Tag: Flies

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Spring Creek, State College, Pennsylvania, May 12, 2021.

Some Egocentric Background

I’m a pretty mediocre fly fisher. There are other things I do well, complex things, enviable things, useful things. I am, I think, a good husband, a good father, and a good lawyer. I’m curious, and reasonably quick on the uptake. If you wanted to elect someone as Benevolent Overlord, I’d be an excellent candidate.

Me, demonstrating one of my higher level fishing skills. I demonstrated similar prowess in Pennsylvania.

Still, my knowledge of trout fishing is weak. I know trout live in rivers (and also lakes), I know they eat bugs (and also fish and freshwater mollusks), and I know that when I catch one it’s more often than not pure happenstance. I’m a greedy man though, and more than most things I want to know how to fish for trout. Fifty years later all those wasted adolescent hours studying Field and Stream have left me ambitious.

Parts of Pennsylvania, along with a few other American places–the Catskills and Yellowstone come to mind–are trout fishing holy ground. Fly fishing lore is loaded with Pennsylvania names; Vince Marinaro, Charlie Fox, and Ed Shenk at Letort Spring Run, Bob Clouser on the Susquehanna, and, at State College, Bob Harvey, Joe Humphries, and most recently George Daniel. I suspect there are several reasons Pennsylvania’s such fertile ground: a lot of great streams spread across the state, an outdoors recreation tradition, just enough leisure and money, and–and this is peculiarly my own invention–a manufacturing industry that encouraged Pennsylvanians to think in a peculiar way. It’s probably nonsense, but I like to think there’s a tie between Pennsylvanian’s aptness with the mechanics of fly fishing and their aptness with the mechanics of industry.

Philadelphia to State College and the Crick

I rarely get messages on this blog, and except for one article*, I’m pretty convinced that nobody ever reads it but Kris and a cadre of hackers from Mainland China. That’s ok, I write it for Kris, and as for the hackers I’m glad for the attention. Last year though Jim Litrum left a message on the blog. He asked if I’d been at Joan Wulf’s school the previous June, and I thought that sounded about right. He volunteers at the schools and said he remembered me. I didn’t think I disrupted class that much.

Jim said that when we came to Pennsylvania, we should go to State College and he’d introduce us to some people. State College, population circa 42,000, is nigh on the state’s center. It’s the home of Penn State**. We were planning, then Covid shut everything down. 

As part of our 2020 planning I had booked Dom Swentosky as a guide for two days in May near State College. I admired Dom’s writing, and he coached little league so if nothing else we could talk about baseball. When Kris and I re-planned for May 2021, we had one spare day and Jim said we should fish Spring Creek, State College. 

Actually he said Spring Crick. Did you know Pennsylvanians say Crick, not Creek? Apparently in the Mid-Atlantic (including Pennsylvania) and the South (except for Texas), proper pronunciation is crick. Of all Southerners, only us Texans stubbornly say creek, with a long e. We also say buy-you, not buy-yo, so what the hell do we know? We got that wrong too. You can’t rhyme “Goodby Joe/Me gotta go” with buy-you, not even right here in Buy-you City. 

So on Jim’s advice we went to State College a day earlier than we had originally planned. We had dinner with Jim, and it was a great dinner, in a good place, and Jim, who I’d only talked to on the phone, is a pretty funny guy, particularly after a martini. Plus I tricked him into agreeing to buy breakfast the next morning. Hah!

The Mayor of Spring Creek.

Jim grew up in Pennsylvania, went to the Merchant Marine Academy and then the Navy, and after the navy spent a career in the chemical industry. He retired to State College to fish (after a stint in the Keys), then for family moved two hours southwest, still in Pennsylvania. On Wednesday we had breakfast with Jim and his friend Chris at the Waffle Shop. Jim paid. Hah! 

We followed Chris to Fisherman’s Paradise on Spring Creek. I kid-you-not. Pennsylvanians had the nerve to name the place Fisherman’s Paradise and put it right there on the map.

Jim’s friend Chris is a former army colonel who retired to State College to . . . fish. This is a recurring theme here. Retired. Fish. And Chris fishes. Chris fishes every day, or almost every day. He spends 300+ days a year on the water, mostly on Spring Creek. Jim called him the Mayor of Spring Creek. When we fished with Dom he said that Chris was the best dry fly fisher that Dom knew. Dom said that on those 300+ days that Chris fishes Spring Creek, he always fishes dry flies, and that he catches fish on a dry every month of the year. He said that some months Chris was fishing midges so tiny . . . Well, I can’t come up with a metaphor for so tiny. Really tiny, teensy, too small to see on the water, too small to count most days as more than a smudge, and on Pennsylvania February days when everybody and everything sane (including bugs and fish) are home in front of the heating vent, Chris is fishing Spring Creek, in shorts, watching where his smudge might be–Chris can’t possibly see his fly–watching for the suggestion of a rising fish, and catching fish. That’s crazy. That’s good.

Of course this is all hearsay and imagination, and will remain so. I’m not going fishing in Pennsylvania in February to see if it’s true.

Spring Creek might not be considered much of a place to be mayor of, it’s neither very wide nor very deep, but if you’re mayor of a trout population, it’s a large constituency. According to Jim, where we fished Spring Creek holds about 4000 wild brown trout per river mile. That’s a lot, and the best parts of the Creek are never stocked. There are no rainbows, no brookies (though certainly there once were), just wild brown trout. The trout can run larger than 20 inches, but most we saw–ok, ok, the one that through random dumb luck and Jim’s good advice I actually caught–was probably about 10 inches. I suspect that’s pretty common. 

