Shoal Bass on the Fly: Kent Edmonds Shares Secrets from Georgia’s Flint River
Fog rising on the Flint River. The author has actually fished this exact stretch of river for shoal bass, although he apparently lacks Mr. Edmond’s knack for finding them. credit Kent Edmonds
When you stand on the shoals of the Flint River, it’s hard to believe you’re still in Georgia. The water slides across boulders and riffles that look like they belong in the Smokies, twisting between palmettos and mountain laurel. For fly anglers, it’s a place that feels wild and improbable—a southern river that looks like trout country and fishes like nowhere else. And few people know it better than Georgia guide Kent Edmonds.
Kent’s journey to becoming one of the South’s most respected warmwater fly guides began long before he ever laid eyes on the Flint. He grew up in the western corner of South Carolina, learning to fish for trout with a spinning rod along the Chattooga River. Back then, he said, there were “more moonshiners than fly fishermen.” But seeing one man cast a fly across a pool changed everything. “I didn’t understand it at all,” Kent laughed. “But I could see that when he threw his fly, it just sat there in that little eddy, while my spinner bait was out of the zone after two cranks.” That curiosity led him to a $3 hardware store fly rod, a spinning reel, and eventually a lifetime behind a fly rod.
After moving to Georgia, he went looking for trout and found something even better. “I started riding the back roads looking for a little creek to fish and came across the Flint River,” he said. “It was shallow and rocky—didn’t look like anything you’d expect in central or south Georgia.” He tied on a stimulator and a woolly worm, waded in, and started catching bass that looked familiar but weren’t. “They looked like the redeyes I used to catch up on the Chattooga, but they got big. That’s really where I started to fly fish for real, and I still love it as much as I ever did.”
What makes the Flint so special, Kent explained, is that it’s one of the last truly wild rivers in the eastern United States—a waterway that runs for more than two hundred miles without a single dam interrupting its flow. The river begins as a small creek just north of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, slipping quietly out from beneath the city before tumbling through a dramatic fall line that drops as much elevation as the famed Chattooga River’s whitewater sections. As it cuts through central Georgia, the Flint becomes a study in contrasts—part Appalachian stream, part coastal plain river.
Kent describes it as “three rivers in one.” In its headwaters, the upper Flint winds through shaded banks and riffles that look more like North Carolina trout country than the Deep South. South of the fall line, it spreads into a maze of shoals and boulder gardens that run for hundreds of yards at a stretch, sometimes a full mile of ankle-to-thigh-deep water split into a dozen braided channels. “It fishes more like a small mountain stream than a big river,” he said. “Most days you never get deeper than your waist.”
For anglers, it’s paradise. There’s always current moving, always seams to read and pockets to work. The riverbed is a patchwork of rock ledges, pools, and sandy bars framed by an unlikely mix of habitats—Spanish moss draping over palmettos on one side, mountain laurel and rhododendron climbing the hills on the other. “It doesn’t look like central Georgia at all,” Kent said. “You can see Spanish moss and palms growing on a sandbar, then look up and see rhododendron above them. It’s a crazy mix of environments.”
That diversity is what makes it perfect shoal bass water. The Flint is their kingdom, and in many ways, it’s the last one they’ve got. The species’ scientific name, Micropterus cataractae, literally translates to “waterfall bass,” a nod to the fast, rocky rivers they call home. Shoal bass are uniquely adapted to that environment—they hold in strong current and shallow runs, often in water that seems far too skinny for fish of their size. “That’s what the shoal bass likes,” Kent said. “Its scientific name means ‘waterfall bass.’ They’ll get right up in the whitewater.”
Kent has spent decades watching how these fish behave on the Flint, and what strikes him most is their comfort in the current. “You’ll see them in some really little water and small little nooks and crannies,” he said. “I’ve got five- and six-pound fish out of an area you’d think wouldn’t hold a five-incher.” He said that much of the time, anglers overlook these skinny runs, assuming there isn’t enough water to hold fish—but that’s often where the best ones live.
Compared to largemouth or spotted bass, shoal bass are creatures of movement. Kent explained that they differ both in how they live and how they respond to the river. “They’re very different from largemouth and the habitat they like,” he said. “They’re uniquely suited to the Flint. The hotter it gets, it doesn’t bother these fish at all.” He pointed out that radio-tracking studies have shown shoal bass can travel surprisingly long distances—sometimes as much as fifty miles in just a few days. “Some of them seldom move at all,” he said. “Others move a lot. We don’t fully understand why. Some of it’s spawning, but not all of it.”
Their feeding habits also separate them from trout. The Flint is alive with aquatic insects—mayflies, caddis, stoneflies—but shoal bass mostly hunt bigger prey. “They’re black bass,” Kent said simply. “I really haven’t found any flies they won’t eat.” He listed baitfish, crawfish, hellgrammites, and dragonfly nymphs as their main forage. Because of that, he said, anglers don’t need to worry about the perfect “drag-free” drift that’s so critical in trout fishing. “A number-16 mayfly can’t swim across current,” he said. “But a two-inch baitfish or crawfish can. So we don’t necessarily have to have that drag-free drift.” Instead, he uses mends and weighted flies to get down to the fish’s level. “If that fish is hanging under an undercut and your fly passes a foot above its head, he may never see it,” he said. “He would’ve eaten it if he saw it—it just wasn’t deep enough.”
