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Marvin:
Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Flower,

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Marvin:
back with another Casting Angles with Mack Brown. Mack, how are you?

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Mac:
I'm doing great. How are you doing, Marvin?

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Marvin:
As always, just trying to stay out of trouble. Was the Easter Bunny good to you?

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Mac:
Oh yeah, yeah, the Easter Bunny was good. Nice weather. And we turned back to

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Mac:
blackberry winter the last few days here.

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Marvin:
Yeah, but you were telling me that the spring hatch activity has been pretty good, right?

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Mac:
Oh yeah, yeah. Middle of the day has been really good. And start in the middle

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Mac:
of the day and towards the evening has been great with hatches and spinner falls

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Mac:
and four or five different things going on pretty much every day.

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Marvin:
And so what should folks expect to see kind of in those early spring hatches

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Marvin:
in western North Carolina?

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Mac:
Well, early in the morning, a lot of the trips you'll see start out there early

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Mac:
in the morning. So, I mean, it's going to be more of a nymphing game early.

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Mac:
And if they want to do more dry fly, then start midday.

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Mac:
Dry fly, wet fly is both really good.

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Mac:
Middle of the day. And wet fly can be, like, really good right up until dark.

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Mac:
And so the hatches are pretty easy to tell, I mean, just by looking up on the

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Mac:
surface. Once you start to see a lot of the risers and sippers everywhere,

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Mac:
then you know what's going on.

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Mac:
And what we look for always is looking for swallows. Like once you see all the

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Mac:
hundreds of swallows on the river, the bugs are already in the air.

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Mac:
And so that's always a surefire sign to switch over and move up, you know.

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Mac:
But it's tough. I like to start everything at midday.

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Mac:
People want to start early and get done early, you know. So a lot of times it

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Mac:
doesn't coincide with what the fish are going to do, you know?

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Mac:
Because I'd say the best dry fly activity on average the last couple of weeks

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Mac:
has been probably 1 o'clock to 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

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Marvin:
Yeah, that sounds about right. And we were talking before we started recording that,

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Marvin:
you know, even though you've got multiple species coming off and you've probably

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Marvin:
got a fair amount of size variation because usually those early mayflies are relatively large,

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Marvin:
but then you've also got the small little guys like the blue winged olives but

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Marvin:
you know we were talking about how people make fly selection you know too complicated.

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Mac:
That's right. I think they overthink it. And really, when you have a whole lot

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Mac:
of activity on top, like I'm talking like in a minute to have 40 or 50 rises

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Mac:
a minute in a little area that you're watching.

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Mac:
I don't think it matters when it's that kind of a frenzy, as long as the size,

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Mac:
shape and color is even close, like even close.

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Mac:
And I've done that a lot over the years just to prove a point,

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Mac:
like put something like an elk hair caddis and there is no caddis,

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Mac:
you know, and then that still works just as good as any other drop slot you'd pick.

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Mac:
So I think that's kind of overrated. I think what people forget in the East

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Mac:
Coast is it's very opportunistic fish in this part of the country.

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Mac:
I think it's that way all up to Alleghenies, all the way to Maine.

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Mac:
I don't think it's super selective anywhere that I've seen on the East Coast.

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Mac:
So I think a lot of those early hatch books that we read in the early 70s about

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Mac:
matching it exactly and all that, I think that's overrated, to be honest.

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Mac:
But I mean, as long as you have something on there that's floating on top,

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Mac:
then you could say, okay, you got a drift and nothing happened.

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Mac:
Let's say you did a dead drift, and then next thing you do is you animate the

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Mac:
fly, let it drift a second, animate it again, and all of a sudden you have a

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Mac:
fish. I think a lot of it's from the actions of what the angler's doing,

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Mac:
more so than the fly that they're picking.

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Marvin:
Yeah, and I would say, too, probably that lack of selectivity is a function

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Marvin:
of the fact that the reality is most of our rivers are freestones,

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Marvin:
and as a result, they're relatively sterile, right?

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Marvin:
So fish don't really want to let anything that looks like food pass them by

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Marvin:
because it's not the buffet that it is in some other places in the country.

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Mac:
That's right. Well, a good example, this was on Easter when the kids were small.

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Mac:
Connor's going to be 18 in a couple of weeks.

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Mac:
This is back when he was probably seven, so it was 11 years ago.

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Mac:
But I remember walking up there on Easter weekend with the family,

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Mac:
and I picked 10 dogwood leaves off of a bridge up high on Deep Creek.

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Mac:
And this was just a fun little experiment because I knew what would happen.

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Mac:
And so I had Jennifer and the kids looking off the bridge, and I rolled each

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Mac:
one of those little dogwood leaves up to about the size of a pea and would drop it in the river.

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Mac:
And eight of the ten dogwood leaves got eaten within three feet of drift.

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Mac:
So how picky are fish? And this is when there wasn't a hatch and the fish weren't coming up.

