Day 5 – Fishing The Jackson River

Today’s Blog Entry

For our Friday outing Cindy and I broke out the fly gear and headed for the Jackson River near Warm Springs, Virginia (home of The Homestead resort).

We spent the morning fishing the Special Regulations section of the Jackson deep in the George Washington National Forest. These regulations restrict not only what kind of gear you use (artificial lures only) but also how many fish you can keep per day. Since Cindy and I are 100% catch-and-release that’s fine with us. As regulations go they’re actually very lenient compared to other waters that we have fished and we would prefer that they were even more restrictive to better protect the trout.

For those of you that know this stretch of river we entered from the Poor Farm Road entrance, which provides a bit more of a driving adventure than the Hidden Valley access point as much of the access was via single lane Forest Service gravel or two-track road. Hint : four wheel drive was useful in places, given the recent rains!

Alas, neither of us landed anything worthy of the highlight reel but we each had a number of fish on and Cindy did land a small brown. The fish were there but they just weren’t buying what we were selling. As they say, that’s why they call it “fishing” and not “catching”.

The water was quite clear so my most memorable moment was when I was able to watch a large brown trout swimming past my feet and then hanging in the eddy behind my legs for a few moments.

I’m sure that we’ll be back to check out these waters in the future – they must be spectacular in the fall when all of the hardwoods are changing colors. In fact we’ve already booked a campsite at Douthat State Park for late September so that we can check out the theory!

Today’s Map

Today’s Photos