By T. Edward Nickens | April/May 2009 | 

Rapid Action

For nonstop smallmouth bass fishing, hop a raft on West Virginia's New River

The River’s Mellow Side
If West Virginia’s stretch of the new presents a wild and woolly aspect, Virginia’s river miles are a downshift into a far more relaxed pace of paddling. A few months before my Class VI adrenaline buffet, I rented a canoe from Tangent Outfitters, a first-rate base camp on the New River just north of Blacksburg, Virginia, and sketched out a three-day camping route with my nine-year-old son, Jack, that promised plenty of good smallmouth water and no shortage of swimming holes.

Tangent Outfitters is in tiny Pembroke, Virginia, where Sinking Creek slinks into the New River along a cliff-edged, hairpin river bend. Part river-sports base camp, part local community center, it’s a funky blend of bluegrass and nouveau-local culture run by a couple of guide/entrepreneurs who are as extreme in personality as the New River itself. Wiry, bearded, sunburned, and intense, Shawn Hash started the business in 1992 with four bicycles, two canoes, and a pickup truck. The biking business sputtered, but the paddling side of the adventure sports took off. Hash, who guided National Public Radio’s Noah Adams on the New River in Adams’s book Far Appalachia: Following the New River North, brought Steve Phlegar into the business a few years ago, using his experience with the world-famous Nantahala Outdoor Center in North Carolina to pump up Tangent’s retail site. Now the base camp sports a full tackle shop, a gourmet deli, and float trip accessories that run the gamut from Copenhagen to fine wine.

Much to Jack’s dismay, I passed on the snuff and spirits, and loaded up on turkey and avocado sandwiches while Phlegar marked up a map with campsites and fishing holes. A quick river shuttle had us on the water just as the sun was topping the two-hundred-foot palisades that loomed overhead. Within minutes we were alone on the river, steering through frothy Class II ledge drops. A blue sky vaulted the river, it was warm enough to swim without a second thought, and there was hardly another soul in sight—this despite it being a midsummer Friday afternoon.

For the next two and a half days, we Huck Finned it north along the New. Unlike West Virginia’s frenetic gorge run, this section of the river drops over the occasional three-foot ledge and boils up a few standing waves, but it’s nothing to chew fingernails over. At a seventy-five-yard-long run of Class II cobble bar below a towering cliff called Caesar’s Arch, I showed Jack how to swim a rapid: feet pointed downstream, toes up, eyes watching for obstacles. He ran back upstream time and time again, swimming the wave train for an hour. Each night we camped a few paddle lengths from the river, stirring up campfire sparks that spiraled overhead as coal trains grumbled and clacked up both sides of the river.

But a Tangent Outfitters trip doesn’t have to involve a camping mattress and a gravel bed, and the company’s guiding options go way beyond a marked-up map. Half-day, full-day, and multi-day fully guided trips are offered in rafts, canoes, and drift boats. And Tangent runs hand in glove with one of the most stunning bed-and-breakfast inns in the Southern highlands, the Inn at Riverbend. Tangent guides will pick you up from the inn and bring you right back to the double wraparound decks, although they won’t apologize if you return smelling a bit fishy.

Jack and I stayed that way for most of our trip. I handled the paddle while he cast a crayfish-colored plastic jig, but it wasn’t until I beached the canoe and tied on a trusty Rooster Tail spinner that the New River started giving up smallmouth in crazy numbers. At one slick pool beneath a ledge of rock that nearly spanned the river, we caught two dozen smallies, Jack howling with glee as he waded chest-deep to fight the fish to hand.

It was at our second night’s camp, however, that I could sense a true angler’s heart beating inside the little boy. I strung up a fly rod and led him out to the edge of a current seam. I gave him a few quick pointers—“Lift the rod up to your ear and stop it with a snap, like you’re answering the telephone, then hanging up”—and I splashed back to shore.

For the next hour he stood riveted to the cobble of the New River, bare-chested, slinging a six-weight line. Every now and then I waded out to check the leader. It was snarled in wind knots, the hook point bent and bashed. He couldn’t care less. I fried up smallmouth fillets and hollered out for him to come ashore and grab some food.

“No way,” he yelled back, eyes never moving from the water, laying out a surprising cast that straightened out over the ancient New River. “Look at me, Dad. I’m fly fishing! Isn’t this the coolest thing?”

Pretty much, I think.