The National Park Service requires that brown trout caught in Shenandoah National Park cannot be returned to the Hughes, Rose, or Brokenback. Browns are invasive and have a negative impact on native brook trout in those streams. I’m not sure why the Conway is not included in those regulations, but Virginia seems to encourage people to seek out brown trout there.

Last week, with the invitation to join a friend fishing a wild brown trout stream, I found a few. None were especially large, but they all took dry flies eagerly. I don’t usually ask for more than that, so it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Since I was looking for brook trout as well, I just used the same flies I normally would for them. In this case, a Deer Hair Caddis with some hackle, a blonde Elk Hair Caddis, an Adams, and a Patriot. As it gradually warmed up throughout the day, the fish hit dries mightily.

I ended up with more browns than brookies, which was the opposite of my expectations when we started in the morning.

This year, targeting more brown trout is a minor goal for me. I plan to spend a bit more time in Pennsylvania hunting them, but Virginia is going to get some attention as well. So far, the year is heading in the right direction.

I had one afternoon of catching over fifty fish, all on two copies of a simple deer hair caddis I cobbled together, with a couple turns of rust-colored hackle behind the head. Shenandoah National Park is a great place to be on a warm day in late winter…

Turns out this one had some small brook trout, always a great thing to confirm.

The week before, on the Rapidan, size 12 and even size 10 Elk Hair Caddis worked great most of the day. Here, with temps about the same (mid-50’s), I couldn’t buy a fish on an EHC. But a size 14 Adams did the trick as it often does when trout are looking up.

There are a ton of tiny streams and tributaries in the park that most people don’t bother fishing. I have found a few with some decent sized brookies over the years, but I’ve also burned some time discovering some that don’t really have any, or at least do not harbor any consistently. Still, it’s always fun to explore the place regardless of how the fishing works out.

The first fish of 2017, in the first pool, third cast, on the nattiest looking dry fly I’ve ever tied:

More followed, and left:

A five weight might be overkill, but on the Rapidan, a little more length is often nice, especially when it’s the favorite dry fly rod:

The sun popped out a couple times. Nothing like dry fly fishing in January:

And one more. Every fish was stunning:

On a separate note, the road up to the Rapidan is worse than I’ve ever seen it. If you don’t have four-wheel drive with some clearance, probably best not to attempt it right now.

It was the end of our first week in Nova Scotia and we were about to depart from Big Intervale Fishing Lodge, a lovely place on the banks of the Margaree River on Cape Breton Island. After several days of driving hundreds of miles in multi-hour chunks and not having cast a fly yet, the thought of getting in the car yet again was making us a little cranky. “That’s Nova Scotia,” said Ruth, who owns the lodge with her husband, Hermann. Damn right it was. The driving seemed endless, but the scenery and the fishing made it more than bearable.

Before we left on the nineteen-hour trip from Virginia, I did not appreciate just how big an area Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island occupy. From approximately Yarmouth on the province’s southwestern tip to the northern end of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia is roughly as long as the distance from Northern Virginia to Boston, about five hundred miles. It’s all dotted with lakes and rivers, and amazingly, nearly all of them are inhabited by native brook trout. Though we were there for two weeks, we could have used another two weeks just to see the entire place, and even that would have been just a superficial glance. Nova Scotia is a big, beautiful, and very wild place.

As we were leaving Big Intervale, Ruth grabbed a map and pointed out tributaries of the Margaree that we might try for brook trout, or “speckled trout” as they are called there. We ended up ignoring her recommendation and winging it, though, and just pulled over at a random stream nearby. It looked like one of the dozens we had already spent days driving by, so we figured we’d give it a shot.

What we found was pretty damn cool. Several salmon parr took our dry flies first. Then we were into small brook trout. We walked further and further upstream, and the fish got larger. The biggest by far were in the smallest runs. My wife landed the largest of the trip and of her life in a stretch about as wide as a king-sized mattress, and maybe a foot deep:

So that first stream we found (still don’t know its name) ended up being the first of many that we stumbled upon that were loaded with brook trout.

