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Don’t let high water scare you away from trout fishing

January 26, 2009 by admin · Comments Off 

The author holds a fish caught in higher-than-usual water.

The author holds a fish caught in higher-than-usual water.

Standing shin-deep on a gravel bar that I had stood atop, bone dry, only a month earlier, I stared at the currents that whipped across the top of a normally placid pool. My hole was washed out. About that time my buddy popped through a gap in the thicket behind me and stepped out onto the gravel bar. “Mighty high today,” he said. “They should be concentrated.”
He pointed to an eddy no larger than my laptop on the far side of the river and asked whether I had hit it. I shook my head, so he snapped of a cast and placed his plug right against the bank. One crank of the rod handle, and a trout walloped my buddy’s offering. Impressed, I followed suit, and so did a trout that would turn out to be the twin of the one my friend was about to land.
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A Connecticut Yankee on a Kentucky Trout Stream

August 23, 2008 by admin · Comments Off 

Stephen Wrinn hooks into a trout during his first trip on the Cumberland River tailwater.

First published in the Kentucky Fishing Journal August 2002. This essay has also been published in Of Woods and Waters, an anthology by Ron Ellis of stories about the outdoors in Kentucky.

By Stephen Wrinn

Among the many myths that outsiders have come to believe about Kentucky is that it has no outstanding trout fishing. Despite 13,000 miles of rivers and streams, and more navigable waterways than any other state except Alaska, it is still widely believed that only bass, catfish, panfish, and the occasional musky lurk in the Commonwealth’s depths. Until very recently, I too shared this fiction.

This is the story of my enlightenment, and of the knowledge I gained after one trip to the Cumberland River. I now believe that Kentucky is home to a river that ranks as one of the best trout fisheries on the continent, period. Not just in the South, or in the midwest, or west of the Appalachians, or east of the Mississippi. Period. Below the Wolf Creek Dam, the Cumberland is a river that, in both natural beauty and trout population, rivals any I’ve encountered. And I’ve encountered more than my fair share.

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