James River Recon

The water hasn't stopped coming down in the Mid-Atlantic for two months so when I found a bathtub in the River Level on the James river Fritz, Jacob, Paul and I jumped at it.

  The James is the major river draining central Virginia.   Its formed when two magnificent trout waters join, the Jackson and the Cowpasture in Far Western Virginia and runs its course ESE cleaving the Shenandoah Ridge-line before flattening and making its run to the ocean.   On its southern banks, the English  settled Jamestown and Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. 

 Our Crew was relatively new to the James, Fritz and Paul had each fished a couple sections before and we decided on a popular whitewater stretch as our destination between Glascow where the Maury flowing from Lexington to Snowden, VA 5 miles downstream.   The river's white water features were named and the fishing was supposed to be superb.

After 3 hour drives from NOVA and pretty fair chow at the Pink Cadillac Diner. We bunked down at a local hotel and made it to the water by 0800 Saturday morning.  The river was running clear at a perfect 2.93 feet on the Buchanan river gauge and the overcast skies, dripping mist promised a great fishing day.   Floated by my kayak, Fritz' trusty Old Town Discovery and Paul's new float-fishing Pontoon we shot through a narrow slot and the Maury pushed us into the James.   

 In what I'd later view as odd but fortuitousness I caught 3 bass in the span of 20 minutes then the catching part of fishing got few and far between!

We caught a few in the 12-13 inch range but not the hundreds we'd expected

Fritz and Jacob question a rock strewn pool

This should by all rights have been exceedingly fishy, it had all the elements but over the course of 7 hours on the water we probably only caught 35 smallies between us.   Very Odd.

Paul spins caught in a back-eddy hydraulic of Balcony Falls

Fritz shows me the extent of his massive Raspberry -- youch!

The fishing wasn't great but the scenery and company was magnificent!

Thanks for looking