Fly Fishing South Holston

Fly Fishing South Holston River

I wanted to wade the South Holston River and fly fish for some brown trout so I called a buddy and he had a free day to get out and fly fish some. So I packed up all the fly fishing gear for the trip and headed out on a Tuesday morning and got up there around noon time. I was going to hit a wild trout stream till I could meet up with my buddy after he got done doing a fly fishing float trip that day.


I ended up seeing a friend up there on the wild steam as he was driving down the road while I was searching for some trout from a bridge. We caught up and chatted for a good while. We talked so long I was out of time to fly fish so I headed towards my buddy's to see what our plan was for tomorrow's trip fishing on the South Holston River. He had several fishing spots he wanted to hit and gave me a layout of the fly patterns we would be throwing.


I got up Wednesday and had some fast food breakfast and coffee and hit the road to our first river spot where he wanted to wade. So we climbed down the giant hill and proceeded to fish a good riffle in the river. I had 2 good hook-sets and broke off 2 good trout, my hook-set was a little over the top and I kept breaking them off, I guess I was just pumped....I needed to lighten up a bit on that Bill Dance hook-set there, I finally caught my first trout of the day. It was a nice sized brown trout that pulled like a bulldozer.

We caught a few more trout out of that hole and proceeded to move up the South Holston River to a better fishing hole. Being as it was a Wednesday we thought no one would be on this secluded section of the river....WRONG...there were 6 other fly fisherman on this stretch of the South Holston River and they all were converged on the good fishing hole. So we proceeded further up stream to fly fish. We went about a hundred yards up further on the South Holston River and got into some good dry fly fishing. This is where I caught some bigger trout. These trout were good sized and unfortunately several broke off after a few minutes of fighting. What fun it was though. We finally landed a nice sized one and then here came all the fly fisherman from the other hole trying to swoop down on this South Holston River honey hole after they saw how good it was fishing. We decided to fish another area of the South Holston River to loose the crowd of fly fisherman. We fly fished several more spots till about 7PM and with the sun going down and me having to drive 3 hours back to the house, I decided it was time to pack it up. I had a blast fly fishing the South Holston River and it's many trout and will be back again soon.