S7, Ep 93: Rainy Day Strategies: Mac Brown on Fishing High Water and Stained Conditions

EPISODE SUMMARY

Guest: Mac Brown - Guide, Master Casting Instructor and Owner at Mac Brown Fly Fish (Western North Carolina)

In this episode: Master casting instructor Mac Brown shares high water fishing strategies for fall conditions. Topics include bank fishing techniques, tight-line rigging modifications and color selection for stained water.

Key fishing techniques covered:

• Bank fishing instead of wading during high water
• Descension drop presentation for pinpoint accuracy
• Tight-line nymphing with pink markers
• Blue mop fly prospecting in dirty water
• Streamer jigging along bank edges
• 2x-3x tippet modifications for high water
• Worm patterns for post-flood conditions

Location focus: Western North Carolina, Arkansas White River (Cotter), Great Smoky Mountains

Target species: Trout (in high water and flood conditions)

Equipment discussed: Pink and chartreuse line markers (SA), mop flies (blue), San Juan worms, squirmies, shammy worms, waterproof bibs, 2x-3x tippet

Key questions answered:

• How to fish high water and flood conditions effectively
• What fly colors work best in stained water
• How to rig for tight-line fishing in floods
• When to fish from the bank instead of wading
• How to cover more water during high flows

Best for: Intermediate to advanced anglers interested in high water tactics, flood fishing strategies and fall fishing conditions

Marvin Cash00:00:00

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

Mac Brown00:00:11

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

Marvin Cash00:00:13

As always, just trying to stay out of trouble. And unfortunately, I missed going to Arkansas with you because had all kinds of crazy stuff going on here at the house and needed to sit tight.But you did the Marathon drive back Sunday night from Arkansas. How was it?

Mac Brown00:00:29

Oh, it was good. Fun driving back across. We had, you know, the weather that was. It's hitting the east now.We already had it, you know, last week, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And then it finally stopped raining the last hour or so Sunday evening there in Cotter.And I get in the car and start driving about an hour east of Mountain Home. Then I was in it the whole way back home. So it rained pretty hard across the state of Tennessee.Fun part was it took me about three hours longer coming home just because there was so much water on the road. Pretty heavy rains.

Marvin Cash00:00:59

Yeah. You were telling me too, that you had challenging conditions because they had the lake turned over down in Arkansas.So you had a fish kill and it kind of made things a little tougher than it needed to be, right?

Mac Brown00:01:09

Oh, yeah, it made it. Made it challenging for sure. And we got to cover a lot of, you know, a lot of different techniques, but it definitely made it work harder to find.Find fish. You know, you could see a lot of fish hanging out in the. The grasses and watercress and stuff. You could see a lot of 10, 14 inch fish.It had perished from the turnover at the lake. You know, there was a lot of those. So the herons were liking it.You saw a lot of herons out there, just picking them up off the bottom instead of going for the live ones. You know, there's definitely some. Definitely a pretty good fish kill.

Marvin Cash00:01:43

Yeah. So it looks like we're, you know, moving in the mid Atlantic into kind of a nice rainy spell, which is good.You know, we normally get these long soaking rains in the fall, but we've been super dry. And so, you know, I think all the way from kind of where we are all the way up to, like, the Great Lakes, people are happy.I know the steelhead guys are happy because, you know, all that rain basically drops the drawbridge and the steelhead are running.But we thought it'd be a good idea to maybe kind of refresh people on, you know, how to fish one when, you know, the water's up and also maybe stained and kind of give Them some tips to be a little bit more effective out on the water.

Mac Brown00:02:14

Yeah, yeah. I mean, a good thing with the rain, we really needed it here because I think we've been a couple of months with no rain.And the other big benefit was the colors finally turned here. There wasn't a bit of color here when I left, you know, last, what was it, Thursday?I drove out Thursday morning and it's, you know, totally different now. The color's finally starting to pop and it's real colorful here now.But yeah, the big thing with the, with the rain is, you know, because it gets higher off colored with more CFs coming down is to, you know, fish with like bibs. I like wearing bibs, those waterproof bibs. I don't even put waders on. Cause I'm not going to be getting in the water.You can stand back on the edge and fish are all up on the edges anyway. So you'll people, you'll see people a lot.When it's flooded, try to get out and walk around and I mean, they're walking through where the fish are because as soon as they step off the bank, that's where the fish are, off on the very edge, you know, so you can fish that a lot easier from staying back on the edge than being in the water. You know, if. Imagine guiding somebody that's.Let's say they're having trouble being pinpoint precision because they're not like Steve Roger by any stretch of the imagination. When you say let's put a fly six inches from the bank, you don't even have to cast if you're going to say put a fly six inches from the bank.You just put the rod down slowly like a dissension drop. And you just put the fly exactly where you want it. Now follow it along for a rod length. You follow em.It's real easy to do even if someone lacks the skill to cast accurately. But when you're in a boat and you tell somebody put a fly up on the bank, it's.

Marvin Cash00:03:47

It's.

