Dropping Water Is A Hard Day

[SDB777]

Even though we arrived early, the water was falling.

Wife landed a 15" Rainbow on a #12 bead-headed olive-woolly-bugger right at the parking lot(dam site) on maybe the third pass with her 3wt. Gave a nice short fight and then she snapped a photo and let it go, of course the photo wen to Facebook with me tagged, so I got to hear about that for awhile until I took one.

Mine? Much smaller at 11-1/2", Rainbow on a #16 BWO fished dry....not much of a fight to it after I got in out of the mild current. No photo, as I fumbled the poor thing out of the net and 'whoops it' back to the stream.

Water dropped three feet after those, and then it was all but exercising the casting arm. A few 'tail whacks' at my dry fly offerings, and 'bumps' to the wife's differing woolly-buggers.....we called it a day and went to the Norfork Café for a great burger and onion rings!!!

Water: Dropping and clear to about 40" temp was near 50*F

Scott (should have brought the squirmy worms) B

[hoglaw]

Two trips ago I had identical conditions but hardly fly fished. Caught a couple good ones in the McClellan's area on an egg/midge combo. Whacked them on jigs.

This last trip I committed to fly fishing more. Wasn't a banner day, but we put in right when they shut off the generator and stopped at most of the runs. I was getting a lot of bites and connecting with maybe half of them on a czech nymph set up with a really heavy fly at the bottom, and a zebra midge tied on a dropper about 18" above it. It's a pretty effective way to fish some of those faster flowing deep areas. Haven't even though of fishing anything dry for a while.