The Ultimate Fly-Fishing Guide to the Smoky Mountains. Greg Ward
of the four titles known to me. Discovered when going through the National Park Service archives in 1979, Sport Fishing The Smokies by Joe Manley is an extremely short, but very accurate book on the ins and outs of catching trout in the Smokies. Only 16 pages long, this informative book was published in 1969 and apparently had a very short shelf life. My favorite notation in the book was when the author advised anglers looking for bigger trout to use techniques that took their flies deep along the bottom. How right Manley was.
The fourth book written on fishing for trout in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was an effort I began in the mid-1970s as a young man with an unquenchable thirst for catching fish from these pristine waters. The first printing of 1,000 books was published by McGuire/Denton Publishers of Dayton, Ohio. It was the first comprehensive, stream-by-stream guide to the 13 major watersheds in the park. This white, blue, and black paperback has become something of a collectible in its own right. I own only three copies and can only guess what the publishers did with the remaining inventory or what became of that pair of Yankees, may God bless them.
In 1984 with my assistance, Menasha Ridge Press of Birmingham, Alabama, acquired rights to that book, Trout Fishing Guide to the Smokies. It was revised, with chapters added to include the waters in the Cherokee reservation located east of the national park, as well as the five lakes that border the southern portion of the Smokies. Now known as Smoky Mountains Trout Fishing Guide, this book has been extremely well received. It went through a dozen printings before my fly-fishing-only book took its place on bookstore shelves.
Naturally, other books have been written that include considerable information on fly-fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains. My close friend and mentor, Charley “Chum” Dickey (who is from my hometown), wrote a book with Freddie Moses (a noted fly-fishing attorney from Knoxville, Tennessee) titled Trout Fishing. Published by Oxmoor House, this tough-to-find title from the 1960s is one of my most cherished possessions. Now deceased, Chum was my mentor for many years and is sorely missed by all. He told me to go places besides the Smokies so I would not look like a total hillbilly. I did what he suggested. I’ve fished and hunted around the world a couple of times (enough that I don’t care to any more), although I still do not like wearing shoes.
Chum has been gone a while, but like Cathey and Manley, Charley Dickey was an icon to fly-fishing in the Smokies. Along with his fishing pal, Fred Moses of Knoxville, they not only fished the streams of the park like possessed fiends, but also traveled widely, fly-fishing and hunting. Moses, a star running back on General Neyland’s Tennessee Vols football teams in 1933–1934, was rated by his long-time partner, Chum, as the best caster to ever ply the waters of the Smokies. Moses might also be the boldest too, as the following excerpt from Trout Fishing: Basic Guide to Dry Fly Fishing reveals. Charlie later told me that this incident occurred at Big Creek.
Not long ago, Fred and Charley were fishing a small river in the Smokies, poking along with Charley fishing the forehand side and Fred the backhand. They alternated honeyholes and ambled along side by side, fishing the few flat stretches. As they rounded the turn, there on a huge boulder lay two young ladies without clothes, basking in the sun. They did not hear the approaching anglers above the roaring water and may have been sleeping.
Charley was deeply worried that they might get sunburned, but Fred was concerned with ethical behavior on a trout stream; should the anglers fish past the sunbathers without saying anything, or should they ask permission to move ahead?
After a lengthy debate, the anglers decided to wade quietly past the sunning lasses lest a sudden awakening frighten them. The trout fishermen pulled in their lines and pushed slowly up the difficult current, passing the boulder where the sleeping beauties languished. The fishermen would be around the next turn in a few seconds and could go back to their routine casting.
At the last moment Fred could stand it no longer. He removed the Cahill on the end of his leader and replaced it with a hookless spinner. Then he stripped out line and began to false cast until he had just the right amount of line out.
Then he stripped line on one of the girls and dropped the spoon, cold out of the water, right on the most logical part of her anatomy. The target turned over, took one look, and let out a scream which drowned out all of the cascades and waterfalls in the Smokies. There was a scurry of sunburned flesh scampering through the laurels as the two anglers turned and continued upstream.
When Fred and Charley returned to their vehicle after dark, weary and sore, the air in all four tires had been let out!
OTHER PRE-1996 PUBLISHED BOOKS YOU MIGHT WISH TO LOCATE ON this subject include Papa Was A Fisherman: Memories of the Great Smokies by Joe B. Long (1969), Twenty Years Hunting and Fishing in the Great Smokies by Sam Hunnicutt, and On The Spine of Time: An Angler’s Love of the Smokies (1991) by another personal friend and neighbor in Homewood, Alabama, Harry Middleton When I left Tennessee for Alabama to start magazines, I lived only a block away from Middleton for over a year before running into him at the Piggly Wiggly. I am not sure which of us was the most surprised. I wish I had met him sooner.
Since my GSMNP fly-fishing book appeared in 1998, a bevy of latecomers have appeared. Longtime fishing pal and fellow Morristownian (as was Davy Crockett), H. Lea Lawrence wrote The Fly Fisherman’s Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Cumberland House, 1998). Lea was another valuable friend and mentor, and without question the most talented conversationalist ever to make a living in the outdoors business. Ian Rutter was the next to publish a guidebook, and this young fellow did a splendid job. I predict Smoky Mountains fly-fishermen will read Rutter’s prose for many years to come.
The most recent book on fly-fishing in the Smokies was penned by North Carolinian Jim Casada, whom I have known for many years. When I launched Southern Sporting Journal, its fly-fishing column was written by my close friend, Jim Bashline, former editor at Field & Stream. After only a couple of issues, Jim passed away unexpectedly. In a pinch, I decided to give the upshot Casada the publication’s fly-fishing column. In retrospect, I am quite pleased to have given him such a prestigious break early in his career. However, while I agree with others that his prose is largely characterized as convoluted ramblings, clearly Casada is knowledgeable of park waters in North Carolina. His book also does an excellent job of supporting the information presented in my first fly-fishing guide to the Smokies.
The only complaint I have received about my previous books is that they revealed too many formerly secret fishing spots to interloping Yankees. In that respect I believe I also have misgivings, but from the many letters I have received over the years, I think I did more good than bad with my efforts. My first book on fishing in the Smokies was the beginning of an outdoor writing career that has spanned five decades. In the late 1980s when I was still keeping track of such things, I had sold over 10,000 articles and columns.
Becoming an editor in the 1990s, I started more than two dozen sporting titles (plus one on NASCAR racing and polo). Some of them, such as Whitetail Journal, remain in publication.
During the last 20 years I have dedicated well over half of my effort to ghost writing for so-called celebrity hunters and fishermen. It’s a quick buck, no hassles with young editors, and I don’t have to kill or catch every damned critter that I write about under the names of others. Additionally, I have hosted a number of television shows, my favorite being Bassin’ Mexico, which we did for four years. It took about six weeks of fishing in Mexico per season of television. On one morning trip there between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m., Wild Bill Skinner and I caught and released over 40 bass that topped ten pounds. The largest exceeded 16 pounds. There is a clip on YouTube of Wild Bill wrestling what was surely a new-world-record largemouth bass. I can be seen behind him. The guide knocked the fish off the bait at the side of the boat. The last time I looked, that clip had over 200,000 views.
Over the years I have hunted and fished everywhere from Alaska and Africa, to Chile and Scotland. I have fly-fished for Atlantic salmon with Ted Williams on the Miramchi River, bowhunted with Fred Bear at Grouse Haven, hunted caribou and mountain lion with Bob Foulkrod, and drank whiskey around campfires since I was 12. For a while I was not as ever-present in the Smokies as I was in the old days. However, everywhere I went, I measured it against these