Latest / The Articulate Fly / S6, Ep 23: East Tennessee Fishing Report with Ellis Ward

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S6, Ep 23: East Tennessee Fishing Report with Ellis Ward · The Articulate Fly

• 0:03
  Marvin: Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of the Articulate Fly.
• 0:06
  Marvin: We're back with another East Tennessee Fishing Report with Ellis Ward. How you doing, Ellis?
• 0:12
  Ellis: Doing all right, Marv. How are you?
• 0:13
  Marvin: I'm just trying to stay out of trouble. And, you know, kind of funny we had
• 0:17
  Marvin: to move things around a little bit because you were out at a muskie tournament last weekend.
• 0:23
  Ellis: Yeah, we fished the North Fork
• 0:27
  Ellis: Kentucky River and this is
• 0:31
  Ellis: the Kentucky River muskie classic
• 0:34
  Ellis: and man the
• 0:39
  Ellis: conditions were tough for I mean just honestly for the two days it had dumped
• 0:46
  Ellis: Thursday night and so Friday things were still coming up and Saturday might
• 0:52
  Ellis: have been alright there's some impoundments that were still kind of draining
• 0:55
  Ellis: water out so it It was tough,
• 0:57
  Ellis: but with a fishery like that, that is really so big,
• 1:06
  Ellis: and not, I mean, the river itself is pretty big, but just the options.
• 1:15
  Ellis: I was fishing with a couple guys that sort of knew the area,
• 1:18
  Ellis: but hadn't fished the river. And so we actually fished just somewhere that was
• 1:24
  Ellis: closest to me since I was just coming up that morning.
• 1:30
  Ellis: Um, and it was, you know, it was tough sliding on the main river that day.
• 1:33
  Ellis: Next day we, you know, we had a jet boat. We were going up.
• 1:38
  Ellis: We checked below, uh, a spill dam.
• 1:43
  Ellis: There's a smarter word for that. and um and then found some creeks and you know
• 1:49
  Ellis: went up three four miles into one and um,
• 1:53
  Ellis: we didn't get anything that day turns out someone the
• 1:58
  Ellis: day before had gotten one twice the
• 2:01
  Ellis: distance up and we saw
• 2:04
  Ellis: a guy trapping beavers who informed us
• 2:07
  Ellis: that that creek was was torn
• 2:10
  Ellis: up with musky so you
• 2:15
  Ellis: know even when you have a blown out river you're still
• 2:18
  Ellis: fine and we were you can go up
• 2:21
  Ellis: these this creek like 12 miles in a jet boat and that's just one of many different
• 2:27
  Ellis: sections and um it's pretty cool to have halfway between me and where my family is in cincinnati and.
• 2:42
  Ellis: You know, another big chunk of water that I think has a lot of potential.
• 2:49
  Ellis: And then, you know, the guy who organized it, Dave Raff from the Wolf Rod Company,
• 2:57
  Ellis: is just such a good dude. His rods are awesome.
• 3:02
  Ellis: I've been fishing the 12-weight for a few years now.
• 3:05
  Ellis: So just a lot of good stuff that came together.
• 3:08
  Ellis: And I think I mentioned this to you before we kicked off, but Thursday when
• 3:16
  Ellis: the water was in great shape, before the timely deluge,
• 3:23
  Ellis: is that word right?
• 3:25
  Ellis: But before the mini-flood, some team that was there scouting went 6-for-15.
• 3:34
  Ellis: And, I mean, that's just, I'll quote Matt Riley calling those NCAA stats,
• 3:39
  Ellis: but to give you an indication of sort of what the potential of that fissure is.
• 3:44
  Ellis: So, yeah, I'm excited for next year and excited to poke around in between now and then.
• 3:52
  Marvin: Yeah, and, you know, coming a little bit back closer to home,
• 3:54
  Marvin: You know, you're west of me, so you're getting it now, but there's a pretty
• 3:57
  Marvin: nasty front moving through and we're going to see about a 20 degree drop in
• 4:01
  Marvin: temperatures here in about the next 24 hours and some rain.
• 4:04
  Marvin: But, you know, I think that, you know, if any, if things in East Tennessee or
• 4:09
  Marvin: anything like they are here in kind of the Carolinas, you know,
• 4:12
  Marvin: it's pretty clear that spring is like pretty much here. Yeah.