Mac Brown00:03:48

Unless it's somebody like Steve or Lance Egan in your boat with you, then chances are you're gonna be going to the bank a lot, pulling flies out vegetation, you know what I mean? So it's a smart way to fish.

Marvin Cash00:03:58

Yeah, I would say too though, you know, the challenge is even if you're accurate, you know, you've got so much current ripping in the middle of the river that you know it's gonna pull your flies out from where you want to fish them anyway. So it makes the management issues, even if you're an accurate caster, really challenging. If you don't fish from the bank. Right?

Mac Brown00:04:16

Yeah, you, you can just do a lot more, you know, from the bank. It makes, it makes your life a lot easier to pull off your drifts if you, if you get hooked up.Of course, it's easy to land it because you're already in the. The edge, the fast waters out in the middle.And like you can play it and land it a lot quicker from the bank than trying to land it out there in the fast water. There's just a whole lot of winds, you know, but there's a lot of times when it, when it'll. It's not flooded by any stretch of the imagination here.I mean we're just getting constant rain from that same front. But. But I mean what we're talking about applies even when it gets to be, you know, really high, like extreme, you know, flooding.Like when it triples to quadruples in cfs, that kind of flood. It's the same strategy.

Marvin Cash00:04:56

Yeah. Cause the colonel pushed the fish on the structure.I would say probably, you know, from a rigging perspective, you probably really don't want a nymph with an indicator because the surface current is going to just rip your rig. Right?

Mac Brown00:05:08

Yeah.

Marvin Cash00:05:08

So you want a tight line. Probably a great time.You know, when I think about, you know, fishing close to banks like that, I think about prospecting like with a mop fly that you can jig pretty killer, right?

Mac Brown00:05:19

Oh yeah. That's a real good strategy. And those little markers, you know, you can buy them from a lot of different places.But I like the, the pink and chartreuse. Like SA has those little marker pins and those work. Those work awesome. Like to just mark your line, you know, right above where your tip it is.Of course you can use bigger tip it. If you're talking about flood stage water, you don't need 6 or 7x.I mean I fish, I'll fish a lot of times if it's really big flood, I'll be fishing like 22 to 3x. And cause you. It's not about tippet size at that point. And you just mark it with that pink and you can see what's going on.You know, I mean, as you're following the fly. But that's a lot better way to do it than. Absolutely. Than any kind of indicator or bobber or whatever you like calling them.Some people like to call them a suspension device. It's just, it's kind of funny how all the names depends what, what part you come from, you know.

Marvin Cash00:06:11

Yeah. And you know, you can fish streamers too.And I guess probably the next thing when we talk about, you know, you can present them kind of parallel to the bank as well. But the other thing I would say too is we start to think about color. Right.And so, you know, in stained water, you probably want a darker fly because you're looking for contrast.

Mac Brown00:06:27

It depends. Yeah, I mean it does depend.Like if, if you're talking about like where down deep, I mean, you might fish a blue mop, for instance, if you're talking about colored water. Because blue will show up the most, more than any other color in dirty water.Just like, like wildlife fishermen, you know, when they're jigging for walleye at 60 foot of water, most of those ice jigs are always blue. And the reason they're blue is because then while I see em, most of the fish all see coloration the same way.So I mean, there's a reason why we fish blue mops. And blue mops is one of the high flood stage colors, you know, that's why we fish a blue one.There's nothing, there's really nothing in the water that's blue. But if that's what shows up for the silhouette where a fish can see, hey, that looks like food. That's why we're fishing the blue.They don't see it as blue, they just see it as shape and profile.

Marvin Cash00:07:17

Yeah. Which kind of gets you like on the streamer front to, you know, fish darker, larger.You know, in theory, if you, you might even want to try the rattle out a little bit if you've got some streamers with rattles in them.

Mac Brown00:07:29

Yeah, you could jig a streamer, you know, along those same situations. You could definitely take, take streamers and you know, get real happy and jig it a lot. But that'll work good.I mean that definitely it's a good, good tactic. That's a real good tactic too.You know, whether it's mop or, or, or some type of a worm in high flood stage, a lot of times there's a lot of people that go straight to fishing artificial type, you know, San Juans or, or squirmies or whatever, their favorite. You know, there's a lot of different worms. We, we tie a lot of them out of shammies as well. Shammy worms.I mean that's a good option too because there's a lot of worms coming in off the edges usually when you water gets up.

Marvin Cash00:08:10

And I guess we should probably give folks the public service announcement about kind of waiting. Like, if you, if you don't feel comfortable waiting and you're not a good waiter, don't do it.But I would say, you know, it's always amazing how powerful the water is. And I mean, once it starts to get up, you know, significantly above your knee, you need to kind of really, kind of reconsider the plan.

Mac Brown00:08:30

That's right. Yeah. There's really no point, there's really no point of waiting, though. I mean, it's not that I can't wait. I can wait in high water just fine. It's.But my point is it's kind of messing up because you can't get upstream. Your goal is to cover the edge as much as possible.And if you're in the water and it's big and you're walking up a, you know, waist deep flood stage, chances are I can walk a whole lot faster and cover a lot more good spots on the bank than somebody out in the middle of the river trying to walk up it, you know. So I think you can actually cover.It's about covering and the more prospecting you can do, kind of like by covering the bank, you're just going to find that you can cover, you know, probably 8 to 10 to 1 by walking up the edge and cherry picking the spots that we're talking about on the edge.And if you're on the water wading, that's of course that's going to take you so long that you, you may be hit 10% of what somebody walks on the bank and hits, you know.

