I’m going to miss Frank Smethurst. I thought Frank was a great host for the show, seemed like a real nice guy with just enough irreverence but always polite and gracious with everyone he interviewed and fished with. Jed also seems like he’ll be a great host, and judging by watching his previous show, this guy is an awesome fly caster.
I don’t know if the temperature hit forty degrees on Skyline Drive this past Saturday due to the latest cold snap, and so I had expectations for a mediocre day of brook trout fishing in Shenandoah National Park. A change of weather can slow a stretch of good fishing, and that was part of my pessimism. The other problem was the time of week. On weekends, SNP is not my favorite place.
Weekends on Skyline are always kind of questionable if you’re seeking some solitude. In good weather any time of the year, the place is a playground for visitors from all over the world. On nice weekends, it can seem to me like the entire DC area suburbs are transplanted here. The outdoorsy Subaru driving twenty and thirty somethings are out hiking, the hardcore dogs are powering down the trails with their Komperdell trekking poles and tourists from all over the world are driving no faster than two thirds of the speed limit (that’s two thirds of 35 mph). “Not a weekday, stay away” makes sense for me, and no matter the weather. So besides the cold, it was even worse to think that others might be fishing out there.
Meandering to the Piney River
None of that mattered on Saturday. I ended up throwing all that wisdom aside and headed to the Piney River and parked the truck around 11:30am. I think this is the third time I’ve fished here, and it’s been almost two years since the last time. Glad I gave it a go.
To access the stream near its headwaters, enter Shenandoah National Park at Front Royal ($15 per vehicle for a one week pass, or $30 for an annual pass to the park, or even better, $80 annually for access to every national park) and proceed south on Skyline Drive. Across the road from Matthews Arm campground is a ranger station on the left, just after mile marker twenty two, with a small parking area. The Piney Branch trail starts here and runs down the mountain toward the stream. Once it crosses the Piney (the first time, at the crossing closer to Skyline), the trail turns right and parallels the stream. You can get to the “larger” part of the Piney when the trail crosses it again a couple miles below, but there are other options if you’re willing to improvise.
The Piney River is a great place to fish, but be warned. This is not the thing to do if you’re pressed for time. Driving to the park is itself a journey unless you live nearby, and once you’ve reached the trail, it’s roughly a two hour round trip hike. It’s also not your thing if you don’t like bushwhacking and climbing up and down some gnarly, overgrown slopes anywhere from fifty to one hundred feet above the river. But you, as an aficionado of pursuing small native fish, are no doubt into getting away from it all to practice this pastime and have already accepted that there won’t be cell phone service, people in shouting distance or a place for the MedEvac to land. It’s a typical outing for the lunatic fringe brook trout fly fisherman. So if you have time, a fair bit of energy and the desire for a very small bit of adventure, here you go.
Burning some calories all the while
Even in early spring with the trees still naked from winter, there is not much of a view on the hike down the Piney Branch trail to the stream. The good spots to fish begin after around ten more minutes of hiking past the first crossing, but you will probably want to head further downstream and fish back up, filling in as much time as your schedule allows. The first time I fished here I hiked all the way down to where the trail meets the stream at the lower crossing, about two miles past the first crossing, and fished back up from there (I have not yet fished downstream from that spot). On the downhill stretch of trail paralleling the Piney is where you can think about improvising.
What I did today and have done before is to find a place where the vegetation is a little sparser and where there is a clear shot down to the water. Along this stretch there are several sheer cliffs between the trail and the river, so find the spots in between where the slope goes all the way down to the stream and head down there to fish. Easy to do in March, but not so fun in early May and later.
The Piney is loaded with trout. All except one I caught today were small, but I have caught brookies over nine inches here. One challenge when you’re on the stream (and a good thing if you’re a trout) is that there are a lot of dead falls on this river. So not only will you hike a lot and do some scrambling down and up steep slopes, but you’re going to do a fair bit of climbing over and scooting under fat tree trunks and lumber and scaling some large boulders with your fly rod in your teeth. You could avoid much of that in exchange for not fishing much — it’s part of what you have to do here.
The water temperature today was a steady forty two degrees. This seems about the minimum temperature for dry fly fishing, and it was mostly the small guys that were willing to risk their lives to eat my dries. I did not tie on a nymph today, not once. As I’ve written before, my preference for catching brook trout is on dry flies, though you may recall that I resort to nymphs when it’s called for. I’m sure I could have hoisted a few larger trout today with a Hare’s Ear. But… I… Just… Won’t… Do… It! Still it was a fun day. I caught at least a couple dozen brookies.
I did see a some mayflies, probably Quill Gordons. The two flies I used were a size 14 Royal Wulff (my go-to fly on these streams, and I caught the big daddy of the day on that… but no photo) and a size 16 Mr. Rapidan. The latter caught way more fish today, though that might be because 1) I tied the Royal Wulff myself and I’m, uh, still learning how to do that well and 2) the Wulff got slimed and abused early on. I ended up trimming some hackle off the top and cropping the tail a bit (the tail was way too long) and got it back into pretty good shape, but the Mr. Rapidan was the fly the fish wanted to eat today.
