#28-North Carolina Part 1: Serve Chilled

After spending some time at home for the holidays, we set out for North Carolina in early February. This is a significant state for me, as it was while fishing on coastal North Carolina last summer that I decided to embark on this adventure.

We started in Boone, where we fished Goshen creek at the recommendation of a local fly shop, targeting Brook Trout. It was hard going, with lots of snowfall and barely any fishable water due to the ice. We fished there all day, spending most of our time hiking in search of water we could actually fish in without having to break through several inches of ice and spooking the very skittish trout. In the last pool of the day, Dan managed to reel in a nice little brook trout. But I had no luck.

We decided to try going further south, as that fish was the only one we saw all day, and the pool we caught him in was really the only fishable spot we found on the creek.

Over the next few days, we bounced around, fishing near Asheville, in the Pisgah National forest, and plenty of other creeks in the mountains of western North Carolina.

We barely even saw a fish the entire time, with snow and ice clogging up the streams much worse than we had thought they would.

Since North Carolina was close to home, and on our route to Clemson in the fall, we decided to move on and come back in the summer and catch my brook trout. We thought it would be a simple matter in warm weather, as the mountain streams of North Carolina have phenomenal brook trout fishing, when they aren’t frozen.

We were wrong.