Wet Tail(water) Dreams

So with guide season looming I am spending a significant amount of time scouting out wading water around my home of Asheville.  The weather has been generally cold, colder, and really frickin’ cold.  This doesn’t bother me so much as it does the trout looking up through the ice.  Half the wild water around here has been iced over as much as it hasn’t for the past month and every Mexican and redneck has poached all the fish out of every delayed harvest stream in North Carolina.  I will take a moment here to say that I have nothing against and generally admire the Mexican people as hardworking and honest BUT, can you please  go rape the catfish populations and leave the trout alone?  Seriously trout that eat dog food taste like dog food. That being said, I have been able to get some days on our fine smaller free stone waters here in the western corner of the state and I have decided that all you small stream, brook trout purist guys can keep that shit for yourself.  I love you guys but I have nothing in common with you except our shared disdain for all things not  trout on the fly.  Why would I haul my admittedly out of shape and lazy ass up or down a steep trail so I can fish a 20′ section of creek for 4″ fish all day when I can comfortably sit in my boat and fish 4 to 7 miles of river where the trout make their creek trout cousins look like Emmanuel Lewis (T.V’s Webster) compared to the Fridge (The fattest man of my childhood), all while drinking my beer out of a cooler like a civilized human being.  You savages of the woods be warned I will not tolerate your tom foolery on my tail waters.  There will be no bow and arrow casting, there will be no Taliban like belly crawls through the shallows, there will also in no way be demonstrations of your superior physical shape or fishing abilities at any time on our waters below the dams.  Any of this behavior will result in swift retaliation, mainly me complaining some more every time my clients hook the eightieth tree for the day.  Tuesday i go float the Watauga and leave all my small worries behind.