The big rivers are blown out. Hurricane rain from whoever-we’re-up-to-now flooded the watershed, and it’s looking like slow mornings and lots of vise time for the coming week.
 

The weather has changed. 70s are no longer in the forecast. The mornings are crisp, and the...

If October is a month of transition, November is the month when we embrace the new season. Squirrels have been legal game for two months. The general firearms deer season will open in a week, and the duck and goose seasons will follow shortly behind. By the end of the...

The world is changing. Summer is clearly in the rearview, and you can see it leaving in the trees.

It happens to some earlier than others. The poplars, namely, start to turn and shed, covering the ground with their golden slips sometimes as early as late-August—creating...

The world is changing. The leaves are turning. Consecutive cold fronts are cooling the rivers, and the smallmouth and musky are in transition. It's farewell to summer, and welcome to fall.

The second half of the summer season was a productive and challenging one. Consis...

It took a little over two hours of four-wheel driving, over and through mountains, into National Forest and, eventually, wilderness area, to make it 12 linear miles and find the tank trap that marked the beginning of our on-foot leg. It was a long walk in, loaded down...

The river valley is clogged with fog in the dawn and early-morning hours, casting a gray light over warm, clear water that carries foamy bubbles and the occasional rings of a rise downriver. It’s remarkably quiet, save for the quiet rush of water as it tumbles over led...

We're officially in the Dog Days in southwest Virginia--the peak of summer--and good days on the river have been rolling steady. Heavy rains that were forecasted as a result of Hurricane Isaias missed our region, largely, but regular, isolated rainfall has kept our str...

It's been an interesting year in every sense of the word, and it's difficult to believe that we're already living in July--well into the smallmouth season, and it seems like we've really just been getting started. Since June 10, we've been fully back in the saddle with...

We've fallen out of the habit of publishing regular fishing reports because our guiding operations were halted for a spell during the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak, but we're hopping back on the train, right now. As you know if you subscribe to this website, we have sl...

The story I’d like to try to tell begins in the late 80s, though it doesn’t really. It really starts before that, with a wild boy in Clifton Forge, the major settings being the Jackson and Cowpasture Rivers. Or, maybe it should start even earlier, on a mid-spring day i...