Trout Waters

The Watauga Riverkeeper, Donna Lisenby, received a phone call on Saturday July 17, alerting her to a fish kill on the Watauga River in Boone, NC. Donna in cooperation with the Boone fire department was able to track down the source of the pollutant and it was from the B B&T parking lot on highway 105 in Boone, NC. It seems that the Watauga River and a tributary called Hodges Creek have suffered a great deal of damage due to the carelessness of an asphalt contractor who allowed asphalt sealer to flow into the Watauga River via a drain sewer.

I know the story about George Washington throwing a stone across the Potomac, but when I saw the Potomac near Washington, DC for the first time, I knew it was nothing but a popular myth. It seems that his grandson G.W. Parke Curtis was writing about George’s great strength when he said that George did throw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock River below Fredericksburg, still an impossible feat. No one knows how or when the story morphed into the stone across the Potomac.

Classifying a body of flowing water by size is simple, for example, rivers by definition are large, creeks are smaller and feeder streams are smaller yet. However, further classification is often difficult because location, geology, chemistry, biological life, flow rate and a host of other physical and chemical characteristics are all different. Regardless of what we call them, each body of flowing water takes on the chemical characteristics of the dissolved portion of the substrate over which it flows, making the chemistry and the PH of each one unique.

The scuds, midges, and sulfur nymphs continue to dominate the food supply for our beloved S. Holston trout. The best dry fly activity has been early morning for the midges and early afternoon for the sulfurs. The TVA has limited generation to a few pulses a day, making for warmer waters in the lower sections of the river in late afternoon. The best bite has definitely been in the morning hours on most days.