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Chironomid Fishing: For Chironomids, size and color are most important. He has small looking micro streamers with longer tails in black, white, & olive. (He calls these nymphs)
Streamers: Streamers is most important technique in the lake.
Either two or one fly only on bank. If fish are very spooky he uses one fly.
Always heaviest fly on point to straighten leader and have conta

David believes in a moderate action fly rod in order to not “bounce” fish. He also likes to use the small, graphite, automatic reels in order to pick up line quickly.
Knowing where fish are in the water is a huge deal. This particular day the water temps were right at 70 degrees and David said that he expected the fish to be up in the riffles. I like to think in terms of extreme opposites as well so in this case if the water temps were very low, we could expect the fish to be in the deep pools.
David says that choosing

This past weekend’s tournament in Cherokee North Carolina put on by an organization called Casting For Hope that supports area women with gynecological cancers, brought to my attention the various opinions of just what a successful day of fly fishing entails. It got me to really thinking that most people have completely different ideas of what a fun day of fly fishing looks like. Larry Dahlburg once said that “there is a definite progression in how people learn to fish. First they want to

I just got back from a seven day trip into the Smoky Mountains, hiking some 50 odd miles, crossing 4 ridge tops and fishing 4 different creeks. If you fished one of those creeks, you essentially fished them all. This makes logical sense to me as all four streams being wild streams, and in rather close approximation, what would cause them to be any different?
The best way to describe the fishing in the Smoky Mountains would be,

1. So this past end of year championship comp, we had two venues and 1 dominate beat in each venue. Beat 2 in the upper venue won 6 out of 8 sessions and beat 3 in the lower venue won 3 out of 6. In competitions:
A. How often does this occur?
B. If it does occur often, do the consistent winners have a mentality to combat this
C. What is that mentality?
2. Fly Patterns: Pat said “He ties his flies with only a couple of materials, old school in the round, with nothing on them that

A. Very first thing, was learning how to cast in order to land the flies, and sighter on the water lightly and at the same time. It could be surmised as a high, very short stroke, that ends with your rod pointed at a point very high above your target. I think the point is to have the leader and tippet completely straightened out when it lands on the water, as to register takes quickly.
Also not using too much power on the forward stroke, but let the rod flex and do the work for you, much like over powering a graphite shaft golf club, the club head is always lagging behind and the power is wasted.

We met at the Riverside Park in Spruce Pine NC about 8:30 am. The temperature was about 34 degrees with about 15 mph winds and cloudy. All that equal miserable fly fishing conditions. I had wader insulators, two layers of fleece, thick buff, bogin, and my heavy rain coat. I forgot my simms gloves, and could have really used a goose down jacket under the rain coat. This is about as cold as it gets out on the water with these windy conditions.
The North Toe is a big river, probably the same size of the Watauga, with lots of

Team Mentality and sharing information raises the bar for everyone, thus creating individual medals
Fish Shallow to Deep
"A" water is dictated by insect activity - When bugs are hatching, fish are going to be in the riffles, pockets, shallow water and banks. When no bugs are hatching they are going to be
where the conveyor brings them the food.
You have to think of the stream as a conveyor belt for food. If you dump in 1,000 bugs at the head of a section of water, how would those bugs be distributed down stream?