S7, Ep 96: The Art of the Dry: Mac Brown's Winter Fishing Insights

EPISODE SUMMARY

Guest: Mac Brown - Guide and Casting Instructor at Mac Brown Fly Fish (Bryson City, North Carolina)

In this episode: Smoky Mountains guide Mac Brown shares contrarian insights for winter dry fly fishing success. Topics include blue wing olive tactics, October caddis opportunities, dry dropper presentations and why the best fall trout come from dries rather than nymphs.

Key fishing techniques covered:

• Dry dropper rigs for precision in skinny winter water
• Micro-dry fly presentations for size 30 blue wing olives
• October caddis patterns in early winter
• Midge fishing on overcast winter days
• Foam terrestrials (crickets and beetles) for suspension
• Black elk hair caddis trimmed flat for winter stones

Location focus: Great Smoky Mountains, Tuckasegee River, South Holston River, Pennsylvania freestone streams, Bryson City area

Target species: Brown trout, rainbow trout

Equipment discussed: Fat Albert size 12, October caddis patterns, blue wing olive parachutes (and why size 18 is too big), size 30 micro-dries, black elk hair caddis, foam crickets, foam beetles, stimulators, dry dropper rigs

Key questions answered:

• How to fish dry flies successfully in winter conditions
• Why size 18 BWO parachutes are ineffective (real bugs are size 30)
• How dry dropper beats indicators for winter accuracy
• When fish look up during cold weather months
• How to target specific risers by studying rise forms

Best for: Intermediate to advanced anglers interested in winter dry fly tactics, precision casting techniques and contrarian approaches to cold weather trout fishing

Marvin Cash00:00:00

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 doing?

Mac Brown00:00:11

Great. How are you doing, Marvin?

Marvin Cash00:00:13

Just trying to stay out of trouble. You've, you've been soldering, putting together some massive solar array, right?

Mac Brown00:00:19

Yeah, I've been, I've been playing with that for the last few weeks off and on and I've about got it all ready to, ready to turn it on. So. Yeah, it's been a fun little project on the side.

Marvin Cash00:00:31

Yeah. So you're gonn gonna be able to drop off the grid or be at the parking lot at a fly fishing show.And you'll have Starlink and all the electricity you could ever want, right?

Mac Brown00:00:39

Yeah, I think the package right now is about 6kW, you know, with batteries and backup stuff and DC chargers and inverters and AC charger for you just got, you have a little bit of everything. And solar, solar stuff too. So I mean you go off the grid and stay somewhere. That's the goal. Hopefully this summer head up to B.C.and just unplug for like a month.

Marvin Cash00:01:03

Well, there you go.Well, we were talking about what we wanted to discuss this time around and you know, it's kind of funny because, you know, it's early, I guess It's Bundy on the 10th of November and we've got a cold front going through. You're getting a ton of snow. We actually got some snow here in Charlotte and ironically we thought it would be a good idea to talk about dry flies.

Mac Brown00:01:21

Oh yeah, yeah, that's, that's a good subject for this time of year especially.I mean, I think that's a, it's so overlooked, you know, throughout the country really when it gets into the colder season like that, but with the water low like it is here and there's just a lot of advantages by staying up top.A lot of places in the park are real stealthy, slow, slow moving water and there's a lot of times those fish will look up, especially going into the winter months to where you can reach out and use your casting ability and touch things from far away and they don't have a clue that you're even nearby.So between the midgen and blue wing olive hatches, if you're going to be throwing stuff up top, I mean you can do a lot of the small stuff down here throughout the winter and that's a good, good advantage, you know. Yeah.

Marvin Cash00:02:09

Or you can even fish a larger dry and put a dropper off of it and see if they're willing to take the nymph and if they start eating on top, just cut the nymph off.

Mac Brown00:02:17

Yeah, yeah, that's the fun part.And it's, it's, it's kind of funny because as a kid that's what we started out with is tying a lot of traditional, you know, Catskill flies and wolf style flies as a young kid and parachutes and things like that.And then it's funny because it's, you know, all the years involved with like comp stuff and Team USA stuff with the kids, it's like everything is nymph, nymph, nymph. And people forget. When I think back, you know, you had a story. We want you to tell us your story about being up there in Pennsylvania this last week.But just looking back at going through all these falls over the course of my life, most of my best memories have all come from. It's not because people say, well, it's cause you dry flight all the time.And that's not the reason at all because I mean I'm really usually like dry fly, wet flies, nymphs, we're going to do whatever it takes to put, put something on the end. And it's like we switch a lot.But when I think back of the fall, throughout the course of my lifetime, the probably the best quality things that have ever happened for me at like East Tennessee where I grew up and over here have all come up Top.And it's like when I think about the Holston memories as a teenager, like on the South Holston and even up here, like going into fall, the best quality fish that I have to remember that whole fall and winter experience from has all come from up top. Not from a nymph and not from a streamer.