• 4:17
  Ellis: Yeah, I think last time we talked, the buds on the little magnolia out back were gone.
• 4:25
  Ellis: We got, my tulips are like, this is how I know I'm old.
• 4:30
  Ellis: I was actually really excited to see that the tulips were, you know,
• 4:35
  Ellis: you can almost see flower coming out of them.
• 4:37
  Ellis: So, but that, you know, relative to fishing, you start seeing,
• 4:44
  Ellis: and we're seeing this now, the lake temperatures are warming up.
• 4:48
  Ellis: The lake is that winter drop where they take it down 30 feet for flood control
• 4:57
  Ellis: and a couple other things.
• 4:59
  Ellis: That starts to go back up. And so the mouth of the river starts to get farther and farther up,
• 5:07
  Ellis: and the lake itself is rising, and that just changes where the bait fish are,
• 5:14
  Ellis: where the predators are.
• 5:16
  Ellis: And then as it warms up and there's sort of an inflection point where shad are
• 5:23
  Ellis: less comfortable in the warming lake and more comfortable near the mouth of
• 5:27
  Ellis: the rivers with the cooler water,
• 5:29
  Ellis: things start to get funky down there.
• 5:32
  Ellis: And that dynamic can kind of be found throughout the lake all year.
• 5:38
  Ellis: Um but but you know now and for the next month or two you have that coinciding with.
• 5:50
  Ellis: We'll just say it's march now so in a month from now we're going to have um pending weather.
• 5:58
  Ellis: Whether some of the caddis starting to go on the Watauga and the sulfurs will
• 6:04
  Ellis: be quickly following on both rivers.
• 6:08
  Ellis: And yeah, it's very much, it's cool to come out at 7 a.m. and have it be 60,
• 6:15
  Ellis: even though it's going to be 25 tomorrow.
• 6:20
  Marvin: Yeah, that'll be a little bit of a reset. and you know with the warmer temperatures
• 6:25
  Marvin: you know how much longer you think you have before the musky in your neck of
• 6:30
  Marvin: the woods start to spawn and you need to leave them alone.
• 6:33
  Ellis: Yeah I was just out today and up in the headwaters and,
• 6:44
  Ellis: It's the temperature variance isn't as great as some other free zones like low
• 6:53
  Ellis: 40s, mid 40s is kind of a winter norm.
• 6:56
  Ellis: It just doesn't get as frosty here as it does on the new or the James.
• 7:03
  Ellis: So it's 49 now and i don't really anticipate that getting up to the low to mid
• 7:14
  Ellis: 50s i gotta think daylight has a little bit to do with with their internal clock so,
• 7:21
  Ellis: it's more or less i i class with a couple folks that live on the river and i'm
• 7:30
  Ellis: up there fishing pushing on my own a good deal.
• 7:33
  Ellis: And, you know, when it starts to get into the low 50s, it's time to pull the plug.
• 7:41
  Ellis: But my last muskie trip booked is March 8th, and I anticipate that that'll be right.
• 7:52
  Ellis: That's a good date for the last trip.
• 7:55
  Marvin: Yeah, that sounds about right. And, you know, kind of shifting gears a little
• 7:58
  Marvin: bit, that Brenner shot us a small mouth question and he wanted to get your thoughts
• 8:02
  Marvin: on, you know, targeting early season smallies.
• 8:05
  Marvin: And is it better to kind of start out with bait fish or start out fishing crayfish patterns?
• 8:12
  Ellis: Sure. So you can cut this question apart in a thousand different ways.
• 8:23
  Ellis: Oddly enough, my inclination in answering is going to be who's fishing?
• 8:31
  Ellis: You know, what rod are you fishing?
• 8:34
  Ellis: What line are you fishing? What type of water are you fishing?
• 8:37
  Ellis: And you know some example of that would be you're fishing skinnier ratter,
• 8:48
  Ellis: some kind of jiggy placer sure that's a bait fish you got crawfish imitations
• 8:56
  Ellis: that are jiggy as well fishing that on the floating line working it through pockets,
• 9:03
  Ellis: in a situation where you have have some more bouldery, cobbly,
• 9:10
  Ellis: crawdaddy structure and, you know, go in there and pop some rocks over.
