Ham

I have a 7'6" 3 weight Orvis Silver Label blank that was a "custom" that begs to be used more often. I have a 9' 4 weight St Croix Legend Ultra that I like a lot for lighter stuff. My all around trout rod is a 8'6" St Croix LU I understand the mechanical needs for the longer rod, but for most of the fish you were catching I think the 3 weight would have been more fun.

I would be absolutely SHOCKED if you could not drag up some smallies off main lake points in 18-35 FOW water. You may have to fish through smaller ones. I have not worked out all the tricks on Ned for trout. I have caught them on most of the colors I have thrown. White if it is cloudy. Dirt would be my first choice for sunny.

Tghanks You Very much for scouting that out! a picture is worth a 1000 words.

Nice fish!

What weight rod on the Iowa streams?

Richard is First Class! He called Micah while we were driving back from the trip on the river and his love for the young man was very evident. Great fish and great story. I'm happy for them both. I'm still hoping to get up that way and have hall come down this way for a White River trip.

Terrible news, but very well put Phil.

Witht he lake rising there is a greater chance for debris in the water and the further up lake or up a creek are you are the more likely that you could hit something BUT I do not think the chances of hitting some debris are high enough that I would leave the boat at home. In general, I think the debris problems way up river on TR are much greater than the debris problems in the lower part of Bull Shoals. The ability to launch a boat into the lake is hampered by the water level, but i bet if there is a will there is a way. You can still rent a trout boat and fish for trout some of the time. launch. Norfork is only 10 foot high right now. It's pretty close and you could always fish there

cant you go to google earth and put the numbers in and pull a sat image? If it was on Bull Shoals that's what I would do. Table Rock, meh.

I might have redacted the GPS numbers

well, I have thrown a jig before. Seriously, there are a lot of very good jig fishermen. I have the advantage of proximity to the White River.

Bull is at 678.83 and seems to be going up about 1/10 of a foot per hour. I'm not feeling real bad for the TR crew just yet. UNderstand that I am likely done with BUll for the next 4 months or so because of this.

That would be an awesome fishing trip. Workking a couple of miles of river. Dialing in on fish location and fly presentation. Beautiful scenery. The fish don't have to always to be huge for it to be a Great trip. There are a lot of negatives ti living in Cali, but none are visible in those photographs.

I've got a jet that says I can go further up than that.

Phil is so stinking good with a jig that he SHOULD NOT try anything else.

I grew up in the MIssissippi River flood plain. I remember my first trip on the Caddo river which at the time was doing great. I saw all kinds of fish everywhere I looked. Most were not (traditional) gamfish, but lots of them were. It was so very interesting to watch the fish being fish. It still is. I love the creeks and rivers.

Apparently LMB and walleye are kind of fond of them as well.

This is really interesting, but in my experience Invisx has the abrasion resistance of a snowflake on a hot day. I saw the Berkley 100% fluro get absolutely abused and I checked and found no scuffing at all. A fish had wrapped a friend in wood and he horsed him thru the wood to the boat. I said man you need to re-tie after that. He checked and said Nah, it's good. I checked the line also after him because I just could not believe it. It was completely undamaged. I lost a lot of fish and a lot of football jigs using 15 lb Invisx. And this was despite frequent re-ties. I loved everything about InvisX except the lack of abrasion resistence. I switched to Abras X and I am good to go.

I would think it would work just fine if that's what you want to do. I really try to use a single hook lure whenever possible for trout. I only keep a few to eat a year and so I'm all about releasing them quickly and witha minimal amount of damage.

FWIW, I did measure the hook gap in Super Dave's Ned Heads. It is clearly less than 1/2 inch.

Keep trying DD. if anyone can catch one, you can.

We are going to have to take the good with the bad. It will enable more ppl to fish from Snow to George's creek. I will be one of those ppl from time to time. I wonder if we can use this access prior to completion of all the work?

I should have said that it is the best I have tried. I'm not about to buy all the fancy import fluoros on the market. Some of them may very well be superior to the Berkley 100%, but it seems like a great product to me. I don't need anything better. Getting it free would be an upgrade though.

A couple of more thoughts then. How many times do we catch "keeper" fish that have recent hookmarks? I know I am catching a lot of fish that have been caught before. I would catch a significantly smaller number of fish if all the legal keepers had been kept. It also shows that while there certainly is post release mortality, that catch and release does work and makes a positve difference in our fish populations. We should understand though that some fish are going to be injured and/or die no matter how well intentioned we are. It seems that sometimes fish are hooked in highly vascular areas and bleed out internally. No blood in the water, but they struggle for a while and roll over and die a few minutes later. Sucks. All the more reason to treat the fish as well and carefully as you can. I hate for them to die for my entertainment. "I don't bed fish because of the impact on the spawn". I don't bed fish because I don't think it is the best use of my time on the water. I KNOW that I am catching spawning fish. Most of them are going to be in some stage of the spawn during March thru early June. I'm just staying off of them and covering more water than the guys locking down on a bed fish. IF you fish from March thru June, you are catching some spawning fish and pulling them off of their beds for those critical seconds regardless of your good intentions. If you want to pat yourself on the back about not catching spawners, you should fish from August thru Janurary only or stay out in 30 plus foot of water. I don't mean to pick on anyone in particular about this, but it seems poorly thought out at best to throw that line out there.

The Berkley 100% Fluro is about as good as it gets. I've used the 10 lb for jerkbaits for a couple of years now. Very abrasion resistant yet seems pretty supple. It doesn't seem to be thick per strength. Don't avoid the 100% Fluro because of Vanish. Vanish was a bad product. They may have improved it, But I will never buy any of their line labelled Vanish. I use Seguar Abraz X on baitcasters and I bought Red Label for leader material. I've gone back to my CX Premium for leader material. Fluro is too picky about how it is tied and I don't think I was getting advantages the advantages of Fluro to offset the disadvantages in my < 8 foot leader. I felt like the Red Label had a little too much body.