The Tar Heel Outdoorsman

It was fall in the foothills.  It was dry and clear and the sweet-cool of the morning refreshed you.  Cool, but not cold.  A good fall day.   I'd loaded up the canoe from the coast and headed west to the in-laws' place, on the banks of the Yadkin River, outside of Winston-Salem.   There's something about a smallmouth bass on a fly rod.  Maybe it's the strength of the fish, the strength of their pull against the current.  Or maybe it's because they're the fish that really taught me about fly fishing.  My original fly fishing quarry.  In all honesty, smallmouth caught me, not the other way around, back on the banks of Rapidan River in Virginia.  I've been hooked ever since.   I met a man once, while trout fishing in the mountains, who claimed the Yadkin held the best smallie fishing in North Carolina.  Better than the New River, even the French Broad.  Maybe not in numbers, but in size.  I'll be honest, I...

          The section of the Rapidan River that runs along Woodberry Forest School's rural Virginia campus is a special place.  A place that brings me back to simpler times.  When you could run down to the river after class or after sports on Tuesdays or Fridays or Saturdays or before chapel on Sunday, and you could catch all the smallies and bream you'd want on a simple popping bug fly.  You'd find some surprisingly nice smallmouth in there, on occasion, especially considering the size of the river.                      Woodberry was the place where I really fell in love with casting a fly rod.  For my birthday my tenth grade year, my first year up there, my dad got me a casting lesson with someone at the Orvis store in Richmond, and got me my first decent fly rod.  The feeling of casting, of feeling the bend in the rod propel line through the air, stuck with me....