You can't catch one of these in Florida. It's a brown trout from the Cumberland River tailwater here in Kentucky. I hope to be seeing more of these over the next few months, as I'll be far away from mayans, snook, peacock bass, etc. This trout was lying still in my landing net as I picked up my camera but just as I was about to click the shutter it began thrashing about the bottom of the boat. It was around 15 inches. A few minutes earlier I had caught a brownie a few inches bigger than this one.
Up here in Kentucky I fish the Cumberland and other waters from a Gheenoe with a six horse power Tohatsu outboard and a small trolling motor. When I fish the Cumberland I often launch at a spot called Traces, which is a couple miles south of the town of Burkesville. Yesterday I arrived at the boat launch at around 11:15 a.m. It's about a two and a half hour drive from where I live in central Kentucky. This is a very long way to go to fish, I know. There are several closer access points to the Cumberland, though all are at least a couple hours drive. I prefer Traces because it's on private property and, although the owner charges $5 to launch your boat, the parking area is very open and the ramp itself is never crowded.
The Cumberland tailwater was beginning to get a national reputation as a trout stream a decade or more ago. But then in 2006 a leak was discovered in Wolf Creek Dam, which impounds Lake Cumberland. Repairs were begun to fix the problem but in the meantime the lake had to be lowered by some thirty feet to reduce pressure on the dam as it was being repaired. This meant that the water coming out of the bottom of the dam was much warmer than it had been formerly. Each summer the water temperature reached the high 60s and this caused a lot of stress on the trout. You could still catch them but their numbers were greatly reduced.
Earlier this year the Army Corps of Engineers, which owns the dam, announced that the dam was fixed and the Corps allowed the lake to return to its normal level. With the cold winter Kentucky suffered through this year, there is now plenty of cold water to sustain the Cumberland tailwater through this summer.
Yesterday the water temperature was in the low 50s; this, combined with the very hot, humid air just above it, and the lack of any breeze whatsoever, caused thick fog to form over the river. This often happens early in the morning on summer days. When I arrived yesterday, the fog was still there. Only once before can I remember fog on the river lasting late into the morning. Yesterday, it never really did dissipate. It thinned out for an hour or two in mid-afternoon but then returned later on.
The fog forced me to be very cautious motoring upstream, as I could only see 50 yards or so ahead of me. I know this section of the Cumberland pretty well but haven't been on it since last fall. There could be new deadfalls and other obstructions in the water I wouldn't know about, not to mention other anglers drifting quietly downstream.
It took me almost 30 minutes to motor upstream to the point where I wanted to begin fishing. There was a pretty good current in the river at that point coming downstream from Wolf Creek Dam. I pulled over to the right bank and lodged my boat in behind some deadfalls, so the boat wouldn't begin to drift as I was rigging up my fly rod.
I started with a copper john nymph below a strike indicator on my 5 weight fly rod. When I fish from the Cap'n Dan, which is what I call my Gheenoe, I generally fish from the bow of the boat, where my trolling motor is. The TM won't buck a current as strong as the Cumberland but it does well to position the boat for casting to the bank and to move it out and away from any obstructions in my way.
After drifting with the nymph for twenty minutes or so I removed the strike indicator--actually a small bobber that's supposed to keep your fly just off the bottom--because I thought it was keeping my fly from getting down to where the fish might be. From then on, the copper john floated deeper in the water column. But by the time I finished that first drift I still hadn't had a bite.
I re-started my outboard and ran back upstream. As I was doing so I remembered a tip someone had once given me about fishing this stretch of the Cumberland. He had said he had "hung," as he called it, a big trout around some steep bluffs above a place called Bear Creek. This guy used a Mepps spinner to catch his trout. I was fly fishing, and a streamer fly offers a bit of the same profile to the fish as a spinner.
Once I reached these bluffs, I switched to my 7 weight rod with the sink tip line - the same set-up I use for freshwater fishing in Florida. I tied on a brown and black streamer fly called a Schminnow, invented by Sanibel Island fly angler Norm Ziegler for catching snook along the beaches there. It's not unlike a wooly bugger, which is a standard trout streamer, when tied in darker colors.
I began casting toward the steep bank and retrieving the fly with a sharp, erratic yanks on the fly line. About halfway down along the bluff, two fish darted out from a couple feet in front of the bank, and attacked my fly. One of them got hooked. It took me several minutes to bring it to hand. Once I got it in my landing net I realized I had "foul hooked" the fish--my fly had snagged the fish in the belly, which is why it was able to fight so hard and for so long. True sportsmen don't like to foul hook fish. I will say that this fish definitely had gone after my fly. How it managed to get hooked in the belly, I don't know.
Once I got to the end of the bluff, I used went back to the beginning of it, to try the area again. This time I hooked another brown trout in the same area as the first one. It might well have been one of the two fish I had seen earlier. This one was a bit smaller than the first, but fair-hooked in the corner of the mouth. It's the one you see in the photo above.
I had a few more passes down the bluff, since this area clearly was holding fish. I caught a fish that turned out to be a smallmouth bass. Then it was time to move on.
The fog, which had dissipated somewhat in mid-afternoon, returned. I allowed my boat to drift downstream with the current, as I cast the streamer to drowned timber along the banks.
At the present time, releases from the dam shut down at night. Since the area I was fishing is 35 miles or so from the dam, this change in flow takes a while to register. Around three o'clock I noticed a perceptible slow-down. Also, the level of the river itself began to lower. Fishing a tailwater river like the Cumberland is not unlike fishing tidal waters in south Florida, except that the rise and fall of the water is caused by a dam's gates opening and closing at the command of a computer program, rather than the moon.
The only action I had had on the streamer was along that bluff. But as the afternoon wore on I noticed trout beginning to rise sporadically. I had seen a mayfly or two but nothing you could call a hatch. Nevertheless, a few trout were finding something to eat off the surface.
I had to weigh what to do next. Despite the fact that I was floating over 50 degree water, the air temperature was 90 degrees or so, and I'd been sweltering. I could cool off by hurrying back to the launch ramp and then wet-wading the shallow but swift area just below that ramp. But as I saw more and more trout rising to the surface, I decided instead to go back to the five weight rod and rig it with a dry fly.
First, I had to burn off the remaining fuel in my outboard engine. I've owned the Tohatsu for eight years. It always runs fine at the beginning of the season, after I've had it tuned up. Later in the summer, it gets harder and harder to start, because the fuel system gets clogged. My boat mechanic said it's because of the way modern gasoline separates after it sits for a while due to all the ethanol that's put into it. This year I've decided to burn every last bit of fuel remaining in the fuel system at the end of each use in hopes of avoiding this issue later on.
So as I approached a shoal area where I saw fish rising, I turned on the engine, disconnected the fuel line from the engine, and allowed the engine to run until it stopped. This took about fifteen minutes, which shows how much fuel remains in an engine even after the supply is cut off.
From then on I used the trolling motor to maneuver close to the shoal so I could cast close to the rising trout. I made three passes. The fish weren't interested in my dry fly. If I'd had any action at all, I would have stayed out longer. But by then it was 5:15 and I still had to re-trailer the Cap'n Dan, stow all my gear and drive for two and a half hours before I was pulling into my driveway at home.
I called it quits.
Some video of my day on the Cumberland can be found at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z5kGvfvZtw&list=UURDkdkwjV228oFTKX66tqYw
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