From Ellis Ward

I am a full time, year round fishing guide in East Tennessee, based out of Johnson City. I also design and tie flies from midges to musky, process a thousand or so bucktails every season, teach at East Tennessee State University, and raise my daughter.

I found fly fishing somewhat by happenstance. A famous tailwater was sort of close to where my friends and I were meeting before a rafting trip. One friend, and also my step brother, took me fishing for a few hours. I didn't catch (or see) anything, we broke a borrowed reel, got hailed on and thunderstormed out, and I was borderline hypothermic for the duration of our stumbling. I was head over heels in love with whatever it was we just did. Living outside of Washington, DC at the time, I started fishing for smallies and stripers in the Potomac watershed. In the summers, when I spent a few weeks in northern Michigan, my rapala chucking for smallmouth slowly morphed into a combination of nearby trout streams, smallmouth fishing, and hunting the pike and musky in that lake with big flies. I still love chucking rapalas for smallmouth.

 

I fell in love with fishing because of everything surrounding the sport - the scenery, the drives, the solitude, the heart wrenching line snaps, knee shaking personal bests or firsts. I don't believe that guided trout trips should focus simply on catching as many trout as possible and hoping that one that week is big enough to put on social media. Watching an indicator float and wishing for a fish to eat your fly is about as exciting as practicing long division.

Learning to cast, understanding what you are doing with the rod, the line, the fly, and watching a fish either decide to eat your dry fly presentation, or manifest from below and straighten your fly line as it tries to tear a streamer in half - those are the moments that I want to share. That inherently means that what I do isn't for everyone, but I do know it's for a lot of people.

 

I have dedicated years to understanding these rivers and the predator fish in them in order to provide a guided fishing experience that is truly unique. Our time on trout floats is spent fishing streamers while moving, and fishing dry flies in certain areas or when we see rising fish. We fish that way because, to me and anyone I have met, it is without question the most engaging, exciting, and rewarding way to approach a trout stream. That approach - streamers and dry flies - brings with it, or benefits from, a universal understanding of fish behavior. The techniques used with a fly rod, along with the subtleties within a presentation of would be prey, translate to nearly every type of fishing and fishery: inshore flats fishing for reds, musky fishing, smallmouth floats, blue line brook trout, off shore cobia, and most importantly, to the streams that many anglers will have access to on foot after leaving my boat.