Fishing in Citio Creek, TN

I fished Citico Creek in October of 2011.  This is a section of the main Citico stream along the road that I fished that day.  I had great success fishing these chutes.  Most of them are pretty deep and they seem to hold some pretty nice fish.  There was one large Trout that I hooked a couple of times, but I just couldn't land him.  He would hit the fly, spit it out, then go back to his holding place.  He started ignoring my fly after he hit it the second time.
 

From there I drove on up the road and parked in the camping area at the end of Citico Road.  From there I hiked in and started fishing just past where the North Fork and the South Fork come together to form Citico Creek and fished my way up the stream to around the first big stream crossing.  I didn't go past there.  The water was high, it was cold, and I didn't want to get wet.  Below is a video of a typical section of stream.

The stream is mostly pocket water with lots of plunge pools.  There are also a lot of huge boulders, overhanging branches, logs, stumps, leaves, etc... to fish around.  I got hung up more than once, but I could usually get to it and retrieve my flies.  Most of the time the stream is about 10 - 12ft wide, but at some points it becomes very narrow flowing through chutes between boulders or against the walls of the valley.  The rocks were also pretty slick where ever they were wet. 

This is a video of a rainbow that I pick up out of a pool.  It is pretty typical of the Trout that I caught that day.  He was holding at the far end of the pool where it tails out into the stream and he smashed my fly when he hit it and then ran to the deep part of the pool.  It took me a few minutes to land him.  I had to be careful to not break my tippet.  He was one of the better fighting fish that I caught that day.

Overall, the fishing wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either.  I think it was because the water was a little high due to some rain the day before.  There was some color in the water at times, an I guess there was plenty of food being washed through the stream.  I did catch enough fish, all rainbows, to want to go back to the South Fork of the Citico again.  I used mostly top water flies, but I did have some success with nymphs at times.

 I camped that night on the North Fork.  What happened that night is a story for another day.

The next day I moved back down to the camp site at the end of Citico Creek and met up with some friends.  We set up a camp there and gathered a lot of firewood.  They put up their huge tent and blew up their air mattresses.  After that, we did a little fishing around the camping area, without much success, and afterwards I did a little cooking in the Dutch Oven.  I made a nice beef stew that fed the three of us very well that night.

The hole for the Dutch Oven

 

Beef Stew in the Dutch Oven

We spent the evening sitting around the camp fire, talking, and enjoying nature.  I slept next to the fire on my sleeping mat, in my sleeping bag, and used my tarp as a ground cloth and bivy to provide an additional layer of insulation.  It was fantastic.  Even though it was pretty cold, I would say it was in the teens, I was toasty warm in my bag.
 
The next morning we got up, made breakfast, packed our gear, and moved on down the mountain to home.