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Recently my brother and I spent 4 days trout fishing in Tennessee. From throwing streamers for big brown trout, to nymphing up some awesome rainbow trout, and even exploring a small secluded stream, we got to experience what winter the mountains of Tennessee had to offer.
When I talked to our guide Joe, who I was with this past December when I landed an incredible 25 inch brown trout, I explained how tough our winter had been thus far. Andrew and I had 3 days of fishing with Joe and although I wanted to catch a big brown trout and throw around some streamers, I was more so looking just to catch fish on day 1. So we grabbed the nymph rods and decided to see what kind of numbers we could put up. If you like to watch bobber downs, then day one is the day for you.
As we moved down the river catching fish, we eventually came to a deep drop-off and anchored up. We then proceeded to fish for about 30 minutes and caught so many fish we lost count, which was a welcome change of pace for two anglers who hadn’t caught much in 2025.
Essentially this continued on for a while, as Andrew and I continued to catch fish after fish after fish. Sometimes the trout fishing seems easy and this was one of those instances. I was just glad we were able to accomplish our goal for day 1 which was just to get on a bunch of fish. After catching so many fish Andrew and I decided that we wanted to throw big streamers, one of our favorite things to do, in an attempt to find a slightly larger trout. Which brings us to day 2
So yeah, as Andrew eluded to the weather man didn’t get it quite right with the weather. But we did still decide to throw streamers since we had already pu numbers on the board on day 1. And it didn’t take long for the river to show us the quality of fish it holds.
The thing about streamer fishing is that it’s not a numbers game. So in my opinion just purely moving fish, especially big fish, is enough to make me want to throw streamers all day long. We did stop briefly for lunch and I nymphed up a rainbow trout just to not get skunked, but then I quickly grabbed the streamer rod and continued chucking and ducking, praying for the moment when a brown trout would finally engulf my streamer.
After finally catching what I was after, a solid very pretty and solid brown trout, we stopped briefly to nymph a run our guide Joe said could have a larger fish in.
Andrew got on the board with a rainbow trout, something we weren’t necessarily expecting, but nobody was complaining. We then went back to throwing streamers, and unfortunately I wasn’t recording for the next fish catch
My day of streamer fishing ended with 2 decent brown trout in the net, both of which were caught in the afternoon. Andrew wasn’t so lucky, but we did get one quick chance at the end of the day.
After that the day was over, and to be honest I was happy with the fishing. I got to see at least one really large brown trout and was lucky enough to have caught a few good ones. In fact we were so happy with the amount of movement we had on streamers that we decided we might as well try and recreate that for day 3 of fishing, with a hybrid of nymphing and streamer fishing depending on cloud cover.
That’s right, Andrew ended the day similarly to how he ended his second day on the river, by breaking off another good brown trout on the streamer. Granted he couldn’t see the last one that hit, but we’ll just assume it was pushing 30 to make things more interesting. After fishing hard for 3 days, 2 of which we mostly threw streamers, we were exhausted. But we still had a half day to explore before Andrew caught his flight back to Colorado, so we blue lined a creek using trout routes and went on an adventure.
And move on we did but we ended up running into other anglers and essentially used the last hour of fishing that we had driving around and exploring the area. It was fun looking new water for a few hours on our last day in Tennessee though and I’d say overall this trip went perfectly. Winter fishing is tough just about anywhere in the world and to be able to put up that many numbers of fish in the net and get chances at some pretty big ones along the way is difficult at best. I’d like to once again give a huge shout out to Joe for guiding us for a few days, he’s super knowledgable and if you need a guide hit him up, his info is in the description. I’m sure I’ll be back to TN before too long because I still haven’t quite found what I’m after. As always, thanks for watching.
