carolina and Green river, but hopefully they got plenty of water too, because, yeah, these fires grew fast. I mean, it was so dry when I flew back from the show up there at Great Waters. I stayed in Wisconsin for a couple days before I flew back.And the humidity here was like in the 15% for weeks in 30, 40 mile an hour wind the first few days I was home. So that just made for some really bad fire conditions, you know, which is what happened.We had a lot of western North Carolina fires there for about a week and a half. So hopefully, hopefully this rains really helped put a lot of that out. Yeah.

And you know, and we've got folks, you know, kind of, you know, fires are bad, Hurricane Helene is bad, still feeling the impacts of that.And, you know, so folks really need to try to make an effort to get to Southwest Virginia, east Tennessee, western North Carolina to fish and spend some money with their family. But, you know, it's funny, you know, we were talking about, you know, how busy you are before we started recording.And, you know, one tip I would give folks is, you know, if you want to fish with a guide, and I would say, particularly if you want to fish with a good guide, you need to plan well in advance because, you know, my general experience is that, you know, most good guides are booked pretty full for this season at this point. And so, you know, you need to really kind of get on that if you're thinking about fishing.And I would say probably, you know, for most of the, of the really good guides, you're probably going to have to get on a will call list or maybe plan to fish kind of in the late fall.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's good advice just because, you know, during that great water show, I know it's opening day of trout seasons this coming, this coming week. I mean, always the first Saturday in April for Western Carolina, for the state water. And I know last week there was a lot of, a lot of calls.I didn't, I didn't get to talk to them, but you know, that left messages when we're at the great water show and they're calling it like 8, 9 o'clock at night, wanting a trip the next morning for three and four boats. And that's just not going to happen because it's too busy. It's too busy to be calling like literally the night before.So I mean, just a little, little bit of planning would, would go a long ways further experience, you know. Yeah.

And I would also say too that, you know, shops that have deeper benches that can maybe be a little bit more flexible, you know, they don't have those college kids home yet. Right.So, you know, they don't have the capacity to call kids that are, you know, home from school and are guiding for the summer to kind of help fill things out. So. Yeah, I mean, kind of like everything in life, right, Mac? A little preparation goes a long way.

Yeah, yeah, I think that would be good.That's good advice because we're about to be into it for April and May and you know, Then it starts getting into what we call tourist season here in Western Carolina with the national park and what is it, 13 and a half million people a year coming through here. So yeah, if they're trying to do something, of course a lot of those calls will come in July, August, which is the worst of the 12 months.But they'll call like a lot that time of year just because partly they don't know better, that's the slowest part of the year. But yeah, it'd be, it'd be good to call earlier and say maybe fall would be a better choice or spring or some other time of year, you know.

Yeah.But if you're gonna kind of, you know, roll your own and in fish on your own right now, you know, like we said, the water's warming up and really pretty much everything is going to work at this point. Right. You know, you got hatches, streamer action is good and you know, the fish are active so they'll take the nymph.So you know, it's a really great time of year as fish are starting to put the feedback on and kind of fatten up through the summer for, to get ready for next winter.

That's right, That's, I mean that's really the, the case with this warmer temperature and warmer water temperature. Like we're in the low 50s pretty much consistently right now. That just makes for a lot better activity.And you can pretty much work on any kind of technique you want this time of year, whether that's wet fly or nymph or dry fly. I mean it's all, it's all fair game this time of year to work on those things because the fish are really active and cooperative.

Yeah.And so, you know, as we kind of move into this, I know you've, you've had a school, you're going to have some more schools and then you know, you may have some openings here and there on your guide calendar.You want to kind of let folks know kind of, you know, what's happening on the class front, say maybe the next two or three months and then how to reach out and all that kind of good stuff.

Yeah, sure. The, the, the first thing I guess on the agenda is the, the two day school. April 12th, 13th. We still got, we could probably take a couple more.Cause I just bring in more instructors for that. But it's, it's actually pretty well full right now. But I could probably take a couple more if I brought in another teacher with that.But the other one is April 23rd is a five day school.And then what we started doing a lot this year is taking the people that only have like the weekend or two or three days they could do for the weekend, like take off a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and just roll them into the schools that we're already teaching. So then we came up with a different, different plan for those. Rather than teach the whole thing over again just for a couple of people.To put them in a school that's already rolling was just a better efficiency of scale for what we're doing because it's, it's still the same sermon.And that way they can get into those kind of things for a two or three day school and they can find that information@macbrownflyfish.com yeah, and I would say too.

So the, the first class you're having, is that a casting class? Cause I know that five day school is probably a guide school, right?

Yeah, it's the first one April 12th and 13th, all advanced line control class for casting. And then. Yeah, the other one's a five day school the 23rd. And that's, that's pretty much, pretty much what's coming up.We'll probably do another one in May, but right now we're not listed May because the thing is, we used to list them all beginning of the year and it's better to list them out a little bit at tied to the spring dates than do the fall dates. And what happens is if you list them all, then people go, go all over the spectrum and then it's harder to, it's harder to fill them up.If, if half of them jump into the fall and you're trying to sell spring, it doesn't work out as well. So I haven't even listed the fall yet. Yeah.

And if you have a great guide season and these classes are good, you may be in the Bahamas in the fall and there may not be a school. So people should sign up now, right?

Yeah, that's a very good chance we might be in the Bahamas. I actually talked to Peter from the department of Tourism down there the other day and he's wanting to start, I mean, to do a school program.So we might be down there teaching school kids in the fall instead.

Well, there you go. Well, folks, you know, as it's warming up, you know, as I always say, you owe it to yourself to get out there and catch a few tight lines everybody.Tight lines back.

Tight lines. Marvin.