Round Spring Access

[trouty mouth]

Me and the boys knocked out the float this past weekend. It was an awesome day with great weather and good water. 

We did use the upper access at Round Spring. The foot bridge over the river was really cool to walk up and check out. 

If I did it again, I would use the middle or lower. The upper Access has partial concrete ramp and is shady and easy to get in and out of, but it was a mad house with all the people using Carr's canoe rentals. The parking lots were overflowed and we had to park in some grass (not my favorite play) at the suggestion from a Carr's employee directing traffic. 

We passed the middle access on the river and there were a couple cars parked and a family hanging out. It seemed like a good spot to launch. 

We stopped at the lower access to check out the spring outlet. It had a couple cars on it and a dumpster. There was a good amount of shade you could tuck your truck/car into for the day too. There were some toilets about 200 yards up the road in the campground. This also looked like a great spot to launch from. 

On the river we passed only 3 or 4 other paddling groups. We finished 12 miles to Jerktail in about 7 hours.

Fishing:  The smallies were active and I had good action all the way down. The hot bait for me was a beetle spin with a curly grub, but any baitfish pattern was getting hit good. All of my fish came out of fast runs and I couldn't hook up with any of the fish out of the deep holes -- I saw them and would move them, but they didn't want to take anything from me. All fish caught were between 8 and 11 inches and I didn't see but maybe one or two fish that would have been keepers all day. 

 

8 or 9 miles downriver we ran into our first of many jetboats. I am a kayaker experienced with sharing the river with jet boats, but it was a jet zoo after that point and a couple of our guys were getting buzzed pretty darn close. I picked up from talking to some other people that the Jacks Fork was blown out from Friday's rain and everything below Two Rivers was crap. I think that may have pushed everybody upstream.

We had one of our guys roll his kayak in a run after yielding to 4 jets coming down stream. He was trying his best to drag his water filled boat out of the run and we had another line of boats coming at us. I hopped up out of my boat and tried to flag the jets down to get them to chill for a minute so we could get out of the way and it mostly worked. They were so darn impatient that they gave us hardly enough time to get out of their way before another 4 of them ran through -- chopping up all the water and further swamping and wrecking my poor guys kayak. This happened about 1/3 mile up from Jerktail. 

-- if someone was out there and remember me flagging you down and you are reading this:  you're an asshole and need to rethink your relationship to the river, the outdoors, and your fellow river people. --