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Welcome to the Fishing Report from Townsend, Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains. At 4:38 am, the temperature is 45.1 degrees.
Little River Road is still closed due to snow, ice and possibly downed trees according to the Park’s Roads Twitter page. Other roads are open in the Park, including Newfound Gap Road, Laurel Creek Road and the Cades Cove Loop Road. CLICK HERE for updates.
It is much warmer than was predicted yesterday morning and 45 degrees will be today’s high temperature. Expect a cold night in the low 20’s. It will be sunny tomorrow with a high in the upper 30’s and a low around 20 degrees.
Little River is flowing at 253 cubic feet per second (cfs) or 2.17 feet on the gauge. Median flow for this date is 327 cfs. The water temperature is 39.7 degrees.
All streams in the Smokies that have USGS gauge sites are flowing at or below normal. The water is cold at all elevations causing fishing to be slow in the mountains.
Fishing is slow in the lowland rivers that flow out of the mountains and through the valleys, due to cold water conditions.
TVA will be generating all day at most dams in East Tennessee. There are breaks in the generation schedules at South Holston and Watauga dams today. Visit the TVA website from the links below to see if you can find more tailwater fishing options today.
For those of you who live in middle Tennessee, TVA or the Corps will be generating all day at Center Hill and Tims Ford dams.
I lived in Nashville before moving to Townsend 30 years ago. The Center Hill Dam and Tims Ford Dam tailwaters were my closest trout fishing haunts. The Caney Fork River, below Center Hill was where I did most of my fly fishing for trout that did not require a long drive. I loved fishing the Caney and knew the river well, including some less used access points. Back then, not many people fished way below the dam like my friends and I did. We learned where those access points were over time. One of my fishing buddies was Jim Mauries, who owns Fly South Fly Shop in Nashville. I learned a lot about fly fishing from Jim.
One day some friends and I decided to park along Interstate 40 at a bridge crossing the river for a day of fishing where we had never fished before. We were excited. I was driving, and pulled off the road, we got out, pulled on our waders, and quickly prepared for the accent down to the river.
A Tennessee State Trooper pulled off the Interstate behind us. He told us we could not park there to go fishing. We knew that. We just hoped we wouldn’t get caught. He was a nice guy, and maybe a fly fisherman himself. He told us to drive to the next exit, then how to take the back roads to where we intended to fish. His directions worked. We found a new access to the Caney.
It was not long after that, in 1982, I saw Little River in the Smokies for the first time. We were here to attend the World Fair in Knoxville. It was a life changing time for me. Little River was the most beautiful river I had seen, while driving along the road in the Park from Townsend to Gatlinburg. I started fly fishing in the Smokies often. Less than ten years later, I moved to Townsend, a move I will never regret.
Have a great day and thank you for being here with us.
Byron Begley
January 25, 2022
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Respond to: byron@littleriveroutfitters.com
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