Fishing Around Blue Ridge: Three Fisheries, Three Rulebooks

Georgia is straightforward about this. Anglers aged sixteen or over must hold a fishing licence. If you are fishing for trout, or fishing on designated trout water at all, you must also hold a trout licence. It is a second purchase, not an upgrade to the first, and it is the thing visitors most often miss.

Both are sold through the state's wildlife resources division and both can be bought on a phone in a few minutes, which matters here because you should do it at the cabin while you still have a signal rather than at the river where you will not. Short-term licences exist for visitors, so you are not obliged to buy a year.

Carry proof. A ranger on a mountain creek will ask, and having bought it and left it on a phone with no reception is not a defence you want to be constructing knee-deep in Noontootla.

Two further rules worth internalising before you start. Creel and size limits differ stream by stream rather than applying statewide, and the stream you are standing in may be artificial-lure-only even though the one you fished yesterday was not. The current regulations booklet lists each designated stream by name, and it is the only source worth trusting on this; the sign at the pull-in may be old.

If you are fishing a private trophy stretch through a lodge or an outfitter, the rules are theirs rather than the state's, and they will brief you.

Two of Georgia's artificial-lure-only streams are in this county, which is a decent indication of the quality of the water up here.

Noontootla Creek runs off the Springer Mountain country into the upper Toccoa and holds wild brown and rainbow trout rather than stocked ones. It is managed with artificial lures only and a sixteen-inch minimum size limit. In a small Appalachian creek, a sixteen-inch wild trout is a serious fish, so the practical effect of that rule is a catch-and-release fishery protected by the rulebook rather than by signage. Fish it accordingly, wet your hands, and put them back.

Stanley Creek, closer to town off the Aska side, is also artificial-lure-only, and is a good introduction to small-stream fishing because you can get to it without a long gravel drive.

What both demand is a different approach from the tailwater. These are narrow, overhung, clear streams where a heavy footfall on the bank empties a pool before you have cast. Short rods, short casts, approach from downstream, and expect to lose flies in rhododendron. Wild fish in a creek this size are small, beautiful and hard-won.

A note on access. Much of this water runs through national forest and is open to you. Some of it does not. Fences, gates and posted signs mean what they say, and the goodwill that keeps informal access alive in this county is easily spent.

Lake Blue Ridge is small, deep and cold, and it produces two species that Georgians do not expect to find at this latitude in any quantity: smallmouth bass and walleye. Both like rock, depth and cool water, and this drowned river valley provides all three. Largemouth, spotted bass and panfish are there in numbers, and trout drop into the lake from the river system in the colder months.

The difficulty is that everything that matters is invisible. The old Toccoa channel runs down the middle under a hundred feet of water, standing timber was never fully cleared before the valley flooded in the early 1930s, and the productive structure is creek mouths, points and drop-offs you cannot read from the surface. A first-timer with a boat and no electronics will have a pleasant day and probably not a productive one.

Two ways round that. Take a guide for a first outing, which on a lake this technical is money well spent, and then fish it yourself for the rest of the week with a better idea of where to look. Or fish the banks and the coves early and late in the day, when the fish come shallow, and accept a smaller window.

Practical notes. Spring is the season everybody wants, as the water warms and fish move up. Summer means fishing deep, early, before the pontoons. Autumn fishes well and is quiet midweek. Winter drawdown limits launching, so check the lake level before towing anything. The state publishes an annual forecast for the lake, which is the most current guide available.