Dry River -- It's fishing not catching

Conor at a fishable section

Conor and I set out Dec 27th for a mid-day excursion to Dry River with high hopes.  The weather was clear and the temps were forecast to rise into the early 40s.  We left at 0800 and after coffee along the way started paralleling Dry River at Rawley Springs at 1030.  I immediately noticed that the Dry was running significantly higher than I had seen it before, swelling its banks when in the past it had run in the center of its rock strewn channel. The next thing I noticed once the road straightened was  hunters in all the pullouts.  In my normal parking spot there were 6 pickups! I drove to the turnoff for Skidmore Fork then headed back to find a parking spot on

pretty ice formations is about all we found

the river side of the road. We geared up with 2 and 3wt rods and marched into the big pool just upstream of the footbridge without seeing any hunters :-)  While the river was not blown out, it was flowing at max load substantially changing the nature of the river.
The big pool was fishable as it can disperse a large volume, but when we didn't have any strikes and headed upstream the channelized flow (white water) became unfishable.  As we hadn't had any rain to speak of the best I can tell is

Conor at the big pool where we started

that the powers that be must have been lowering the reservoir increasing the tailwater flow in anticipation of rain in the next few days. We scouted around for a few fishable pools and made sure we didn't take a dip into the icy water for another 30-minutes then decided that we'd find some lunch in Harrisonburg and live to fish another day.