A Bad Day of Fishing Beats a Good Day of a Lot of Other Things
Last weekend, I returned to a river for the first time in far too long. Kris and I left around midday on Thursday to make the drive up McCaysville, GA, and Fighting Town Creek, where we had rented a cabin. We arrived to late to really get any fishing in once we had unpacked and made an unplanned trip into the town (but more on that for a minute).
The cabin was of a mini “compound” of three rentals, not there were walls or anything. We found it at the end of a long, occasionally steep, washed out dirt road. I’m super glad we took the wife’s crossover rather than my Alfa, which certainly would have drug and scraped in multiple places along that road.
Once we had arrived and unpacked, we realized that I had forgotten my computer back, which was mainly mean to ferry my notebooks and our chargers up for the weekend. Since writing was the other main goal of the weekend (for me at least), I needed a notebook and pencil at the very least. Then we discovered that there was absolutely nothing in the kitchen. Usually, you can count on a few essentials or leftovers from previous tenants (and I had forgotten an ingredient for my jambalaya as well. So off to McCaysville and Copper Hill, TN, we returned. We found the remaining larder options we required at the IGA and chargers and writing implements at the Family Dollar. Typical of small towns pretty much.
We just decided to grab a bite in town so we could settle in and enjoy the evening in front of the river or in the hot tub (we won’t mention the hanger or dryrate), so we popped into a restaurant right on the river, The Twisted Tomato, a pizza place since the pies looked good when we walked by. Well the pizza was pretty good, but we were a little freaked out because not a soul it seemed (in the entire town except for the cashiers at the IGA and Dollar Store) were wearing masks. And get this, the place had an honest to God salad bar in the midst of a pandemic. The salad fixings looked OK from a distance but, uh, no. The pizza itself was good—especially the toppings—but it could have used about 75 seconds to two minutes in the oven. I’d eat it again, because our seat next to the river (the Toccoa in this case because the Ocoee is formed by the confluence of the Toccoa and Fightingtown Creek about a mile away.
So with my new composition notebook in hand, we returned to the cabin where Kris set up shop to just relax and I prepared a desk in the upstairs bedroom overlooking the river and wrote for a few hours (expect to see some of what I was working on soon).
The next morning, it was up early, breakfast (bacon, eggs, and grits) and then to the river for some fishing once I had geared up. I had noticed it the evening before, but the water was a little up due to recent rainfall, which pretty much confined me to one side of the stream, as the middle course was deeper than I wanted to deal with (and may have actually been head high). So, I patrolled the near banks, getting lines into some really good looking chutes along the way.
Fightingtown Creek is an excellent looking trout stream. It’s as lovely as it is conducive to at least rainbows and brookies. I fished, without much success for a couple of hours, sticking to nymphs as I hadn’t seen any flies rise, which is pretty typical of GA trout fishing all the way around. I started with an olive hare’s ear, one of my favorite flies, but didn’t have any luck with that, or the black hare’s ear, so I switched to an attractor nymph. About 10 casts in, I caught a branch as I was just beginning my forward cast. It didn’t snag in the tree, thankfully, but sort of wrapped around itself, so I pulled everything in best I could to try to untangle things. Well, the butt end of my rod was pointing one way, my wading staff was pointing the other, and I was trying to untie a proto-knot at the thin end of the rod, when I lost my balance a bit. From there the current took over and gave me a mini dunk in some waist deep water. Did I mention the water was up and the current was stiff. Once I had crawled on my knees out of the river (my hands were full managing everything else so I couldn’t get purchase on a rock to stand), I stripped down to some wet clothes, warmed up a bit, and decided that was good for a morning session.
After lunch and some time just hanging about the cabin on the deck enjoying the sun, I did a bit more bank fishing in the afternoon, but it really wasn’t be best time of day for trout anyway, but I heard the water, and that was enough. We grilled a dang tasty steak and repaired for the evening, pretty much the same as the evening before. (Yes I left the asparagus steaming just a bit too long).
The next morning, despite my better intentions, I slept in. And you know what, I’m fine with that too! Once we’d had some lunch a hung out in the sun on the deck, we decided it was time for a bit of an adventure since some clouds were moving in. First we stopped in town again to stimulate the local economy by choice rather than circumstance. I mean, c’mon, they had two separate outfitters in town that I had to check out. (New t-shirt, check. Some local fishing related stickers, check. Magnifying glasses to be able to see the tippet and hook’s eye a little better, check).
Then we decided to explore TN a little since we found ourselves on that side of the river. So we drove up to Ducktown about 20 miles away since one of Kris’s patients had a house or cabin there at some point. Once there, we discovered the Burra Burra Cooper mine museum or attraction, which was all pretty cool.
On our way out of Ducktown, we had to choose between checking out Cleveland, TN, or Murphy, NC. We opted for the latter as it was a bit closer and put Kris’s car through it’s paces on the way over (four-lane road through mountains built for speed). Arriving in Murphy, we just sort of drove around. There were some nice looking cafes and the like, but Kris had just grabbed a snack, so we passed. It’s a pretty little town. YOu can tells these small towns from the ones only 100 miles south into GA pretty easily, since we didn’t observe a courthouse square in any of them.
One the way back to we stopped at the Hiawassee damn to check that out. The dam itself couldn’t really be seen, but there was some great people watching of the folks having cookouts and fishing the lake in the park. About halfway back to McCaysville and our weekend home,. we saw a black bear run across the road, and he or she was booking it, so I couldn’t get my phone out in time for a picture.
Then back to the cabin. Some more bank fishing. Some hot-tubbing. So writing. And about 30 minutes of TV (for me anyway, which was all I watched the entire weekend—it was super nice not watching and I would have not done it had the sun been out and I hadn’t been just having some snacks a couple of hours after jambalaya for dinner. Funny, how we came back around to they right?
I’ve included a bunch of pictures below to help you get a sense of the adventure.
Finally, we headed back to Atlanta Sunday morning after a very relaxing weekend, all things told. One the way through Blue Ridge, we stopped at Mercier’s Orchard because I wanted a fried apple pie, and that was very tasty (it didn’t make it out of the parking lot), and some snacks.