One of the great things about Nova Scotia is its stream access laws. Residents are allowed to fish on any water, and you can cross private property to get to a stream so long as you’re not causing damage or otherwise being obnoxious. The law is not clear about non-residents like us who have a fishing license, but thankfully we never had to challenge any legal boundaries. We were able to just pull over and start fishing right next to the road on every stream we fished.

From Margaree, we finally got to settle down for a few days near Chéticamp in a place we booked online. It was a small cabin with a stunning view of the Chéticamp River and Cape Breton Highlands National Park, and allowed us to access the park and its collection of small streams loaded with brook trout and small salmon.

I really don’t understand why more is not written about the fishing in Nova Scotia. Aside from several famous salmon fisheries, including those on Cape Breton Island like the Margaree and Chéticamp rivers, you don’t read much about fishing here compared to places such as Maine, for example. Surely some of it is its remoteness, maybe some secrecy, probably some unfavorable comparisons to nearby provinces, but I have to think a lot is just ignorance. It certainly seems like not many people in the U.S. know about this place, but I think a lot of Canadian anglers pass this area over as well.

Aside from a guy from Montreal that we ran into when we camped at Meat Cove who caught a striper at the campground (which prompted me to grab my spinning rod and do the same!), we saw no other people fishing in our two weeks there — not for salmon, not for brook trout, not for anything. Granted, water levels were at record lows, but despite that, brook trout fishing in the small streams we tried was like springtime in the Virginia mountains. In other words, it all fished pretty damn well.

To sum it all up, we hiked and caught a lot of brook trout, some small salmon, a striper, a mackerel… but we mostly spent our time touring one of the most beautiful coastlines I’ve ever seen. If you get a chance, go! See the end of this post for some useful links.

Some more photos…

First, the darkest brook trout you’ve ever seen, taken about a quarter mile upstream from the ocean on a Cape Breton Island river:

The killer view from a place we rented overlooking the Chéticamp River and Cape Breton Highlands National Park. We saw some large salmon leaping from the water several times:

We caught some nice little brook trout in the national park, as well as several small, incidental salmon that we were not targeting, and not expecting:

The view from our campsite at the spectacular Meat Cove Campground:

It could have been a great springtime in Virginia if we didn’t know where we were fishing — tons of decent little brook trout every day:

We spent one night in Halifax, and happened on a public park set up to simulcast the final concert of The Tragically Hip, aka, “Canada’s Band.” A very moving experience, and a group I knew almost nothing about until that night:

Civilization is never far away, even on the northern coast of Cape Breton Island:

This fish was caught near the angry car sign, and would have backed the f*** up had I not been standing behind him:

We sped through New Brunswick, coming as well as going. Though we did spend a few hours at Hopewell Rocks on the Bay of Fundy (a fascinating place), we definitely shortchanged “The Picture Province,” or, “The Drive-Through Province,” if you’re feeling a bit disparaging. We plan to return and see more, it really was a beautiful place and we just hadn’t planned for that. Lots of great fishing there, and some wonderful scenery including the coastline near this lighthouse at Cape Enrage, though the photo doesn’t do the area justice:

We did manage to cover Nova Scotia from stem to stern, though. From the Meat Cove on the northern end of Cape Breton Island to Yarmouth, on the southern tip, we got to see a lot of it. This was the sunset the night we stayed at Ye Olde Argyler Inn, near Yarmouth:

This isn’t even a fraction of the info I have and the pictures we took, but that will have to do. Thanks for reading.

More Links

In addition to the links for fishing, camping, and places to stay above, here are a few more:

Nova Scotia Department of Fisheries – Lots of good info here.

Margaree Salmon Association – One of Canada’s premier salmon river, on Cape Breton Island.

Chéticamp River Salmon Association – Another great salmon river.

