HOOK: #8-14 2X-long, heavy-wire streamer. WEIGHT: .010” lead-free wire. THREAD: Black 6/0 Uni-Thread. HACKLE: Yellow-dyed grizzly hen hackle or lemon wood duck. BODY: Palmered peacock herl. NOTE: The Yallerhammer is a classic Smokies pattern with myriad variations. The fly draws its name from the yellow-shafted woodpecker--in mountain parlance, those “yaller birds that hammered on the trees all day.” Now protected, the yellow-shafted woodpecker provided the original hackle material, which was noted for webbiness and pliability--select modern replacements accordingly. Locals fished these flies wet on the swing; nowadays they’re usually used in tandem with large stonefly nymphs like Bitch Creeks (droppers are legal in Great Smoky Mountains National Park).
Small Stream Tactics My education in catching Smokies brook trout came, as the best experiences usually do, from happenstance. I had started fishing down Road Prong, a newly opened brookie stream on the slopes of Clingman’s Dome, when I encountered an angler named Hans who was fishing his way back upstream. Hans, of Scandinavian origin, explained to me why I hadn’t caught a trout on my way down. “The fish here, they are spooky, yes? You have to do all those things you laugh at when you read them in magazines to catch them, okay?” He gestured to the tilesetter’s knee pads he was wearing. “Stay low, ya? Take one of these.” He handed me an oversized yellow Stimulator that could have been used in a Western Salmonfly hatch.
“The brookies, they don’t care about the size at all, only the drag. You have to be able to see your fly to keep it clear.” Hans and I then worked our way back up the mountain. He would approach a pool on his knees, squeezing the water out of his fly in pinched fingers, then with “no false casting, no!” he would lay the fly right behind a rock, hovering it for a brief moment with the tip of his rod so it didn’t shoot out from the lie. He managed to score more than a dozen fish in the half mile of water I had just sloshed through. As I gratefully gave him a lift back down the mountain, Hans expanded on his fishing technique: “I look for the high streams, and I fish them tight. No false casts; it spooks them. They are 30 years without people, yes, but still they are spooky. You have to stay low, dry the fly, make sure not to drag. Do that, and you can’t stop catching fish.”
Zach Matthews is a freelance writer and the editor of The Itinerant Angler, www.itinerantangler.com. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. This article originally appeared in the May 2007 issue of Fly Fisherman.
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