The James River gets talked about as a tidal river, the one with the colonial history and the big blue catfish and the barges near Richmond. That is the lower river. Up above the fall line, winding through the foothills west of Lynchburg, it is something else, a wide, shallow, rocky river full of ledges and grass beds, and it holds some of the best river smallmouth bass fishing in the country. In late September, with the water low and clear and the first color coming into the sycamores, it may be the best float trip in Virginia.
We put in at a gravel ramp at dawn with two canoes, a cooler, and the kind of optimism that shows up before anyone has had to drag a boat. The upper James runs low in the fall. Low enough that on any given day you will step out and walk the canoe across a riffle at least three times, and one of those times you will step on a rock that looks flat and is not. This is considered part of the charm by people who are describing it later from a dry chair.
The fishing makes up for it. A smallmouth in the James lives on the ledges, the long shelves of dark rock that cross the river at an angle, and it lives in the slack water on the downstream side of them where the current drops food off the lip. First thing in the morning, while there is still mist on the water, a small walking topwater thrown just past a ledge and brought back across it will draw a strike that sounds like someone dropping a cinder block into a bathtub. Then the fish jumps, twice, because smallmouth consider jumping to be the whole point of the exercise.
The fish are not enormous. Most run twelve to fifteen inches, bronze with those dark vertical bars and a red eye that looks faintly offended. But they fight like they are twice that size, and in a river with current behind them they will take a light rod and make it look like it has never been properly tested. By ten the sun was up and the topwater bite was done, so we switched to small soft plastics dragged along the grass edges, and the fish kept coming, just quieter about it.
Eleven miles, twenty eight fish, and one full swim when a canoe met a ledge sideways. At the takeout a man loading kayaks asked how the fishing was. My partner, still wet from the waist down, said it was good. The man looked at him for a moment and said he could tell.
Early starts and long runs, with her stitched into the crown. See our embroidered boat hats, drawn from a photo of your own boat.