Cape Breton Highlands National Park – There are several really good streams loaded with brook trout. My advice: get an annual park fishing license and a good topo map (the park visitor center sells both), pick a stream close to you, rig up a three-weight with a dry fly, and give it a shot.

My first brown trout, Lehigh River, taken with a very blond Elk Hair Caddis:

What I thought would have been a brook trout stream, in Hickory Run State Park…

…yielded my second brown trout:

Watching you:

And the brook trout and their beautiful Pennsylvania neighborhoods:

I’ve driven over Cedar Creek a number of times at different crossings, and always wondered if it could be a good trout fishery. The owner of Double Spur, Levi, is making sure it is, at least in the upper section on the nearly four miles of stream that he owns. He has planted lots of big, stocked rainbows in the stream, along with some brook trout. Plus, there is at least one tributary that has wild brookies that may find their way downstream, though we did not encounter any.

The fishing was not easy. The stream itself has lots of shallow runs interspersed with some deep pools where we found fish. I started with a dry fly but abandoned that idea after ten minutes — it simply was not going to happen on this day, despite the warm weather and a number of small, grayish caddis flying around. I ended up with my usual prospecting rig, a dry-dropper, which was a foam ant with a bead head hare’s ear to start. That combo worked, though I only caught a couple of fish with it. The other fly that worked for me was the infamous pellet fly. Don’t ask. I am truly ashamed, but it took another couple of fish.

Not sighted was the ten-pound monster Levi said had been caught at least once and released — over a mile upstream from where he stocked it.

We ended up taking about ten fish home, and on the wood-fired grill on low heat (as low as I could get natural coals to go), it was a great meal with a salad and a glass of white wine. Mmmmm hmmmm.

The water was high from all the recent rains. We fished Brokenback Run first, a new stream for me. It seemed less affected by the rain, and we found quite a few eager fish. We decided to cut that short after a couple hours and hike up the Hughes River, which is nearly always in decent shape. The water was very high, and it probably would have been better to hike down from Skyline Drive. Still, we managed several nice fish, and tiptoed around two water snakes, which is now a common occurrence on our excursions as it’s late spring.

The cool, wet spring is definitely extending the fishing season in the mountains. Hopefully it will continue to be just as good for a couple more weeks, at least. Get out there with your dry flies and catch some brook trout!

It’s really more of the same, and I’m not going to mince words. A group of guides based on Andros, the so-called Bahamas Fly Fishing Industry Association (see the draft there if you’d like), led by Prescott Smith, is trying to control the flats fishing business in The Bahamas under the guise of a nativist effort to take back the flats from pesky foreign anglers. And the good news for that group is that the government seems to be a willing accomplice.

The Bonefish and Tarpon Trust has published their response, as has the Abaco Fly Fishing Guides Association (and here). As well, see Rod Hamilton’s DIY Bonefishing and Bjorn Stromsness’s Bonefish on the Brain for more on this. Read the comments on those two blogs, too.

If you fish in the Bahamas, whether it’s DIY fishing or at a lodge, this will affect you negatively. Write to the Bahamian government and express your views NOW using the contact information below (send or cc: to each address):

Michael Braynen, Director, Department of Marine Resources – MichaelBraynen@Bahamas.gov.bs and michaelbraynen@yahoo.com

Angela Albury, Senior Member for Permanent Secretary of Fisheries – ANGELAALBURY@bahamas.gov.bs

V. Alfred Gray, Minister of Marine Resources –  valfredgray@bahamas.gov.bs

Obie Wilchcombe, Minister of Tourism –  owilchcombe@bahamas.com or tourism@bahamas.com

The Hon. Perry Christie, Prime Minister –  primeminister@bahamas.gov.bs

Dr. Hubert Minnis, Leader of the Opposition – hubertminnis@bahamas.gov.bs

Gary Sawyer, Senator, Abaco – gmsawyer@abacopetroleum.com

Renardo Curry, Member of Parliment, Abaco – renardocurry@bahamas.gov.bs

Cindy Pinder, AFFGA – skeeterone.pinder@gmail.com