Peter contacted me during the summer about a guided fly fishing trip for smallies, but we decided to delay the trip until fall when the weather was cooler. I wanted to accommadate him with a fly fishing trip, but I had spent some time in the previous days stripping streamers, fishing crayfish patterns and poppers with poor results. Even soft plastics like grubs and tubes were not doing the trick.
However, I was having good success with live bait. He said that if the fly fishing bite was tough that he would be interested in catching fish with other methods and using live bait would be fine. On his first cast he caught a smallie and I used to joke that it was bad luck to catch a fish on your first cast, but he proved that not to be true because he caught a sizable mixed bag of white bass, catfish, and smallmouth. The smallies were a variety of sizes, but he did manage to catch a couple of really nice fish that were over 19 in. Peter was a lot of fun to guide and he a did a great job of catching that mixed bag of fall fish on the French Broad.