Scaly, swimmy kind.
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Fly fishing trips this year?
- Thread starter WestTexasHusker
- Start date
Rainbows, Brooks, and brown trout. And then there is also great smallmouth fishing as well.
I fished parts of the New for smallies. I wore out my wrist and a few olive zonkers they’d crush just as the fly finished its sweep across the river.
It's such a cool river that it can support trout, smallmouth, and catfish. I don't think that is very common.
Ive seen other rivers out west that have a lot of diversity through their overall length, but the New does that over a relatively short distance.
A different friend also recommended that. Is it a wade-able river, or would it require a boat?
Don't forget the muskies. The New River and the James River (VA) are becoming some of the better musky waters in the U.S.
It's considered a normal riparian habitat to have trout in the cool headwaters with brookies at the top and then brown trout further down, eventually giving way to smallmouths. There's usually some overlap, especially by seasons, but the places where the smallmouth and the brown trout overlap is usually not ideal for either. Keep going down stream and you start seeing largemouth and then channel cats. Muskies more or less overlap with the smallmouth water in most streams, which is also usually where walleyes/saugers and crappies thrive.
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The Smith River in VA is very cool because it shouldn't be able to support even stocked trout because it's not cold enough either through elevation or geography. But when they installed a dam upstream years back, they found the water stayed cold enough to support stocked brown trout. The best part is apparently the trout have adapted and for those that make it through the season, they swim downstream where the water is deeper and most fishermen can't get to them. There are some monster brownies down there.
Cold water release dams have created some of the best trout habitat in the world, including many places that could never sustain trout populations otherwise. Brown trout are the most adaptable, too. They're probably my favorite species of fish. They're not native to anywhere in the western hemisphere, but they don't care. They can handle warmer, more polluted water than any of the other trout species, or they can thrive in icy cold, pristine spring creeks. They're also the most predacious. What's not to like?
One of these days my buddy and I are gonna float all the way downstream to the remote areas and go after some of the monster browns. Here's an article about it:
Bill Cochran: Trout fishery on lower Smith River enticing, but a pain to reach
One of fly-fishing’s best kept secrets in Virginia is the developing brown trout population in a 10-mile section of the Smith River below Martinsville Dam.
I bought a used one-man pontoon exactly for situations like that. Virginia has a lot of rivers that have great wade fishing, but it's difficult to access without a boat. I love fishing the Rappahannock for smallmouths, and it has a lot of water like that.One of these days my buddy and I are gonna float all the way downstream to the remote areas and go after some of the monster browns. Here's an article about it:
Bill Cochran: Trout fishery on lower Smith River enticing, but a pain to reach
One of fly-fishing’s best kept secrets in Virginia is the developing brown trout population in a 10-mile section of the Smith River below Martinsville Dam.www.roanoke.com
