S8, Ep 54: Weathering the Storm: Matt Reilly on Adapting to Summer Fishing Conditions

Hey, folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. We're back with another Southwest Virginia Fishing Report with Matt Reilly. Matt, how are you doing?

Yeah, I'm doing great, man. How are you?

Yeah, just trying to stay out of trouble. And you know, your rain has started a little bit ahead of ours, but you may need to build an ark down there in Abingdon.

Yeah, it's, I'm looking outside at puddles sitting in the ditches and on the road right now. It's, it's been raining pretty steady from about midn night last night through the day on. This is Wednesday. Yeah, Wednesday.And it's kind of, it's kind of run a little bit of a, of a weird, weird path.You know, you've probably seen some of the footage of some of the flooding up in West Virginia that a lot of that was seemingly about an hour, you know, north of, of the, what I call the lower New River Valley, like, like Narrows Pearisburg, Virginia.And then we had, we've had quite a big little swipe of, of rain come through south of Radford today, through southwest Virginia and a lot of northeast Tennessee. So the new has remained fairly unimpacted, I would say.But the rest of the region, it's kind of just kind of a grab bag just depending on where the war hit. And it's, it's all changing right now.You know, that's the hardest part about my job pretty much the whole years is these big isolated storms in the summer just trying to figure out day to day. You know, I got my chain yanked a ton last week where, you know, folks are asking where we're going to fish, where to stay, and I tell them.And then that night, you know, we get an inch of rain up there and it, it's, it's just continuing a little bit.But we probably have another 2ish weeks of that until we get into, we tend to level off a little bit early August and then we get into this pretty stable late summer, early fall months. So we'll probably be dodging around for a little while longer, but otherwise things have been pretty good.

Yeah, so it's kind of funny, right?So I guess you kind of know, at least when you wake up tomorrow morning, you're gonna have high water and it's gonna be significantly cooler for probably a week. Right?

Yeah, I would, I would say, I mean we're definitely gonna have water moving around in the system. You know, with it being relatively fresh tomorrow, my move is probably to try to get below it or away from it somehow.And then days after that, it's just gonna be, you know, figuring out where the, where the best case scenario is, where the sort of most susceptible fishing pattern, you know, might be found.

Yeah.And so, you know, obviously with the cool off and the high, dirtier water, how's that gonna affect kind of the bug game that everybody was getting used to?

Definitely gonna knock it back. I mean, you can still catch some fish in some sort of, you know, small, limited situations when you have higher, dirtier water.But, you know, for the most part, I try to, I try to try to adopt the technique that's gonna be the most effective and given the, the ambient conditions and sometimes kind of lean into those conditions and might, you know, the next couple days find water that's higher than, you know, other places just because, you know, higher dirty water is often better than low dirty water in terms of locating fish.So I would say, you know, just, again, depending on the, the conditions, we might still have some bug fishing over the next week or so, but it's just gonna highly depend on where you are.

Yeah.And to kind of answer Jack sent in a question and he wanted to, you know, get your thoughts on kind of what conditions put smallmouth kind of in the feeding mood this time of year.So I guess probably the best thing to do is like, let's just say we get on the other side of this high water and we're dancing around kind of thunderstorms for a couple weeks into the kind of dog day, dog days of summer. You know, what's the, you know, what's kind of the rule of thumb you like to use.

