If you do not see today’s Fishing Report, please refresh your browser to empty your cache.

Welcome to the Fishing Report from Townsend, Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains. At 5:35 am, the temperature outside is 54.0 degrees.

Steady rain has been falling since 1:00 am. The rainfall total in Townsend is .52 inches so far. The rain should end in about three hours. Then we will see sunny skies and a high temperature in the upper 60’s. Tomorrow and Wednesday will be mostly sunny and warm, near 70 degrees both days.

Little River is flowing at 479 cubic feet per second (cfs) or 2.60 feet on the gauge. Median flow for this date is 265 cfs. The water temperature is 52.9 degrees. The river is rising slowly.

All streams in the Smokies that have USGS gauge sites are flowing above normal and they are all rising slowly. The wet weather front is widespread over the Southern Appalachians. It is likely all streams will rise further today and some may be stained temporarily.

Lowland rivers will be affected by the rain. We will likely see those streams rise and possibly become stained.

I don’t think the streams will be blown out. Fishing may be possible today.

I would wait for a while before going fishing to see how high the rivers rise.

I checked the generation schedules at most of the dams in the area and did not see any wade fishing opportunities on the tailwaters today. The lake levels are receding on the lakes I checked.

We are sort of in a “wait and see” mode today.

We are still fairly busy at the shop. There were three of us working yesterday and I think there will be four of us there today. Mail order and curbside pickup are keeping us going.

We all appreciate you patronizing our store. We sure do miss seeing you face to face and talking to you about fishing and other discussion. Customer interaction in person is the fun part of this business for us and you.  

I am still working on the new fly tying department on the online store. That will continue for several weeks. Right now I am adding dubbing. You can see that category by CLICKING HERE. There is a lot more dubbing to be added. Photography is the time consuming part of this project.

I have two different cameras and lighting setups in the studio. One uses flash on the subject and continuous lighting on the background. The other setup uses flash on the background and continuous lighting on the subject. Keeping the background white while lighting the subject well and reducing glare on the subject is not easy to do. Sometimes I try both methods.  

We have several orders of fly tying materials arriving from our suppliers early this week. I’ll take a break from the online store construction for a couple of days to receive the new materials and tools. Then, I will re-order this coming weekend.

Customers are already buying fly tying items on the online store. The trick is going to be, keeping everything in stock. I will need to continue to order weekly and stock higher levels of the most popular items. We know what the most popular items are now, but they may change when everything is shown online.

Our business is changing and leaning more toward mail order at least for now. That is happening all over America. Right now our shipping department is set up for one person to work at a time. We plan to re-arrange and enlarge that department so two people can ship at once.

That is contrary to our original plans for this Spring. We were going to add a third cash register checkout station out in the store bringing our total computer cash registers to four. It looks like now we will have two in the store and two in the shipping department.

Have a great day and thank you for being here with us.

Byron Begley
April 20, 2020  

Respond to: byron@littleriveroutfitters.com