Good Holliday Fishing

[Yakfly]

I thought I'd join in and give another report about the good trout fishing recently experienced on the White.

Right after Christmas, I fished the Buffalo City area with a buddy and the fishing could not have been better. We had dead low water levels for 4 days. We kept the flies small and the tippets a little thinner that usual. Didn't catch any trophies, and only a few brown trout, but the rainbow bite was ON!

Two days, we fished the top of Smith Island - Buffalo and White River confluence area on dead low water. Easy wading, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. The most productive flies were black woolly worms with a red yarn tail in size 14, and dark olive/black woolly buggers with beadhead in size 12 - I guess that's really a "mini bugger". My buddy and I are novice fly fishers at best , but steadily caught rainbows with a few browns mixed in, rate of 20 or so each in a 3 hour session.

On the back side of Smith Island, fishing those deep holes (even at 0 generation, they are fast and deep here) was difficult with floating line rig, even with bigger weighted streamers and added split shot. Switched over to spin tackle and caught several nice bows - next time I'm going to bring a sink fly line for this area.

Two other days we fished Buffalo Shoals - again dead low water, so we could wade the entire mile of shoals pretty much. In two days I think we saw only 4 other anglers. At dead low flows, its a paradise of pocket water and runs, nice riffles everywhere. Again, the go to flies were black woolly buggers and worms. The flat water up at Crane Island was the most productive. Caught a few rainbows that were 16 inchers, with deep pink/red coloration. You could tell these had been in the river a while with nice full fins and they really put up a battle when hooked. I tried soft hackles which usually work well for me in the riffle water, but didn't get a take on any SH flies.

All in all a great trip. Weather was cold but enjoyable if you layer up properly. I also rediscovered the woolly worm - a simple fly that I'll be fishing more often.

I hope everyone has a great 08 and I'll see you on the rivers. Thanks for all the posts and reports here, I've learned a lot- it's really helped my fishing and helped me have a lot of fun on the water!