Say the name “McClintock,” and most people think of the famous 1963 John Wayne movie.
Say the name around a select group of anglers, however, and they’ll think first of fishing guide Fred McClintock from Celina, Tenn. He’s 60 years old, and like John Wayne, wears a rugged look carved by years on the water.
It was 1985 when he quit his job, pulled up his Pennsylvania roots and moved South to fulfill a dream of becoming a full-time fishing guide. “It was a hard thing to do,” said McClintock, still wearing an accent born North of the Mason-Dixon Line. “I came down here with $97,000 cash in my pocket and three years later we was broke.”
McClintock had no fishing experience in the Dale Hollow area, but was attracted by its reputation. “Since you’re from here you probably don’t realize how famous Dale Hollow is,” he said. “Dale Hollow Lake is famous all over the world because of the world record smallmouth. I grew up reading about that along with the lake trout, the rainbows and the muskie.”
Add crappie, walleye and rockfish to that list. McClintock guides for them all and says the diversity is what turned his business into a success. “It was looking mighty bad, but then things caught on and we took off.”
The November morning we met, he pointed the boat trailer toward Burkesville, Kentucky just across the Tennessee border, and said, “let’s go trout fishing.”
We dropped the boat in the misty Cumberland River. I was frozen to the core as he made the early morning run upriver. He stopped just above a swift, shallow neck in the river, handed me a 4-inch minnow jerkbait and said “work it back to the boat with a real erratic action. That drives those big old brown trout wild!”
On about the third cast in the swift current, a basketball-sized boil erupted behind his bait and he exclaimed, “missed him.” Three casts later his rod bowed down and he said, “didn’t miss that one.”
It took several minutes before I could net the 21-inch-plus brown trout. The spectacular fish was probably the largest of the day, but certainly not the last. Several more brown trout fell victim to the jerkbaits during the early morning bite, and as the sun climbed above the surrounding ridges, McClintock switched to a special system he says he developed years ago.
His nine-foot rods more closely resembled flyrods, but they were outfitted with spinning reels filled with fine diameter braided line. On the end he tied a weighted flyfishing nymph with a dry fly trailer, all suspended on monofilament beneath an extremely small float. The long rods allowed us to cast the extremely light lures and take up any excess slack when a trout decided to inhale the drifting nymph. Basically it was flyfishing with spinning tackle. The method was easy for even a novice to execute, but very effective.
I was stunned the first time I set the hook and a 3-pound rainbow trout shot out of the Cumberland River. I’ve caught a lot of trout in the Hiwassee and other area streams. In my 47 years, however, I’ve never seen trout of the size we pulled from the Cumberland. McClintock said, “I’ve fished with guys who’ve been everywhere ... Montana, Utah, Wyoming, the whole works. They all say they’ve never seen trout like the trout that’s in here. There’s a 20-inch size limit on the browns and everybody’s releasing them. It’s just great.” As he displayed a 3-pound rainbow, he added, “You can catch these all day long, and all year-round.”
While success rates have fallen due to increased pressure, McClintock catches huge stripers out the same water, one of his favorite guiding trips. “Even if a person only catches one fish it’s probably the biggest fish they ever caught in their life,” he said. “So you can make more people happy striper fishing, but personally I would rather smallmouth fish.”
The veteran guide, who was recently nominated for the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, says during the winter he and his clients focus on smallmouth and monster muskies in Dale Hollow Lake. He also enjoys his crappie and walleye trips. While he’s happy for clients to keep the legal fish they take, McClintock proudly says, “you can count the number of fish I have killed since the mid-1950's on your two hands.”
After guiding full or part-time for 30 years, the expert angler says he’s a long way from quitting. “It’s hard to do something that long and not get burned out. I just think if I didn’t get so excited about catching fish, there’s no way I’d be able to be out there everyday.”
Just a moment later his float bobbed under, he set the hook and a rainbow rocketed out of the Cumberland River. The setting sun drew hard lines on McClintock’s grin, speaking volumes of a man who loves his work.
You can contact McClintock at www.trophyguideservice.com or by calling 931-243-2142.