I finally got out to do my first smallmouth bass fly fishing trip of the year on the Holston River in TN. I took my son on this fly fishing trip, and he was excited to go. I geared him up with a spinning rod because he has yet to master long fly rod casts, so I figured this would work better for him and keep fly hooks out of my body parts from him trying to cast from the boat. We headed out about 8AM and ate breakfast and drank some much needed coffee before we hit the Holston River for some fly fishing smallmouth bass action.
Arriving at the boat ramp, we noticed the water looked good and the weather was nice and overcast. Perfect weather for some Holston River smallmouth fly fishing. We rigged up the fly rods and a spining rod for my boy and put the boat in and rowed across the Holston river. We told my boy what to look for as far as structure in the Holston river and cast there. It wasn't 10 minutes after putting in the boat, and my son landed a hog of a Holston river smallmouth.
I knew after seeing my son catch that Holston river smallmouth bass, and me already breaking off 2 big pigs....this was going to be a good day for smallmouth bass fishing on the Holston river. We drifted on down about a hundred yards to the first riffle, and I caught a good sized smallmouth bass on a woolly bugger. These smallmouth bass were the biggest I have ever caught. They fought like crazy and were tough to bring in some times, even on 2X tippet. The bites was good early on in the morning, and the bigger fish kind of slacked off around 1PM. So we casted the fly rods at the river banks with yellow poppers and caught a bunch of smaller smallmouth bass on yellow poppers. We would fish holes that were really productive and see 2-3 smallmouth bass chasing the caught fish trying to get the fly out of it's mouth and eat it. I would have my son throw right on top after hooking up to see if we could put 2 smallmouth bass at the same time.
We floated from 10:30 till 6PM and put 43 fish in the boat between us. The fishing was on fire. There is nothing like Holston River smallmouth bass fishing on the fly rod to get you adrenaline going on a good summer day.