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Mac:
So if eight of ten leaves got eaten within three feet of drift and it wasn't

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Mac:
even prime time when they're looking up, feeding on the surface,

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Mac:
what's that tell us? Don't overthink your dry fly.

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Mac:
And I think that's why I wanted to talk about this for the podcast just because

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Mac:
I think people overthink it way more than they should.

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Marvin:
Yeah, which then gets us to pattern. And I would say probably in our part of

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Marvin:
the world, you know, orange and yellow elk hair caddis, probably a parachute Adams, right?

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Marvin:
And then maybe something that sits a little bit higher up, you know,

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Marvin:
not as flat in the water as a parachute style fly. I don't know,

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Marvin:
maybe a humpy or something like that.

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Marvin:
And, I mean, you pretty much got it covered. Yeah.

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Mac:
Yeah, I think pretty much that would do it. And it's like those flies will skate

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Mac:
well, like any traditional, like, Catskill-type flies are easy to skate and

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Mac:
ride high up in the water.

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Mac:
So if it's a windy day, having a fly that skates, because then it emulates the

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Mac:
insects, because insects get blown a lot.

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Mac:
So a good example, like a parachute sits flush down in the sun,

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Mac:
but they don't get blown naturally like the naturals that are getting blown.

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Mac:
You know what I mean? So a parachute's kind of tough to get blown on the surface.

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Mac:
And a lot of times, this sounds crazy, but we've had a lot of wind the last

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Mac:
week, like 20 to 30-mile-an-hour gusts, pretty constant here.

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Mac:
And when you look at the naturals, they're actually getting blown upstream really pretty quick.

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Mac:
And then when you put a fly out there and it's kind of just sitting in the current

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Mac:
or moving downstream when all the other naturals are going upstream,

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Mac:
just little things like that of changing styles of flies to match what the naturals

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Mac:
are doing. makes, I think, a lot of times a big difference.

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Mac:
That's something you don't hear about in those hatch books or anything.

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Mac:
But there's a reason why those flies that will skate and blow like the naturals

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Mac:
are a lot of times a better choice if it's windy.

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Marvin:
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of that talk that I gave in Edison in Denver about trout food and you.

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Marvin:
And it's like you don't have to remember all this stuff. If you just sit and

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Marvin:
look and see what the food's doing, make your fly look like the food and behave like the food.

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Mac:
That's right. Then it's going to be a much bigger ticket, I think,

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Mac:
to success by doing that.

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Mac:
And yeah, it's just the big thing right now is there's so many.

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Mac:
Spring's such a wonderful time. I made a post the other day about the hatches,

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Mac:
and some buddies in Ireland were texting me back and go, you know,

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Mac:
it's prime time over there too, this time of year.

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Mac:
And I think the thing is just to keep it simple and not overthink it.

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Mac:
You know, don't worry about having the perfect bug. If it's the same size,

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Mac:
shape, I mean, it doesn't even have to be the color.

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Mac:
Because if you animate a fly, they're probably not going to see the color.

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Mac:
I mean, if it's actually hopping and skittering and really moving erratic,

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Mac:
all they know is something's there.

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Mac:
And you're going to get what we call an impulse strike over something that's

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Mac:
selective where they can roll up.

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Mac:
And I'm sure people have dry-flied. They've seen that where the fish rolls up,

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Mac:
it's pecked sands, and it follows it two or three feet downstream looking at it.

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Mac:
And decides he doesn't want to eat it, you don't have to worry about those kind

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Mac:
of behaviors when you actually animate it.

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Mac:
You know, you're going after the one that wants to come and get it right then.

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Mac:
A little bit different strategy.

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Marvin:
Yeah, so we're kind of navigating this kind of shoulder season. It's kind of funny.

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Marvin:
I think we've had a 20-degree temperature drop here in Charlotte,

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Marvin:
and I know it's windy here. It's got to be howling where you are.

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Marvin:
But, you know, I know you've got schools coming up.

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Marvin:
You want to let folks know about those. And also, I know that you got people

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Marvin:
reaching out that want to get on the water.

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Mac:
Yeah, no, that'd be good. The big thing for this month coming up after the –

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Mac:
we've got a school that's coming up.

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Mac:
It's a casting two-day weekend school, April 27th, 28th, and we've still got

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Mac:
some room in that toward the end of April.

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Mac:
That's probably one of my favorite things of the whole year.

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Mac:
That one in September, we do a two-day weekend.

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Mac:
Advanced line control class here for fly casting, and that's always a lot of

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Mac:
fun. and then the trips, the same information's on the same site at mackgroundflyfish.com,

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Mac:
and they can find that info on there pretty easy.

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Marvin:
Well, there you go. Well, listen, folks, it's warming up.

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Marvin:
We're gonna have a nice week or so of weather, I think, once this front passes

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Marvin:
through, and you owe it to yourself to get out there and catch a few.

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Marvin:
Tight lines, everybody. Tight lines, Mack.

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Mac:
Tight lines, Marvin.