So yes, it ended up a good day. I fished with a Winston WT 7 foot 3 weight I got off eBay. Really nice rod and I’m going to have a little review of that shortly. Stay tuned…
Another big week for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, stocking those trout all over the state. And looks like another cold weekend here in Virginia. Temps on Sunday are only expected to hit the upper 30’s, and only the low 40’s today through Saturday. It’s a good bet that that is going to turn off dry fly fishing for brook trout in the mountains.
So, go catch some dumb stocked trout! In my area, Lake Thompson (aka Thompson WMA Pond) has once again filled itself back up after mysteriously draining last year, so the state is once again stocking it. I have never fished there but have pestered some of the guys who are persistently on the banks hauling out trout for supper. They had some nice rainbows on stringers last time I was there. I just got a 300 grain Scientific Anglers Wet Tip Express for my Scott A3 switch rod, so I may head down there to see how fast that line gets down to those fish. But next week, I swear it’s going to warm up and I’m going to head up to Shenandoah National Park with my new used Winston WT 7 foot 3 weight. This thing is a joy to cast.
Rapidan Brookie from the Eat More Brook Trout blog.
The Eat More Brook Trout blog was fishing on the Rapidan River just a couple weeks ago. Sounds like a great time, dry fly fishing in the afternoon with Tenkara rods. I’ve fished the Rapidan once, the first time I caught a brook trout. It certainly is a beautiful place. On that April trip I did not make it to President Hoover’s camp, having called it a day just downstream from there after losing count of how many trout I caught, but reading this post reminded me there is a lot to see in Shenandoah National Park, and that river and the camp should be high on any fly fisherman’s list of places to go.
This time of year, when the temperature has warmed up a bit, afternoons bring good dry fly action on the streams in Shenandoah National Park. My first brookie of the season was exactly a month ago, on a certain unnamed stream in the park, and on a day when the temps hit seventy degrees the afternoon definitely turned the fish on to dry flies. I still can’t bring myself to nymph for them. It just seems wrong even if I miss out on some action because of it. There is nothing like floating a Royal Wulff or an Adams over small pockets of water and having little native fish just slam them. Right now the Quill Gordons should be starting to hatch so the fish should be looking up.
If you’ve never fished the Rapidan and certainly if you’ve never fished Shenandoah National Park, consider signing up for Murray’s Fly Shop Mountain Trout Fly Fishing School. It’s two days of guided fishing and instruction on the Rapidan River, and you’ll learn exactly how to fish these small mountain streams.
I realize I have posted a lot of trout stocking info for Virginia in recent months, and that’s not exactly brook trout fishing material. Bear with me, though. A lot of people find this useful. For many of us, fishing for brook trout in late fall through mid-winter (during and after they spawn) is considered at least unfair, and really, damaging to the populations of fish. So hopefully the trout stocking info has helped people find other places to go during the winter months. I also try to add a little extra info on particular places I’ve fished before in the hope that it is helpful.
Anyway, in the next few weeks the amount of brook trout fishing content should increase. The weather is now turning for the season (and for the better) and I plan to make time to fish a lot of streams and report about it here. Next week I have a Winston WT 7 foot 3 weight fly rod arriving for a full on-stream review, and in conjunction with a detailed report on the Shenandoah National Park stream I visit to do that. So things will be picking up.
The latest Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries Outdoor Report has an item about a trout fisherman who, after catching his limit of stocked trout on Passage Creek, decided he wanted more. So he allegedly changed clothes and returned to the stream to catch more fish, thereby exceeding his daily limit and being charged with a violation of the state’s fishing laws.
If you want to fish Passage Creek and have never been there to do it (and will abide by the laws of the state), it’s a beautiful stream and worth checking out mid-week in the winter. Keep in mind that it is not managed like a wild trout stream. It is a put-and-take fishery, so the fish don’t last long… especially when people take more than their fair share. A good way to fish Passage Creek is to either park near the fish hatchery (see map below) and hike upstream, past the dam and into the deeper water. Another good option is to park at the Signal Knob parking area, cross the street towards the stream and fish upstream from there. I think that spot gets less pressure and I’ve caught what I believe are some wild rainbows in that stretch — I believe it because they were really tiny and they crashed a dry fly like eager brook trout. This was before last year’s long, dry summer so who knows what’s there now, and I haven’t been there since then.
Whoops, I’ve been asleep at the wheel and missed this last week. LOTS of places were stocked last week, and this little cold snap has made brook trout fishing during our false spring a week ago seem like a distant memory. But soon…
Almost a year ago I fished the North River Gorge and caught a couple small rainbows. It’s a beautiful place and a good hike in and out to fish the interior parts of the Gorge. If you drive in almost to Elkhorn Lake there is a small campground and parking on the upstream end of the Gorge. There may be better places to fish but this is certainly a nice getaway while you’re waiting for the mountain streams to warm up a little.