Marvin Cash00:03:41

So.

Mac Brown00:03:41

So I think to myself, well, why is that? Because fish have always, they always like to look up on like an overcast day in the winter and they're feeding on little midges and things.They're going to still come up and eat a Cheeto. And I think that's a big part of it. But tell us what, what happened there up there where you were in P.A.

Marvin Cash00:04:01

Yeah, it was kind of interesting, right? I mean I was up there last week fishing and you know, you know, I got all of my fish on a size 12 fat Albert.And you know, even the folks in the group, I would say probably half the fish were on that dry fly or something like it. And it was just kind of interesting. I mean we had, you know, the water Was really, really low and you know, it just kind of worked out.I mean, I, you know, kind of like you would do here.I mean normally where I fish around here, if I'm not fishing on the south holston of the Watauga, it's relatively, you know, the water's not deep, so dry dropper in the summertime, like I could fish all summer with an elk hair cattus and a soft hackle pheasant tail. But you know, the fish were rising and I was like, well gosh, let's give this a whirl and see.And you know, we were in dairy country, so, you know, they're used to seeing crickets and grasshoppers and stuff. And you know, even one day it was relatively warm.You could hear the crickets in the grass on the banks and it was just fun, you know, it's kind of just a fun way to fish. You know, it's fun to stalk fish. I was super lucky.Had a rise, you know, probably two feet in front of a rock and dropped it on the other side of the rock and hooked a 21 inch brown so, you know, a little bit of clean living. I can't complain too much.

Mac Brown00:05:12

Oh yeah, no, that's a good, that'll make some good memories too later on seeing it, seeing stuff come up.And so yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating how, how much that's overlooked because when we were kids, like when I first moved here even out of, out of college, was probably Jim Estus who lived here. He's the one who did the mop and mop fly and all that. But that's who I'd camp with a lot.Like when I came up here, we'd go up, I'd stay, you know, four or five days at a time up high in the park and people that like Jimmy's, I think 80, 82 now and. But people grew up that way. I mean, I was lucky to grow up kind of when I did.Where that's what I thought the sport was is rapping, you know, hackle on a, on a hook and tying all these different dries. That's all I tied as a, as a young kid, really. I didn't even tie any kind of nymphs as a kid.And it's totally, totally reversed now where everything like new, somebody's new to the sport and they take up time pretty much they spend 99% of the time wrapping up nymphs and you look at their dry fly assortment, it's really, you know, hardly it doesn't exist because there's not hardly any dries, you know, and. But it's just different. Like people that are, I guess, close to my age and that's kind of a universal thing.What I see it shows even out in the Northwest and Pacific area and then like Denver people that are close to my age. Like I remember sitting in the author's booth with AK Best a few years ago, and that's all we talked about. I mean, that was his, his thing.But is talking about dries, you know, and it's, it's, it's just totally reversed and flip flopped is what I'm trying to say. Like if you're, if you're 60 and up, you grew up, cut your teeth on tying a lot of dries and fishing dries.And if you're like 20 years old now, you're doing it the exact opposite way. Instead of tying any dries, you tie nymphs and you'd fish nymphs and you never appreciate the other. So, so I don't know, that's.It's good to talk about it just to resurrect a little bit. Hopefully it resurrects some interest and curiosity, you know, with folks about dry fly. Yeah.

Marvin Cash00:07:17

And so I would say, you know, this time of year you got October Cattus, which are actually a relatively good sized dry. Right. So that's a, you know, a decent sized stimulator is not a bad option there.But then as you get deeper into winter, you know, fishing the small stuff like the blue winged olives or like a Griffith's gnat, right. That you can see or you know, fishing those small patterns behind something bigger.But you know, the other thing too is, you know, do the dry dropper when the water's super skinny in the wintertime, right. Because you're gonna have a hard. It's gonna make it so much easier for you to present the fly and not spook the fish.To have a dry fly drop down with a nymph on it, you know, or an egg off the back than it is to plop down a thingamabob or something like that.

Mac Brown00:07:58

Oh, yeah, yeah. And that's, that's good advice. And that's the, that's the big key. You can do so much more precision stuff by, by throwing in light, delicate rigs.You know, that's, that's the big advantage. Like you can actually go to a lot of these freestones in the winter and just sit there and target exactly the fish you want to catch.And of course that makes it a lot of fun, you know, sitting down at the bottom and looking at a bunch of rise forms and picking out the best quality fish. Just by studying the rise, the rises that you're seeing, you know, that makes it a lot of fun. Yeah.

Marvin Cash00:08:31

I also think too, that you can fish more accurately nymphing with a dry dropper than you can with an indicator.

