I wasn’t planning to fish the Watauga River in western North Carolina, then I got an invitation to go with Dustin Coffey. Last spring, Orvis dubbed Dustin the 2024 Orvis-Endorsed Fly-Fishing Guide of the Year. To get endorsed by Orvis, a guide obviously needs to know his or her way around a fly rod and have a reputation for helping clients reel in fish. What’s more, they need to be personable, encourage conservation, and help newbies get hooked on the sport. Guide of the Year meant the best of the best at all of these attributes.

“It’s like being crowned the heavyweight champion of the world for fly-fishing guides,” said Dustin, who not only won based on receiving the best customer ratings but also the most ratings of any other Orvis-endorsed guide. I wanted to learn his story, and I’m always happy for the chance to catch fish.

 

Back Cast

Angling, and sharing his passion for it, is in Dustin’s DNA. He didn’t aspire to global prominence among fly-fishing guides, but ironically, he grew up in a place called Globe, a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a river in his front yard and numerous streams flowing through nearby Pisgah National Forest. His grandfather was the mentor of his mend.

“We would spend countless days fishing miles of untouched trout waters,” writes Dustin on Orvis’ website. “I learned the simple pleasures of how to find huckleberries and drink spring water through moss . . . somewhere along the way, Grandpa taught me how to entice a trout into eating a chicken feather.”

When I asked Dustin, now in his mid 40s, the obvious question (how he got into fishing), I got more details. He started tagging along with Grandpa when he was six years old. “We called it dabbling, not much more than a cotton string with a little monofilament on the end,” he recalled in what sounded like a homemade version of Tenkara.

“All I got to do at first was carry his stuff, but he would ask me, ‘How would you approach this pool?’” Dustin continued. “When I was eight, he handed me his pole. I almost cried.”

He has fished ever since and has done it professionally for half of his life. Along the journey, he figured out the nuances of his local waters, traveled to other trout streams to get more educated, and developed a slew of Dustin-isms that he spews with an encouraging smile in his friendly Southern drawl. The guy is all confidence with a fly rod—any rod—and he has his opinions about them, too.

 

The Lesson

Dustin met Jack and me at the Chetola Resort, a 78-acre outdoorsy getaway in the town of Blowing Rock. Dustin was the resort’s fishing manager and head guide. Chetola is one of only two Orvis-endorsed fishing lodges in North Carolina.

“Why do you want to fish here when you have a place in Montana?” he inquired as we drove from the lodge to the nearby Watauga River. Dustin had fished many times in Montana. It was his angler’s Eden. He hoped to move there one day. “To fish with you,” I replied. “Well, let’s catch some fish,” he declared as we pulled into a small parking lot behind an old church. We put on our waders and strung the rods, but surprisingly, we didn’t go to the river.

“If you can cast in the Appalachians, you can cast anywhere,” he said, handing me a 10-foot, 7-weight rod. “Think of fishing the Watauga as a par five. When I go to the Bob Marshall Wilderness [in Montana], the cutthroats are ravenous. . . . We’ve got big fish, too, browns and rainbows. There’s a lot of them, and they’ve all got PhDs, but you can catch ’em if you know the angles. That’s why we call it angling.”

A seven-weight rod seemed like a big stick for the smallish Watauga River. The waters of the Watauga began on the western side of nearby Linville Gap and tumbled 78 miles to its confluence with the South Fork of the Holston River in Tennessee. It was a freestone waterway where we stood, about the width of a healthy cast if your back-cast stayed clear of the lush, tree-framed riverbanks. Within a quarter-mile of the pickup, there were boulders, riffles, overhangs, and deep pools. A trout could certainly be happy there.

I considered myself a respectable angler. Since learning to cast a fly rod four decades ago, I had netted trout across the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Jack was even more experienced. We thought we knew what we were doing, but Dustin didn’t trust our history and proceeded with his lesson.

“Nothing in fishing is reactive,” he began, showing us the Watauga way. “You are a predator catching a predator. Bent rod tips set hooks. Straight rod tips lose hooks. Lift to cast. Thumb up. Set the hook at 85 degrees to 90 degrees. After hooking a fish, assume the ‘fight position’ and be sure to play it on the reel. Trout move from zero to 22 miles per hour in 0.1 seconds.”

The fight position involved placing the butt of the rod along the arm below the elbow, and then wedging the elbow against the body if you needed additional support. We dry-cast over and over, with Dustin sometimes grabbing the end of the line as if a fish had nabbed the fly. After a half hour, he thought we were ready.

 

The Playground

I followed Dustin to a spot littered with half-submerged rocks below a lazy riffle. He called it The Playground. Some of the rainbows and browns were over 20 inches long. A few were poking the surface, so he tied a dry fly with a worm dropper on the end of my tippet, both barbless.

“Now don’t go T-rex on me if you hook one,” he said. It took quite a few casts. For such big fish, they sure had soft mouths. I couldn’t feel the strike and lost a few. Then a fat 21-inch rainbow trout took the worm. It tugged, ran, tugged some more, then jumped with such a jiggle that I had to hold on with two hands.

Normally when fishing, for me the thrill comes from hooking the fish. Landing it mainly serves to see what it looks like before releasing it. Not so on the Watauga. Setting the hook was merely a prelude. The fish fought for so long that I wasn’t sure who was going to tire first. Luckily the fish did.

“It’s a wild one,” claimed Dustin. “You can tell because its fins aren’t worn like the hatchery trout’s are.” According to Dustin, this stretch of the river holds 8,000 trout per mile, a mix of wild and stocked monsters. I had to catch my breath and rest my arm for a moment after we let the rainbow go.

 

The Crescent

After catching a couple more rainbows and an equally big brown trout, Dustin thought we should move upstream a short way to The Crescent where he promised a chance at even bigger browns. The Crescent was a tight oxbow with a deep pool on the outside of the arc below an overhung bank. We approached from the shallower inside of the curve. Caddis were hatching off the surface, so we naturally put a caddis fly on with the same worm dropper.

With each cast and drift, the trout looked at my caddis but didn’t take it. It was both maddening and entertaining. To the human eye, the natural ones looked the same. Finally, a curious brown trout took the worm. Suddenly all of Dustin’s prefishing lessons gelled. Rod snug to my forearm, I played the fish from the reel. It eventually tired. When I finally held that beautiful brown trout, my cheeks started cramping from smiling so broadly. I won’t forget that one.

Humble Pool

As I basked in the pleasure of landing such a trout, Dustin turned his attention to Jack, who had also landed several sizeable trout on his own. Dustin led him to Humble Pool, a section of calm water above The Crescent that ended at a riffle. Countless 20-plus-inch trout finned calmly in the shallow water. Periodically one rose to nab a caddis fly as it hatched off the glassy surface. They looked ready to pounce on whatever we floated by them, but looks can be deceptive, hence the name, Humble Pool. These were the PhDs that Dustin had referred to.

For about a half hour, they were true to their reputation. Then, as often happens, the aquatic dinner bell rang. Jack hooked one, then another and another. What a grand finale to a fantastic day on the water! It was exhilarating and exhausting at the same time.

Back at Dustin’s truck, he offered us each a shot of whiskey to celebrate. We had landed titanic trout in a place where we hadn’t expected to see so many fish and certainly not ones that big. It was a day on the water that we will never forget, thanks to Dustin, who checked all the boxes as the Orvis Guide of the Year. Perhaps that’s the essence of that honor, making other anglers, like Jack and me, feel at home on his home water.

 

FIND OUT MORE

For information about Dustin Coffey and fly-fishing on the Watauga River, visit chetola.com.