Fishing Report 5/7 And 5/8

[vanven]

My wife, son, and I stayed at Rim Shoals Resort for a couple of days on a short tour of northern Arkansas. I managed a few hours on the water. I have to give Gary and Paula some credit for a great dose of hospitality and making our stay comfortable.

Evening 5/7

I was the only person at the Rim Shoals access from 4pm on Thursday. I fished the two sets of riffles just at the walkin. I had my Taneycomo daytime fly box with me and tried a few of the standard patterns I usually would during the afternoon at Taney: san juan worms (brown and dark red), and a couple of midge patterns. No luck with the indicator, well at elast no luck with the flies under the indicator. If the indicator would have had a hook attached I would have caught several. I noticed a heavy Caddis hatch and switched to the closest pattern I had, a black and green soft hackle. I had a couple of takes but no fish to hand. I ended up the short evening with zero fish.

Stormy 5/8

There were several rounds of storms that blew through Friday morning. Our cabin was only about 100 yards from the public access so I walked down to try and get some fishing in before the storm. This was around 9am. I was dressed in gortex head to toe so the though of a sprinkle didnt phase me. As I was focusing on tieing on my fist fly of the day I heard a couple of boats quickly motor past. I looked up just to notice the storm front barreling down the river and pushing the fog with it. It looked a bit menacing and was actually a really cool sight. Lightning quickly followed and chased me back to the cabin. I headed to the fly shop and chatted with our hosts for a bit as well as a local fisherman. This changed my mind from indicator fishing. I grabbed my night time streamer box and headed down to the access after the storms passed. I caught quite a few nice rainbows on a pine squirrel sculpin pattern as well as a flashy green wolly bugger. Most of them in the flat between the two riffles at the public access. The water was moving fast enough that the biggest fish, an 18 inch rainbow, put up quite a fight.

Fishing the White was great and quite a bit different than Taneycomo. Given the choice I will always choose streamer fishing over indicators, so it was a pleasant suprise to do this in the middle of the day. The water was a lot less crowded, most of the time I had the Rim Shoals public access to myself. At the busiest there were 3 of us there. Part of that was probably due to the rough weather. I am already looking forward to heading back.

-Jerod