Fly Fishing the Cumberland River. Gene Slusher

      Cumberland River (Kentucky-Tennessee)

       Location: A little over 2 hours from Lexington and Louisville, and a handful of miles south of Jamestown, Kentucky, U.S. 127 passes directly across the top of Wolf Creek Dam, with Lake Cumberland on one side and the Cumberland River on the other. Although the lower stretches of river meander through Cumberland and Monroe Counties before passing into Tennessee, the majority of the access points are located in Russell County along KY 379 on the north side of the river, and KY 3063 on the south side.

      The Cumberland River starts as a small mountain stream in the hills of eastern Kentucky and grows quickly as the lack of arable land funnels rainwater into the Cumberland Basin until

      a relatively large river emerges in the central part of the state. Flash flooding along this river became such a problem that in the 1940s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Wolf Creek Dam to create Lake Cumberland as a flood control project. It turned out to be the largest manmade lake east of the Mississippi River. Lake Cumberland is roughly 50,000 acres in area and deeper than 200 feet in some places. The Corps unintentionally killed many of the native warmwater species that once lived in the waters downstream of the dam. As a “fix” to this problem, a sizable fish hatchery was built at the base of Wolf Creek Dam to stock rainbow and brown trout into the newly created tailwater, as well as in many other streams throughout the region.

      The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources annually stocks about 240,000 trout in the Cumberland River: about 150,000 rainbows, 50,000 browns, and 40,000 brook trout. While there is no documented trout reproduction in the river, anglers can find fish from 9 to 30-plus inches. The current

      state-record brown, brook, and rainbow were all caught in this tailwater: the brown was just over 21 pounds, the rainbow was 14 pounds, and the record for the newly introduced brook trout is currently being broken almost monthly.

      The Cumberland is an amazing striped bass fishery as well. Twenty-pound stripers are common, and 40-pound fish are not as rare as you might think. Fish over 50 pounds are seen and caught every year, although most larger stripers are not taken on the fly.