superchub
01-29-99, 09:14 PM
I have had the opportunity for several years to travel to the Cohutta Wilderness with my Scout Troop. We would leave Atlanta on a Friday afternoon and get into Daly Gap after dark. A short night hike down the trail and we were settling in at our camp site for the weekend. On this trip I decided to leave my fishing gear at home since I was in charge of the botany/ecology walk. Some of the other dads had brought along their gear and weren't having much luck with anything including crickets and worms. There is always a mistique surounding flyfishing and for good or bad, perception equals reality and assumption fact. Because some of them had seen me fly fishing and actually catching, I was asked to explain the nuances of fishing the Jack's River. One of the guys had a woolly worm in his tackle box and I proceeded to tie it on a UL outfit. Now if any of you have visited the Jack's river it cascades through the ravine with open stretches tumbling over large boulders then quickly begins a run through rhododendron tunnels with little space to crawl much less cast. As is often the case the best spots are the most inacessible. With a few dads and some scouts in tow I moved off the trail, down an embankment then dropped to all fours and scampered into the rhododendrons along the water's edge. To say the least my observers were beginning to think I was going a little crazy. Crouching low, I tossed the woolly into the head of a small pool and watched as it was sucked under an overhanking boulder ledge. The water was crystal clear and crisp cold. As quickly as the fly was taken down by the underpull a streak of color shot from under the ledge and solidly hit the wooly worm. Without much of a fight I pulled in a 7" native rainbow. The color undescribable and the vigor of this little fish unmatched by fish many times his size. Quickly releasing the fish I repeated the ritual and was rewarded with another native trout, this time slightly smaller. Some of my audience missed the whole point of the demonstration commenting on the lack of size of the fish and how many you'd have to catch to make a decent meal, but several Dads understood what fishing could really be like and the significance of catching a native rainbow and releasing the fish unharmed. As has been said on more than one occasion, size isn't always the important factor! A few folks left the Cohutta with a whole new view of fishing!
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