Chattahoochee River, Georgia

On The Fly Freshwater

Featured photo of Old Rogers Bridge on the river by Jimmy Jacobs.

December 2023

By Chris Scalley

Editor’s Note: This article was originally scheduled to run in conjunction with the story of the On The Fly South crew fishing with guide Chris Scalley on the Chattachoochee. However, Mother Nature interfered with a stretch of bad weather. Thus, that article will appear in a later issue after the fishing is possible. Meanwhile, here’s the back story of how the Hooch became a world-class brown trout river.

If you told me three decades ago the greater metro area population of Atlanta would more than double by 2023, I would have been skeptical. Then if you told me the trout would not only survive this growth, but would thrive in the shadows of this juggernaut, I would have said you’re crazy. 

In the 1970s and ‘80s I was very fortunate enough to have grown up like a modern-day Huckleberry Finn with my brother John fishing, hunting and trapping along the banks of the Chattahoochee River in Sandy Springs, across from the City of Roswell. Fly fishing in the backwater flats of Bull Sluice Lake (a small impoundment on the river between Roswell and Atlanta) for  giant shellcrackers on their spring beds was how I first got hooked. But then venturing out to the main river to experience blizzards of caddisfly hatches at Island Ford Shoals to catch trout on dry flies that I had hand tied sealed my fate as a lifelong fan of the river and eventually a fishing guide. 

Fly fishing had become more than a passion. It was now an extreme obsession!  My first guided, drift boat trip was down the Snake River in Jackson Hole, Wyoming as a young adult with my dad and older siblings in 1993. We couldn’t help but notice the droves of traveling anglers in the airports with their fedora hats and fly rod cases. The popularity of fly fishing was already growing, but when the 1992 hit drama film directed by Robert Redford A River Runs Through It came out, the world became enamored with the art of fly fishing.

As soon as we got home, I approached the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area ranger on how to go about starting a fishing guide service, using primarily drift and jet boats to help anglers of all experience levels to gain access to the river, much like out West. In 1993 with much contemplation for the name of the business, I named it “River Through Atlanta Guide Service.”

One other key factor that inspired the start of a fishing guide service on the Chattahoochee was a 1995 proposal from the Georgia Wildlife Resources Division to change the closed trout season to year-round on a handful of trout rivers in the state. The Chattooga, Toccoa and Chattahoochee Rivers no longer would have a closed winter season, which opened these rivers up for year-round guiding.

With all the stars seeming to align, it was now critical to have the support of The Fish Hawk. The shop had been the leader of fly fishing in Atlanta since opening in 1974. I bought my first high-end fly rod and fly vise from the owner Gary Merriman and his brother Bobby in the late 1980s. I presented the idea of a guide service exclusively for the Chattahoochee Tailwater to Gary and he was so receptive he offered me a part-time job to work at the fly shop until I could get established.

I worked at The Fish Hawk from 1993 through 1995, which helped me learn a lot about customer service and the clientele I would accommodate on the river. In 1996 Atlanta hosted the Summer Olympics Games and the influx of international travelers kept me busy in combination with our local and regional customer base.

Witnessing first-hand the crazy growth of Atlanta during the 1990s with the always close contest between Gwinnett and Forsyth counties being listed nationally as the fastest growing counties in the U.S., what used to be vacant pastures and chicken farms on both sides of the River would soon be transformed into suburban sprawl with shopping centers and golf course communities. This development was a blessing and a curse, as these new inhabitants were affluent professionals who would hire us to access the river, but this land disturbance would cause sedimentation, thermal and chemical pollution of prime trout habitat in the Chattahoochee.

Right about the time I was working at The Fish Hawk, we heard about a new conservation effort to protect the river, It was called the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, a nonprofit run by Sally Bethea and established with seed money gifted from the philanthropy of the Ted Turner Foundation. Protecting the river in one of the fastest growing cities in the world was a daunting task. but Sally and her group proved to be unwavering in their pursuit to keep the Chattahoochee intact.

I collaborated with Riverkeeper to become their eyes and ears on the river. Volunteering every time I was asked, I transported Atlanta mayors down the river, helped collect water samples, documented Metropolitan River Protection Act violations and reported faulty or lack of stormwater Best Management Practices on land disturbances in the riparian green zones buffers of the river corridor, both on tributaries and the main stem.

In 1997 I had the pleasure of fly fishing with Leroy Powell, the host of Georgia Outdoors on Georgia Public Television. Leroy’s plan was to film an episode with me and his cohost Robin Russell to display the dry fly fishing on the Chattahoochee during the spring caddis hatch. A few months previous to that filming Leroy wanted  to sample the fishing and invited along Don Pfitzer, a well-known outdoor writer and former Assistant Director of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the southeastern region. .