Mac Brown00:08:38

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's placement. Placement is a lot easier.You know, it's a whole lot simpler to, to place it accurately with a light rig than something that's a, you know, like you said, penguin bob. That's kind of a sacrilege here. Here we are talking about dry fly and we're talking about the anti bobber.

Marvin Cash00:08:57

Yeah, but, but you know, too, then you also just say, you know, if you're looking for suspension advice, you know, you know, foam crickets and foam beetles, I mean, they ate them during the summertime. And, you know, and where we were, it was relatively warm during the day, so it wasn't crazy.And there were a ton of ladybugs, so there were, you know, plenty of kind of terrestrials out there.But, you know, I think those are all things to do where, you know, particularly in the wintertime, you start go, you know, fish that DH water in like January and February, you know, unless you're fishing a New Zealand indicator, you're gonna have a really hard time, you know, nymphing without scaring the bejesus out of the fish.

Mac Brown00:09:32

That's right. Yeah. And they're going to tune in on the stuff, you know, like after the October Cattus.We still have some going on here this week, actually, up in the park. I was up there. Well, I was on three different streams last week in the park. And they're all big, big water.I mean, for the park, streams are considered big. And that, that definitely happened, you know, last week with October Cattus on all three. That's about the only thing that we saw.But that'll disappear here in the next week or so and it'll be back to the blue wing game until springtime. And so those are really small, like blue wings.You know, the biggest mistake I'll say about blue wings real quick, just because people think, well, I'm gonna put on a, an 18 parachute that's way too big. Because the type of blue wings that we're seeing already in the park, we've already fished several blue wing hatches in the fall.And even out here on the, on the tuckaseegee, they're really, really small blue Wings right now, the little tiny gray bug. That's really. If you were gonna be honest and give it a fair representation of a hook size, you're talking about a size 30, you know what I mean?So to go from an 18 to a size 30, one's like the Titanic compared to the real bug, you know.So what I'm saying by that is that you put on an 18, you might catch a fish, you might get a strike on it, but the reality is it's so big that it's not going to turn things that are already keyed in and eaten on that small blue. And, you know.

Marvin Cash00:10:57

Yeah. And then of course, you know, later into the winter, we'll get a little hatch of those little itty bitty black stones.

Mac Brown00:11:03

Yeah. And that'll become big too.When it gets into the cold, like cold winter and you know, the temps get down in the 30s, you'll start seeing that little Blackstone all around this part of the country too. And that's not a bad way to go because they're a little bit longer and skinnier, so you can use a little bigger hook.But the black stone's a lot of fun. Just black thread bodies, you know. Yeah.

Marvin Cash00:11:24

I generally like to fish a black elk here, Caddis. But I cut the hackle off the bottom so it sits flat on the water.

Mac Brown00:11:31

That'll work. That'll work good. Those are real plentiful. Like all on all the waters around here, you'll see a lot of Blackstone action.

Marvin Cash00:11:38

Yeah. So it's interesting, right? I mean, you know, you're kind of starting to roll up the sidewalk for the season.We're getting ready to head into the holidays and you're probably going to hunker down until till show season because I know all of your schools are done and you'll do some guiding here and there. But why don't you let folks know where you're going to be on the road in 2026 so they can come out and see you in person.

Mac Brown00:11:58

Yeah. Well, the big event right now for me is going to be I'll do all the fly fishing shows.Start out in Boston, then down to Edison, and then we'll head out west. Then we return in March and Lancaster is the final one.There'll be three in the east coast and I think there's three in the west and three in the East. So I'm Denver. And the ones out west will be Denver and Bellevue and San Francisco, Pleasanton, and that'll cover the main.The main events for me for the fly fishing show season. And so if you're anywhere, you know, like Edison, that'll be a big show as well.That'll be right after Boston, the week after, and come out and say hello.

Marvin Cash00:12:42

Well, there you go. And if they want to get on your boat or take a class or a casting lesson in the winter or book for the spring, where should they go?

Mac Brown00:12:51

Probably the best thing is reach out with on website there@macbrownflyfish.com that's the easiest thing because the social media stuff's hard to keep up with for me, to be honest, because I'll get messages and I'll see them like a month later, because if they're not already, you know, on your friend thing, then they hide them and I don't go in there and look. Then when you look, finally, they're like a month and a half old. You know, it was, like, easiest to reach out with an email or a text or a call.

Marvin Cash00:13:21

Yeah. Or a smoke signal, because we're burning leaves this time of year.

Mac Brown00:13:25

Yeah, burning the leaves up. So, yeah, the smoke signal works pretty good here in Bryson as well.

Marvin Cash00:13:31

Well, there you go. Well, listen, folks, as I always say, this time of year, you owe it to yourself to get out there and catch a few tight lines, everybody.Tight lines, Mac.

Mac Brown00:13:38

Tight lines. Marvin.