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Motorcycle Trip Update - South Holston River Fly....
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By:
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bigfish44
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Mood:
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Other
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Date:
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Jul 02, 2009
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Music:
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None
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I have been out on the road for my cross country motorcycle trip for over a week now and it's been great. I set out from Texas and battled 100 degree heat each day for the first few days until I hit the coast. I camped at the beach at Edisto Beach State Park and had a blast swimming in the ocean.
From there I headed up into the Appalachian Mountains. I can not tell you what a relief it was to climb up out of the heat into the mountains. Near Asheville, North Carolina I got on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the early evening in order to take a more scenic route to my destination. This is a really famous route through the Appalachians that cuts through a number of different states. I would have to say that flying down this road at sunset on my motorcycle has been the highlight of the trip so far. The termperature was perfect and the scenery was breathtaking. I almost didn't want to take pictures because I didn't feel as if the pictures would do the area justice. I also saw two bears at sunset! I have spent a ton of time in the mountains and had never seen a bear. To see two in one night was amazing.
From there I headed to my hotel in Johnson City, Tennessee. This awesome guy named Travis gave me two free nights at one of the hotels he manages! And I didn't even know the guy until yesterday. We went fly fishing on the South Holston River in eastern Tennessee all day yesterday. We started out below the dam and then drove to a number of different spots downstream. The South Holston is a beautiful fishing river that holds a good population of rainbow and brown trout. The river is shallow in most areas but there are some deeper holes. We caught a lot of fish yesterday on a dry dropper setup. The fish were hitting both our top fly as well as our nymph. The fishing got slower later in the day, but we also were fishing further downstream at that point, in an area where the fish population is not as dense as below the dam. All the fish we caught were small, but there are some big ones in the river, if you can get lucky enough to hook into one. I didn't even have to use my Brodin Fishing Net - the fish were small enough that I could hand land them. This was the first fly fishing that I had done in a river east of the Mississippi so I was glad to see that my same flies and techniques still worked. The only bad part of the trip was that I ripped my old waders, but I got a nice new pair of William Joseph V2 Fly Fishing Waders so I guess it's not so bad :)
From here I am headed out to the White River in Arkansas. If anyone wants to meet up over there or has some tips for me for fishing that river let me know!
I will leave you with some words by the Eagles:
Take it easy
Take it easy
Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.
We may lose and we may win.
But we will never be here again.
So open up while climbing in.
And take it easy.
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