As far as man? I'm going to try not to ramble too much. I'll, I'll start with the bug fishing thing. Jack.Jack and his dad and I got to fish a couple weeks ago, had a pretty stellar day showing Jack the whole bug thing.In fact, in fact, we, we got to watch a absolutely giant fish eat a bug before breaking off and, and, and still managed to get a couple, couple of big fish. But, you know, the, the bug thing, when you got really low and clear and hot water, I like to make this point, you know, those, those big fish.The reason why that sort of passive finesse bug technique works is because, you know, a lot of, a lot of folks, it just kind of depends on the lens you look at it through.You know, if you go out there in those conditions and you're trying to power fish with, you know, big streamers and, you know, fast retrieves and you know, you, you'll, you'll get a reaction strike every now and again. But it's, it's kind of like, it's kind of like trying to catch a big brown trout when it's high pressure, sunny, clear water, hot.You know, it's just really not the condition for power fishing in a lot of ways. And so it's not necessarily that those fish aren't feeding and active, it's just that they sort of have to change their behavior.And kind of by definition, catching fish is understanding how the fish are behaving and then coming up with the technique that allows you to kind of exploit that, you know, so the bug thing works well for that reason in that, you know, real kind of cagey, what a lot of people would call just bad conditions for predatory fish, because when the fish do eat, they've got to do it in a really subtle, sort of conservative way and then to, you know, flip that on its head. You know, when you get these big shots of rain and the river comes way up the, it just changes things.You know, the water temp will drop, so the fish can afford to get out and chase things a little bit more because they're going to burn less energy per unit of effort. And so you can afford to, you know, fish bigger, fish faster. It's, it's going to sort of put them on a treadmill a little bit.They're going to have a lot more food available to them because there's going to be a predatory veil in the water where they can, you know, feel comfortable from predators. They can sneak up on things and be predators themselves.And so a lot of times, you know, I think it's a combination of the, of the water temperature dropping and that water clarity dissipating and the water level coming up. You'll see fish in that low and clear water get kind of skinny if that condition persists for a long time.And then you get a big, a big push of water and a drop in temperature. And all of a sudden the fish you catch are just super fat because they've been out eating like crazy.And it's, they're probably more active in those kinds of cooler, higher, dirtier conditions in the summertime. But it's, you know, again, you've just got to be able to get in front of them.So that's where, you know, if the water's real high, we're going to protected pieces of water, you know, slack water holes, eddies, bank cover, fishing large profiles and, and darker colors and just, just trying to get some attention, I would say too, you know, in just sort of normal summertime conditions, the same sort of gradient occurs early in the day when you've got lower light, lower water temperatures.You know, that's when you often see, you know, windows of, of real aggressive activity, aggressive top water activity, streamer, you know, bait fish type activity. And that stuff just wanes as the, as the, the visibility gets better, as the heat increases.So, you know, it's, it's all about just sort of identifying how fish are gonna behave and the conditions that you have. Cause every day, you know, you don't have ideal conditions for every situate, for every technique every day.So, you know, you just look at the, the gradient of conditions that you're gonna be dealt any given day and then try to isolate where your greatest opportunity is, given the techniques that you have in front of you, and then just try to go exploit that. I don't know if that answers the question, but that's, that's kind of how I think about things.

Yeah, well, Jack, if it didn't answer every question you had in the question, hit us back. And you know, folks, we love questions on The Articulate Fly.You can email me or DM me on Instagram and if we use your question, I'll send you some Articulate Fly and Butcher Shop swag.When you're drawing for something cool for Matt at the end of the season, and I know you're super busy, right, in terms of the near term, you probably might have a handful of days on the tail end of smallmouth season. And I suspect you might be taking muskie deposits now, right?

Yeah, I've definitely booked some muskie dates. I've. I've really, I've booked some, some striper stuff for next year too, just. Cause those spots are.I mean, all the spots are pretty limited, but yeah, you know, everything's fair game. But I have, you know, maybe a handful of October days left and. Yeah, then we're talking muskies.

Yeah. And of course it makes sense to connect with you because as we know, things are fluid.And so you might, if you're flexible, you get that text, be like, hey, I've got a cancellation tomorrow. You might be able to get on the boat. Right?

Yeah, I tell people, just go to my website and subscribe to the newsletter that I put out every month because that's where all that stuff gets posted first. And yeah, you'll just be kept abreast of everything as it changes.

Yeah. And it doesn't last very long. Cause I read it and then I mentioned it to you, like, oh, dude, that stuff's long gone.

Yeah. So it does pay to be the first if. If you want to.

Yeah. And so just so folks that don't know off the top of their head, you want to let them know the. The website URL.

Yeah, it's mattreillyflyfishing.com. And all my social stuff is on there. You can subscribe to the newsletter. You can give me a phone call, send me an email, whatever.

Well, there you go. Well, listen, folks, you owe it yourself to get out there and catch a few tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Matt.

Thanks, man.