Nice weather, nice fish

Since we've been back in Kentucky I've been fishing the Cumberland River tailwater in southern Kentucky for trout every week or two from my Gheenoe.

Yesterday was a beautiful day weatherwise -- partly cloudy, low humidity, no wind, temperature in the 70s.  This is pretty rare in Kentucky in July.  I'm glad I was able to take advantage of it.

It's a long haul from where I live to where I put in on the river.  It's a two and a half hour drive; then time spent packing up the Gheenoe and dunking it off the boat ramp; finally a 30 minute drive upriver to the spot where I start fishing.  It wasn't until after noon yesterday that I took my first cast.

I started off throwing a streamer toward the vertical bank that I believe I showed in the video accompanying my previous post.  I had one bite in that first drift but the fish came off.   I switched flies to a San Juan Worm, which flutters a bit in the water and which I thought might look like a caterpillar to the trout, and then motored back upstream to drift over the same water with this different fly.  Well, the fish either didn't care for the San Juan Worm or were too deep in the water column to see it.  The flow in the river was still pretty strong at this point.

After this second drift I switched to a different rod and a different technique.  I tried a double nymph combination (a size 16 Hare's Ear and a size 20 Copper John) under a split shot and a neon orange strike indicator.  I drifted a different section of the river and hooked three trout on the nymph rig.  All of them broke off.  The hook on the Hare's Ear seemed sharp to me but I know that fly has been in my nymph box for quite a while, so maybe it wasn't as sharp as it needed to be.  I then put on a Pheasant Tail nymph fly of a more recent vintage.  I caught the first trout I hooked and several more thereafter, either on the PT or the smaller Copper John.

By this point in the afternoon it was around three o'clock and the water level in the river had begun to drop and the current to slow down.  I had good action from then on, until I quit around six o'clock.  I hooked a bunch more fish.  Some broke off, some I managed to get all the way to the boat.

Most of the fish I'm catching in the Cumberland this year are good size, between 15 and 20 inches.  In earlier years, the average Cumberland trout was between 8-10 inches.  I don't know this for a fact, but it may be that the folks at the trout hatchery just below the dam have been holding fish back and allowing them to grow a bit as we all waited for work on Wolf Creek Dam to be completed and the river below it to return to normal.  So I'm thinking I'm catching hatchery fish recently stocked, rather than holdover fish from previous years that have grown up.  If anyone reading this knows what's up with this, please leave a comment.  In any case, the Cumberland is really fishing well right now, but you need to be there in low water levels.  Check the generation schedule on the TVA website

http://www.tva.com/river/lakeinfo/index.htm

and plan your trip accordingly.

Here's some video I shot yesterday:

http://youtu.be/t12b0ce-JtI

None of the fish I got to the boat show up in the video.  By the time I got the fish into the boat, they were pretty exhausted and I didn't want to further risk their health by holding them out of the water for a video.  Also, it's tougher to take video in moving water like the Cumberland than in still water, such as I fish in Florida.  I need a hand on the rod and another on the trolling motor I use to control my position as the boat drifts downstream.  If I want to hold a camera, I either need to set the rod down or take my hand off the TM in order to take the camera out of my shirt pocket and aim it.  One of these days I'll get a camera mount, like other anglers do.