One of our streamside reporters, Mark Gasior, had this wonderful report on early summer fishing in western NC.
From Mark:
“I have to share this story and pictures with you! Hope yall had a great weekend.
I spent the beginning of mine with Rando the Camando. On Friday we started on the Looking Glass above the Davidson and caught 20-bows between the two us in just a couple of hours.
We then hit the Hub for BBQ and beers. Cool place, bike shop and bar. We dropped our stuff off at the Sunset Motel and then headed west on 64 to the North Fork of the French Broad. This is a wild, remote river tucked in the Pisgah National Forest. The river is known for large native Browns. We hiked down a step gorge and marked our trail with landscape tape knowing that we would be walking out in the dark.
Crazy,but our plans where to get into the Caddis hatch that could happen at anytime up until dark. Around 7:00pm I looped a size 8 stone fly (Gary Jones special) into this fast running pool and on the first cast the strike indicator stopped and I did a triple hook set into the biggest brown I have ever seen. My heart was pumping hard and my mouth became dry as the dessert.
The Camando was an 1/8 of a mile down river and when I yelled for help he kindly waved back and gave me the thumbs up sign. He could not here me! Fifteen minutes later the Camando came up beside me and watched me fight this monster for another 10-minutes. After three attempts to net this bad boy, the Camondo came through for me. We proceeded to do a photo shoot and then released the brown back into the river.
Brevard is a great town. That night we celebrated the big brown andpartied with the locals and live music till midnight.Next morning we drove west to Safire and fished the Whitewater. Another beautiful river and we caught some beautiful browns.
Enjoy the pictures and see you on the river!