Georgia
Live fishing conditions for 5 rivers and creeks.
Georgia sits at the southern tip of the Appalachian trout range, and the fishing splits cleanly in two. Up in the Blue Ridge — the northern third of the state — you get classic southern mountain water: small, tumbling freestone streams that hold wild rainbows and browns in the runs and native brook trout ("specks") up in the cold headwaters, fished with short casts and light tippet through tight rhododendron tunnels. The Chattooga on the South Carolina line and the upper Toccoa are the marquee freestreams, but the region is laced with hundreds of miles of blue-line creeks that see almost no pressure once you walk past the bridge. These streams fish best from spring through early summer and after fall rains; by August the smaller ones run low and warm, and the trout pull into the shade and the spring seeps.
The other Georgia is tailwater country. Buford Dam holds back Lake Lanier just north of Atlanta, and the cold, bottom-release Chattahoochee below it carries stocked and holdover trout right through the suburbs — a genuine coldwater trout river inside a metro area of six million people. Farther north, Blue Ridge Dam turns the lower Toccoa into a trophy tailwater of big, wild browns before the river crosses into Tennessee to become the Ocoee. Both tailwaters run on generation schedules — when the turbines spin up the river jumps and the wading windows close, so the release matters as much as the hatch. Georgia's Wildlife Resources Division (part of the state DNR) sets the rules, dividing the mountains into seasonal and year-round trout streams and layering catch-and-release Delayed Harvest regulations (roughly November through mid-May) onto the best public stretches.