Marvin Cash00:09:24

Yeah. And so if I remember correctly, you're done with schools for the season, right?

Mac Brown00:09:29

Yeah, I'm done. I'm done after Arkansas. That was fun. That was a fun clinic down there with Davey and we had some really good, good guys that were, that were in that.And I'm kind of glad to be done though.Looking forward to like fall and you know, maybe get out a little bit, run Thanksgiving, maybe sit in the woods a little bit and do some other things for a while. But yeah, it's been a busy year, you know, with schools and fly fishing stuff. I'm kind of ready for a break before show season.

Marvin Cash00:09:58

Yeah.And so we'll at the end, we'll let folks know how to get in touch if they want to take a guide trip or get a casting lesson in between you maybe, you know, chasing some turkey or some deer or something. But, you know, as we kind of, you know, everybody kind of this time of year Starts to kind of focus on, you know, 2026, early 2026.And what that means is basically shows. You want to let folks know where they can find you on the road.

Mac Brown00:10:20

Sure. The. The fly fishing show website. And I'll have a link on my page as well at Matt Brown Fly Fish for all the other clubs and show events. And I'm.I'm going to do all the shows for the fly fishing show. Again, this in 26 and all the other dates that are like, unique. Like, I'm not really sure.Cause I'm still looking at, you know, contracts, lot of different things for other events, you know, deciding which ones I want to do. Because I'm trying to make sure I don't do too many. Marvin.Because when you do all of them on the road, it's tough to keep doing a bunch of extras coming March and April. You follow me? Because you're already tired of traveling three months and doing show. I mean, it's wears on you. So usually come early April.I kind of want to stay put here and not. Not do any more shows in April. After April, I like to stay around Western Carolina.

Marvin Cash00:11:10

Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense.I mean, it's really, you know, the shows are fun, but if you're doing a bunch of them, particularly like this year, I want to say that like, you know, Edison, Denver, I know Atlanta got canceled, but I think those were like three weekends in a row. Right? Yeah.And I mean, to your point, like, you and I, we record and do stuff like, you know, you got to be there like the day before the show starts. And for that you. That means actually the day before, the day before, because you usually teach that day.And then you've got kind of two or three days where, you know, particularly if you're on the west coast, it doesn't make sense to come home. I mean, it's. There's a lot of logistical stuff that will definitely take you out of your routine for sure.

Mac Brown00:11:50

Oh, yeah, there is. But I've got some good plans this year.

Marvin Cash00:11:54

Buddy.

Mac Brown00:11:55

Jason Atkinson has a place on the Klamath. He was real active in getting all the dam removal. So Tim lives about three hours Raja from there. And so I've got a plan like just making.Making these little mini stops where we get three to four days to do something cool with. With, you know, some friends is that's going to really break it up for me. I'll have fun doing that.I mean, just getting to hang around those guys will be a lot of fun for in between and get you reset, ready for the next one, you know. So I've got most of the stuff on the west coast.I've got, you know, plans like that in between all of them to where I get to go, go explore stuff that I hadn't been on in a long time.

Marvin Cash00:12:34

Yeah, well, there you go.Well, it's a little wet for smoke signals, so why don't you let folks know where they can find you on the Internet so they can kind of get in touch and get on the boat, take a class, find you on the road.

Mac Brown00:12:45

Yeah, the best way, the probably the best one ismacbrownflyfish.com and that, that ninja email on that and, and that's probably the easiest and it has the links to the, you know, the guide school, the specialty, all the stuff coming up in 26. I'll get ready to update that in the next week. All the dates for schools and casting schools and everything else.People have been texting me a lot the last month like why aren't they up yet? And I never put them up till we're into November, you know what I mean? Because I'm, I'm still busy.There's, it's hard to put all those dates up when you're trying to get done with everything else to wrap up 25, you know. So I'll have time this next week to put up all the dates and it'll be up, up there on the right menu under specialty classes and it'll have a link.There's one that's a specialty page and it has a link to a link. So it's really easy to follow, you know, to say I want to do the, you know, the two day casting school. Boom.They click the link and there it is, all the information and all the sign up. But it's, it's pretty vast, Marvin, to put all that stuff up. And you're doing a lot of these different things.It's like, it's hard to put all those up in the top menu. You know what I'm saying?

Marvin Cash00:13:49

Yeah, I'm with you for sure. Well, you know folks, keep your eyes peeled. Next week or so, all that information will be up there.And as I always say, this time of year, you know, in February when it's too cold to fish, you're gonna regret not getting out. So you owe it to yourself to get out there and catch a few. Tight lines everybody. Tight lines, Mac.

Mac Brown00:14:07

Tight lines. Marvin.