And then there’s their toughness—the trait that Kent admires most. “They like the whitewater, the rocks, the heat—it doesn’t bother them at all,” he said. “They’re native fish in their native environment, and in this area that’s never been stocked. That’s something you find almost nowhere.” To him, the Flint and its shoal bass are inseparable—a river and a species that evolved together, still clinging to their natural rhythm in a part of the country where most waters have long since been dammed and tamed.
When it comes to flies, Kent doesn’t overthink it—but he’s refined his patterns over decades of trial, error, and guiding on some of the most technically demanding warmwater rivers in the Southeast. Three patterns in particular have become cornerstones of his arsenal: the Stealth Bomber, the Rubber-Legged Dragon, and the Tokyo Spider.
The Stealth Bomber started out west. Years ago, Kent was fishing during a stonefly hatch in Yellowstone country, throwing a pattern called Turk’s Tarantula—a bushy, rubber-legged fly with a deer-hair head that would dive when stripped. When he brought the fly home to Georgia, he found that bream and bass loved it too, but after a dozen fish, the deer hair soaked up slime and wouldn’t float anymore. “I wanted something that kept that same diving action,” he said, “but would stay up all day.” The fix was foam. By reshaping the fly’s head into a folded, wedge-style body and tying it with closed-cell foam, Kent gave it the ability to dive, push water, and pop back to the surface, leaving a bubble trail. “You can fish it subtle, just twitching those rubber legs, or strip it hard and make it dive,” he said. “Most any topwater works good, but that one works really good.”
The Rubber-Legged Dragon holds a special place in Kent’s story, though it isn’t technically his own invention. The pattern was created by his late friend and mentor, Carter Nelson, who originally designed it for shellcracker in the ponds at Callaway Gardens. Kent remembers showing up to fish with Carter years ago, armed with heavy rods and big streamers, thinking he was going to show the younger man a thing or two. “Carter showed up with a two-weight and these little rubber-legged dragons,” Kent said. “By lunchtime, he was putting on a clinic.” That day forever changed how Kent thought about fly size and fish behavior. The Rubber-Legged Dragon, tied on a #8 or #10 hook, imitates a dragonfly or damselfly nymph—a key forage for bream and bass in the South. Fished slowly with half-inch strips and long pauses, it crawls through the rocks like a stalking insect. “When a fish eats that fly, the line just gets heavy,” Kent said. “You never know if it’s a leaf, a five-inch bream, or a five-pound bass.”
The Tokyo Spider, by contrast, came about as a smaller, more castable surface pattern—a response to the challenge of teaching beginners at Callaway Gardens. The Stealth Bomber, while deadly, can be tricky for novice casters because of its air resistance. The Tokyo Spider kept the foam and leg action but scaled it down for easier casting and versatility. “It’s tied the same way as the Stealth, but smaller, and with enough foam to float a dropper underneath,” Kent said. The name, he added with a grin, came from old Japanese monster movies—“like that crazy mutant spider that ate Tokyo.”
The world-famous Stealth Bomber, a clever fly that incorporates the effectiveness of deer-hair diver type flies with the practicality and floatability of 2mm sheet foam. credit Kent Edmonds
Even after decades on the water, Kent still talks about the Flint with the same excitement he felt when he first waded into it more than forty years ago. He knows the river’s moods, its channels, and its hidden pockets like old friends. What still amazes him, he said, is that such a place even exists. “The fact that it’s as clean as it is—considering its headwaters are in Atlanta—is amazing,” he said. “We’re lucky to have it.”
Kent’s path to guiding was never planned. “Totally by accident,” he said. “I never thought about being a fishing guide.” Back in the early days of the internet, his son helped him set up a basic webpage on a dial-up MindSpring account. “We just posted a few photos and some fishing reports,” Kent said. “Next thing I knew, people from all over Georgia and Alabama were emailing, saying, ‘I had no idea anybody else was fly fishing for bass.’” That simple site became a gathering point for warmwater fly anglers long before social media existed. “We realized there was a community out there—we just didn’t know each other yet.”
Not long after that, fly tier and writer Carter Nelson invited him to help teach at Callaway Gardens. “He told me, ‘You know more than most of the people who come through here,’” Kent said. “So I started helping with the fly-fishing school part-time.” Before long, he was guiding on weekends, then full-time. “In 2001, I had a late midlife crisis and decided I wanted to be a fishing guide,” he said, laughing.
Today, he mostly guides wading trips on the Flint, though he still uses a canoe to reach the bigger shoals. “For me, it’s just transportation from one set of shoals to the next,” he said. “The fishing’s done on foot. That’s what I love about this river—it fishes like a small stream.” A day with Kent usually means slipping through knee-deep water from one riffle to another, stopping often to read current seams or point out eddies where a shoal bass might be waiting.
He still gets just as much joy from guiding as he did when he started. “It’s fishing vicariously,” he said. “Not to say I don’t still love to fish, but I have just as much fun helping somebody else catch one. Being there when that fish comes up and blasts a topwater—it’s hard to beat that.” When he tells stories from the river, it’s rarely about his own fish. It’s about his clients’ firsts—the looks on their faces when a shoal bass smashes a Stealth Bomber in a spray of whitewater, or when someone realizes that this isn’t just a “bass river,” but a truly wild place.
“I had a real job for thirty years,” Kent said. “So I know how good I’ve got it now.” He paused, smiling. “There are days when it’s still a job, but not too many of them. Most of the time, it’s just fun.”
For anyone looking to chase these native Georgia fish, Kent still guides full-time and welcomes beginners with open arms. You can find him at flyfishga.com, where that simple website that once connected a handful of curious anglers now stands as a doorway into one of the South’s last wild rivers—and the man who’s spent a lifetime helping others discover it.