Moormans Fly Fishing

Since Cam decided to take a little time away from studying (we have mid-terms approaching) I guess I can take a break to introduce myself.  My name is Richie, and I'm a pisces... just kidding.  I started going on fishing trips with my dad when I was five years old.  At first I probably played with rocks in the river, but eventually I graduated to slowly learning the intricacies of fly fishing the mountain streams of the Shenendoah National Park.  After that baptism by fire, I have been able to hold my own with the brookies and smallmouth in Virginia, the redfish in the coastal brackish waters of Louisiana, and the big water and big sky browns of Montana.  My fairly long fishing career has been off-and-on, however, so I still have plenty to learn and I am not too proud to ask Cameron (or anyone for that matter) for a hand.  Through this blog and the VMFF, I hope that we can provide a resource to compare notes, answer questions, and learn more ourselves about the art of fly fishing.

On that note, I'll share a little bit of my experience with the waters near Charlottesville.  Yesterday, Cameron and I fished the Moorman River, an easily accessible nearby trout stream.  It is only about a 25 minute drive from Charlottesville to the reservoir at Sugar Hollow and the "headwaters" of the Moorman, if you can call a concrete dam headwaters.  The Moorman is stocked throughout the year with rainbow trout, and you need a pass (available at Albemarle Angler) to fish there.  So far, the experience has been fairly positive.  

At the moment there are hundreds of fish mostly concentrated in the deeper pools.  They seem a little sluggish and maybe even disoriented right now, probably because they were just stocked last week.  We were most successful with egg patterns (yes, we did stoop that low) and copper/gold kreelex.  Correction, Cameron had luck with eggs and kreelex, I only caught one fish (you can see it above) on a kreelex.  

These rainbows learn pretty quickly what is food and what is not.  Eggs caught fish initially, but the fish soon ceased to even look as our eggs drifted down right in front of their noses.  Once we switched to kreelex we caught a few more fish and generated a lot more strikes.  We had the best luck on slow retrievals with small jerks on the line to give the fly some life.  The only real downside to fishing the Moorman is that you will find plenty of other fishers there on weekends, so try to make it out mid week if possible.  Oh yeah, and the $45 fee for the pass to fish there hurts the wallet of a med student on loans, but hey, if you live in Cville it makes sense to have access to such a close, fun fishery.