River Report 02/18/23

High Water is here, Folks. The James River and the New River have suffered the most. We had to reschedule a lot of our trips from this past week. however, as the water drops the musky fishing on both rivers will be good leading up to their spawn. if we were to guess, we’d say they’ll likely go into spawn right around the second week of march due to the increasing temperatures.

this will lead into some good smallmouth bass fishing on both the James and new river. we’ve seen some more activity out of the smallmouth recently, and they’ll be eating streamer patterns with some regularity come mid-march at this rate.

the smith river has been higher because of the recent rain, but as it drops we’d expect the streamer fishing will be game on, and we’re creeping up on bug season. brown trout will be eating dry flies on top with some regularity here soon!

The Jackson river has some color, but continues to discharge fairly low. spring is right around the corner so the bug fishing will be great here soon! we still recommend using finesse nymph presentations on the Jackson for now, hopefully they’ll increase the flows sometime in the next ten years…