• 9:16
  Ellis: And the temperature is above 50, 53, 54.
• 9:24
  Ellis: That's kind of a crawdad active temperature.
• 9:30
  Ellis: I'd honestly not wed yourself to a fly too much.
• 9:34
  Ellis: I think that, you know, going into the TBA reservoir system,
• 9:41
  Ellis: for example, when you have shad moving in, you start to look at like,
• 9:47
  Ellis: you know, are you fishing a peanut envy and that looks kind of like a bait fish
• 9:50
  Ellis: and smallmouth are crushing it, but it's also kind of jiggy and has rubber legs and it's a crawdad?
• 9:56
  Ellis: Yeah, the answer is yes. So it's really trying whatever you have in your arsenal.
• 10:03
  Ellis: And sure, if there's shad getting blown apart, throw some bayfish patterns.
• 10:09
  Ellis: And I've actually seen smallmouth striper, brown trout eating shad and refusing anything.
• 10:15
  Ellis: Even the clousers that are too big or too densely tied, they're not eating them
• 10:20
  Ellis: because they're eating two-inch shad, inch-and-a-half shad. These things are tiny. tiny.
• 10:25
  Ellis: So it's really, what is your river structure? What type of food is around?
• 10:33
  Ellis: And that's what you're going for.
• 10:36
  Ellis: If you're wade fishing a lot of these creeks and you want to go natural, go crawfish.
• 10:44
  Ellis: My personal preference is if I can find out that they're actually going to swim
• 10:50
  Ellis: through a seven-inch changer, I'd like to find that out at the beginning of the day.
• 10:56
  Ellis: And if they're not, I can pretty quickly check it off and move on to some more
• 11:02
  Ellis: reasonable presentations.
• 11:04
  Ellis: But I do kind of like to approach it in that order.
• 11:09
  Marvin: Says the streamer junkie, right?
• 11:12
  Ellis: And yeah, it's just too fun.
• 11:14
  Marvin: Uh, dude, I'm with you. And you know, folks, we, uh, we love questions at the articulate fly.
• 11:18
  Marvin: You can email them to us or DM us on social media, whatever's easiest for you.
• 11:22
  Marvin: And if we use your question, I will send you some articulate fly swag.
• 11:26
  Marvin: And we're going to draw for some cool stuff from Ellis at the end of the season.
• 11:28
  Marvin: And, you know, Ellis, before I let you go and drain all the rain out of your boat, um,
• 11:33
  Marvin: and hunker down for the storm, you know, we will let folks know, you know,
• 11:36
  Marvin: if you've got got any kind of you know uh bucktail releases coming up soon or
• 11:41
  Marvin: if you got any you know just to let folks know kind of how to get on your guide
• 11:45
  Marvin: calendar for you know smallmouth trout musky the whole nine yards yeah.
• 11:50
  Ellis: So bucktail will be there there's some available now but i got some,
• 11:57
  Ellis: some more colors um a wide array of naturals and some different just like four shades of gray,
• 12:08
  Ellis: and all of that's on elliswardflies.com there's some information on on booking and that's,
• 12:16
  Ellis: run your own website is uh it's a moving target so if you ever have questions
• 12:21
  Ellis: um but you know about booking or just about what a trip looks like or fishing
• 12:27
  Ellis: whatever you want to book a trip,
• 12:30
  Ellis: best way to do that is my cell phone at 513-543-0019.
• 12:36
  Marvin: There you go you know don't forget folks that uh
• 12:39
  Marvin: you know in our patreon community the articulate fly you got a couple options
• 12:43
  Marvin: to support the show and and to support ellis at one tier there's a 10 discount
• 12:47
  Marvin: on bucktail but there's another tier which is particularly apropos for this
• 12:51
  Marvin: time of year where you get a hundred dollar off guide credit every year so you
• 12:55
  Marvin: might want to check that out it's in the show notes and And, you know,
• 12:58
  Marvin: we're in this great time of year, you know, get your gear ready,
• 13:00
  Marvin: get ready to get out there.
• 13:01
  Marvin: And if it's warm enough, get out there and catch a few.
• 13:04
  Marvin: Tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Ellis.
• 13:08
  Ellis: Appreciate it, Marv.