The show Match the Hatch was a success and really helped the public to understand what a great recreational resource the Chattahoochee was as a trout fishery. Leroy lost a battle with cancer a few years later, but Don and I continued to fish together and developed a great friendship for the next 18 years.

Right around this same time frame the Georgia WRD hired a new biologist for the Chattahoochee Tailwater named Lisa Klein. She had a master’s degree from Tennessee Tech, with an extensive knowledge of the tailwater trout fishery on the Clinch River. My first comment to her was; “I plan to guide on the Chattahoochee Tailwater the next 20 years, how can I make a difference in how we protect the River?”

“You need a nonprofit 501C3 status and you should study the river ecology by sampling benthic macro invertebrates throughout the corridor in the main stem of the Chattahoochee River from Buford Dam to Peachtree Creek within the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area. This should be done to create a data base to monitor water quality over a long-term using a bioindex,” was her reply.

With no formal knowledge of biology, I was intimidated by such an ambitious study. I knew Don had an entomology background, but little did I know that Don Pfitzer was “the Godfather of trout in southern tailwaters.” Back in the 1950s, while working for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, Don pioneered the concept of stocking southern tailwaters with fingerling trout, including as Little Tennessee, South Holston, Watauga and Chattahoochee Rivers, to help mitigate impacts of hydroelectric dams on sport fisheries downstream of impoundments.

In 1998 we began sampling macro invertebrates, or “river bugs” at six established sites on the Chattahoochee at Buford Dam, Settles Bridge, Jones Bridge, Morgan Falls Dam and Cochran Shoals. We utilized established sampling methods to collect both quantitative and qualitative measures of bottom dwelling critters along 41 miles of the main river. Each quarter from 1998 through 2011 the samples were captured and stored in labeled containers, then on the following day they are sorted by qualified volunteers into glass vials filled with isopropyl alcohol for storage. Don would take the samples home to count and Identify by species. All this was under the auspices of The Chattahoochee Coldwater Fishery Foundation we established.

In 2013 the National Park Service hired a private contractor for $14,000 to catalog the decade-long data set by genus. The reason I give that dollar amount is to illustrate the value of Don’s endless time at the microscope in his basement. There also were countless hours our volunteers dedicated to this project.

Don Pfitzer always said we captured the ultimate data set, which encompassed a historic drought in 2006 to 2008, then a historic flood in 2009.  He also said we should resume sampling again if there is a dramatic change in policy of how they manage the Chattahoochee watershed. Don passed away in 2016, but his legacy will live on for future generations of trout anglers.

 Another part of the mission statement for this nonprofit was to document natural reproduction of trout in the tailwater. Since I was child, we had caught juvenile brown trout throughout the river They couldn’t all have been escapees from Buford Trout Hatchery that was maintained on the river shore by the Georgia WRD. The fact that trout can successfully reproduce in the Chattahoochee is a testament of very high, water quality. Additionally catching wild stream bred trout provides an aesthetic value for anglers.

When Lisa Klein was hired in 1997, she decided to try to document spawning trout by dawning scuba gear and filming fish actively propagating on gravel habitat on the riverbed. It just so happened that one of my clients was volunteering for the Riverkeeper in October 1998, filming fly fisherman at Jones Bridge. They set up a tripod with a camera facing down on a gravel bar and low and behold they filmed a big hen brown trout being courted by two interloper male browns, which is classic spawning behavior. In the spring of 1999 Lisa and her DNR crew used backpack electroshock devices and discovered an abundance of “young-of-the-year” brown trout, official documenting natural reproduction! A couple years later. 

Chris Martin eventually replaced Lisa Klein as the lead trout biologist for DNR. He continued to closely monitor fish populations in the river, recognized warming trends below Morgan Falls and helped introduce delayed-harvest regulations on an 8-mile stretch of the River. Before Chris retired, he also proposed and end to stocking browns on the 37-mile reach of th eiver between Buford Dam and Morgan Falls Dam, which took place in 2005.  That was due to a robust self-sustaining population of those fish on this section of the Chattahoochee.  

In the spring of 2023, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Nature Conservancy partnered in the Sustainable Rivers Project, national a water quality initiative,  the Corps is looking at improving water quality with more sustainable flows and dissolved oxygen levels for the benefit of the sport fishery where it is pragmatic. This program has helped to restarting our invertebrate sampling work to help illustrate these improvements.