Toccoa Tailwater 3/7/10

After hearing predictions of truly spring-like weather for Sunday afternoon in north Georgia, I called a few friends and made plans to fish the Toccoa tailwater that afternoon. The TVA generation schedule was 7 AM until 11 AM which would give everyone a chance to go to church, eat a leisurely lunch and even hang around the fly shop a little while and tell some lies. (Oops, actually, they're more like embellishments). The tailwater hasn't been fishable much recently due to the releases at the dam but a sunny Sunday afternoon was too good to pass up. There have been some black caddis coming off so we stood a good chance of getting into some dry fly action. Well, as is usually the case, the weatherman wasn't very accurate. It was a nice day for early March but the sun never came out and the wind was blowing just enough to make it chilly. We saw a few gray caddis flying about but only a couple of rises. So deep we went. The beautiful 17" brown pictured above fell for a black micro-leech. Earlier a black woolly bugger had tangled with some kind of really big fish that never showed itself and ran almost into the backing twice before finding a rock to cut the line. Our group did catch some smaller rainbows and one with a DNR tag. Considering where we were fishing, the tagged fish must have moved either several miles downstream or several miles upstream since there were no public stocking areas nearby. The award for chunky gal of the day goes to this 17" rainbow. All in all, a great day to be on the river. Keep your ears open for reports of tailwater hatches in the coming days on the Toccoa. It should be great going forward into spring, whenever the weathermen decide to let us actually have one.