Casting in Tight Conditions - Fly Fishing Smoky Mountains

**Good cast results in nice fish.**
This brown trout was taken in
the upper portion of the Little
River .

**Brook Trout** are easy to catch if
you can make cast under a
canopy of tree limbs and land the
fly in a small area of water
without spooking the fish.

**Side Arm Cast** made under tree
limbs work to present your fly in
tight places.

**Angie keeping her profile low** to
get close to the trout in these low
water conditions.

You will find that the Smokies may require some cast that look more like flippin for bass than fly-fishing. The majority of the 700 miles of streams are tightly enclosed in trees. An overhead canopy of limbs or limbs extending from both banks out into a stream that may be ten or fifteen feet wide, doesn’t allow the space necessary to make a 60 foot cast. There is some good that comes with this problem, however. Casing that far is almost never necessary anywhere in the Park and certainly not in the stream just described. With few exceptions, most of which are not in streams such as you have in the Smokies, making a 60 foot cast would be a stupid thing to do anyway.

Creative Casting:
Creative casting is a big key to presenting your fly in many situation. Most of your cast should be between 15 to 20 feet. In certain streams in certain situations, you may need to make a 30 or 40 foot cast. Anything beyond that, in the smokies, would be a stupid cast.
Almost everything taught in fly casting has to do with straighting your line and leader out. After all, you can’t make a very long cast if you don’t straighten the line out. When you straighten your line and it lands in moving water, you get INSTANT DRAG.

**This is a medium size stream for the park** that is on the borderline for being a large stream. As you can see, there is no way anyone could cast from the banks and if they were wading down the center of the stream, making a cast without hanging one of the overhanging limbs would not be easy. Casting underneath the overhanging limbs where some of the trout would probably be, especially the brown trout, is yet another thing.

Messed Up Cast:
Most of the cast you make trout fishing, especially in small streams, are messed up cast so to speak. They are cast that do not completely straighten the line. Pile, curve, cast are necessary. We don’t intend to teach casting on this website but we will touch on some of the types of cast you need to learn to make in order to fish the small streams in the smokies effectively.

Roll Cast (to catch Smoky Mountains trout):
The roll cast is a relatively simple cast needed when obstacles are behind you or you just need to straighten out your line to make a different kind of cast. It’s really just picking the line up off the water with the rod tip and “rolling” in forward. These cast are easy to make.