JEKYLL AND HYDE

By Jeff Durniak, Unicoi Outfitters

Stream trout are just innocent victims of their March landlords (really riverlords). Our favorite flowage has a split personality. Mr. Hyde shows up as winter hangs around; the river is cloudy, cold, and catching frequent, icy rains or snow squalls. Hyde bullies past us with a bad attitude: raging, discolored, and cold, often under fifty degrees and sometimes flirting with that bonechilling forty-degree mark. It’s inhospitable for both trout and trouters.

In contrast, spring occasionally knocks on the river’s front door and guess who warmly welcomes us? Yep, the mellow Dr. Jekyll. Ole Doc flows past us clearly, leisurely, and warmly, with water temperatures nudging up toward that magic fiftydegree mark. We pray for that early indication of spring.

Smart March trouters will bring two games to the neighborhood before they knock on the condo door. If Hyde is home, we employ our deep dredging game with big, dark bugs. We’ll lead with a #8 brown Pat’s rubberlegs and drop a meaty nymph off the back. Aquatic macroinvertebrates (stream bugs) are all grown up by March and are ready to hatch in the next month or two. Bigger nymphs like size 12-14 hares ears, pheasant tails, Walt’s worms, and caddis larva match those stream bugs and can be spotted easily by trout in heavier flows. We also focus on pools and deep runs, those coveted flood refuges for our submerged targets.

If the snow leaves for the season and the sun shines, Dr.Jekyll may answer our knock. Then we’re on the lookout for hatching bugs on warm afternoons when waters flirt with fifty degrees. We’ll often throw a search rig of a big, fluffy dry and that meaty dropper (listed above) about 3-4 feet below it. If the dropper isn’t getting down, we’ll even add a small (#6 or 8) tin shot about six inches above it. March’s bug colors are as drab as the weather and foliage (brown and gray), so our favorite dries are #12-14 quill Gor- dons, parachute Adams (try them with a dun-colored post!), and gray elk hair caddis. Be on the lookout for smaller (#18) blue quill mayflies, too. We’ll toss those dry/dropper rigs into the heads of pools, right below Rabunite “bug factories” (long, cobbled riffles), while occasionally scanning the surface for hatching bugs and telltale rings of rising fish.

Trek north to your favorite March trouting address. Size up that front door as you take a water temperature. If Hyde intimidates you, fend him off with a bobber and big shot and toss your winter dredging rig. But if Jekyll greets you with warm, open arms, reacquaint yourself with your dry/dropper rig and celebrate your spring homecoming. Enjoy the fact that it only gets better from here, as April and May’s topwater thrills are right around the corner! Stop in either UO store in Helen or Clarkesville and we can outfit you for your spring adventures.

When visitors head toward Blue Ridge, Georgia, bright signs located at major highway entry points are adorned with a colorful rainbow trout and proclaim Fannin County as “the Trout Capital of Georgia.”

Fannin County was named the Trout Capital of Georgia by official resolution in 2010 by the state legislature. Speaker David Ralston led the effort, following his heritage in the north Georgia mountains where dozens of the region’s best trout streams provide hundreds of miles of trout fishing access on both public and private property in Fannin County.

At the forefront of local troutfishing opportunities, the Toccoa River stands apart from all other local trout waters. The river forms the spine of the Fannin County trout fishery, collecting cold-water tributaries that flow north off a “triple point” in north Georgia, where the Eastern Continental Divide joins the Tennessee Valley Divide. At that point, the Toccoa heads up in adjacent Union County before crossing the whole of Fannin County, east to west, and leaving the state at McCaysville-Copperhill on the Georgia-Tennessee state line. There, the river name changes, and the Ocoee River continues north and westward where it is among the nation’s most-popular whitewater rafting rivers.

The Toccoa and several of its headwater tributaries stand high on the list of waters stocked with trout by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources/Wildlife Division. In cooperation with the US Fish & Wildlife Service/ Chattahoochee National Forest Fish Hatchery (located on Rock Creek Road in southeast Fannin County), the agencies in 2023 will stock more than 1 million trout in Georgia’s trout waters.

John Lee Thompson, GDNR trout stocking coordinator, confirms the Toccoa River will receive nearly 68,000 “catchable” trout (10 inches or longer) this stocking season, in addition to the 7,000 trout stocked in the delayed-harvest section of the river between Nov. 1, 2022, and early May. Thompson says the stockings overall will round out at about 70 percent rainbow trout and 30 percent brown trout placed in the Toccoa River.

“The lower Toccoa is scheduled to receive 38,000 catchable (10inch) trout and 500 ‘big fish’ (12-inch) this year,” Thompson says. “We have strived in the past to have at least 30 percent be brown trout.” Brook trout won’t be among those fish, however. Thompson says “brookies” don’t do great in tailwater fisheries.

The upper Toccoa is scheduled to receives 29,000 “catchable” trout and “400 big fish,” Thompson says, “dominantly rainbows …” and the hatchery on Rock Creek is expected to have a low number of brook trout available to stock in the river and at its fishing events on hatchery grounds.

Stocked trout make up the bulk of catches made on the lower and upper Toccoa, but the recent showing of small, 4-inch brown trout may have led some anglers to believe the river is producing wild trout. Certainly, the upper river (and especially its tributaries) holds a combined population of wild, stream-bred rainbows, browns and brookies, but the lower river/tailwater is not recognized as wild-trout water.

“We do not consider the Toccoa tailwater a wild trout fishery. We have confirmed spawning activity,” Thompson explains, “but the recruitment, or the ability for these trout year-classes to persist, is not at the level needed to sustain a wild-trout population.”

Local fishing guides and anglers say, however, that trout redds – spawning sites – have been observed in the Toccoa tailwater during the fall of 2021 and 2022. In fact, GDNR reports approximately 2,800 of Georgia’s 5,400 miles of trout streams support wild-trout populations where trout reproduce. Brown trout spawn in the fall months when water temperatures drop back into the 50s, and local fishing guides believe those tailwater redds likely belong to spawning brown trout.

Thompson says those small brown trout reported in the tailwater in early February are among some 50,000, 4-inch brown trout stocked that month in the lower Toccoa at Tammen Park and Curtis Switch sites. Those were joined by 20,000 small rainbow trout.

“The ones that survive will mimic a wild trout population,” Thomp-