The river is spring fed,*** so flows are reasonably constant, both as to volume and temperature. Jim explained it to me. Beneath us and the topsoil was limestone. Limestone is permeable. Water filters down into the limestone, cools, and leaches mineral deposits. As new water seeps in, old water is pushed up and out. First-in, first-out. My finance lawyer brain can understand that. Spring Creek’s springs are the products of FIFO accounting. 

The Spring Creek limestone was formed from invertebrate deposits settling from ancient seas that eons ago covered Central Pennsylvania.**** When the spring water emerges from the limestone, it brings along the leached minerals from the ancient dead things, and the mineral nutrients that once fed the ancient dead things can now do double duty, this time feeding new invertebrates that feed the mayflies and caddises that feed the brown trout. Lots of brown trout. The world’s motherload of brown trout. And Jim and the Mayor and their friends are there to fish those brown trout. 300+ days a year, including February. 

Jim and the Mayor and Friends

With Jim’s guidance I caught my trout early. Kris fished with the Mayor and caught one a bit later. I guess it goes without saying that we were fishing dries. Jim and the Mayor fish dries. These days nymph fishing is all the rage among trout anglers, and most of the best new writing about trout fishing is about the unexpected complexities of nymph fishing, but watching a bobber hesitate can’t compare with watching a fish rise. The Mayor and Jim fish dries.

And we met the guys. I don’t know what Jim told people, or maybe everybody just shows up at Spring Creek every day, but it seemed that morning everybody started showing up. There was the retired Penn State biology professor, Art the retired Penn State engineering professor, and Luke from the local fly shop, Angler’s Paradise. I apologize that I can’t remember names, or everyone. There was Dan Shields, who literally wrote the book about Spring Creek, and Dan gave me a copy.***** We had to fish in front of these people. These people actually know how to fish.

It was the sulphur mayfly season, so Jim (who’d offered whatever flies I needed, which was helpful since Chris pronounced my 40-years of randomly accumulated dry flies worthless for the sulfur hatch), tied a size 16 sulpher on my line. I fished that all day. I was casting ok, and my drifts were mostly ok, but I probably missed a half-dozen rises. Jim gently–ok maybe not so gently–pointed out that my hook sets were horrible because my line management was horrible, that I left my left hand, my line hand, off the line too often, that I left too much slack line on the water, and that by the time I cleared the enormous line slack the striking fish had sent a couple of texts, called in a dinner reservation, and readjusted the car radio to find the ballgame. Sulfer duns were coming off the water, so the mayflies were cooperating, and I was getting rises. My biggest problem was that the trout didn’t have the courtesy to hook themselves, and apparently I was too polite to do it for them. 

Towards the end of the day I was fishing up river from the bridge with Jim and Art, and I watched Art catch fish. His casts were all just a foot or five finer than mine, his drifts were just a bit-to-a-whole-lot cleaner, his hook sets were, well, he set the hook. Mid-afternoon Kris and I left the creek to check into our room, and then Kris had us back at Fisherman’s Paradise for the evening’s spinner fall. In the roughly three hours we were gone Jim caught and named most of the fish in the Creek. That part anyway.

What These Guys Got

Jim said that he and Chris would fish until dark because the best fishing of the day would be the spinner fall–after mayflies emerge from the stream as duns, their lives consist mostly of partying, laying eggs, and falling dead back to the water as spinners. I didn’t fish much that evening, for some reason I couldn’t see my fly and for some reason I didn’t trust my fly or my fishing, so I just watched. Kris was having a fine old time, but I was oddly unsettled. Our companions were so knowledgeable, so practiced, so accustomed to their water, and while I was happy just to watch them, I was also a bit jealous. Ok, more than a bit.

One of the downsides to our gallivanting around to fish is that it’s a great way to travel, but a lousy way to fish. I have learned a lot about visiting places, but not so much about catching fish. These guys stayed put in a place worth staying put and had learned how to fish.

I sat down a night or so later and read parts of Dan Shields Fly Fishing Pennsylvania’s Spring Creek, and I’ve read it off and on since. Dan covers the year at Spring Creek, nymphs and dries, and he covers the miles of the river. There are parts of it that unfortunately I’ll never need:

Fall brings some decent hatches of Trichotera, Tan Caddis in #16-18 and a larger fly in #14 produce interesting fishing.

I say unfortunate because I doubt I’ll be back to Spring Creek in the fall. My loss.

There are also things Dan writes that could be said for most bodies of water:

Improve stormwater detention basins. They should trap, filter, and permit water to seep into the ground instead of pollute streams.

Of course in Houston we need detention basins to keep from drowning, which selfishly encourages detention more than any aversion to our considerable non-point source pollution, but that judgment could be written for any urban area near a body of water.

Entertainment isn’t Dan’s goal either, though at times he’s flat-out amusing, at least in a fly-fishing sort of way:

Spring Creek trout see more different imitations than I do, and I work in a fly shop.

But Dan’s not really writing to amuse. Where Dan shines brightest is in his description of the place, its geological and human history, its biology and ecological fragility, its provenance, if you will. Dan is thorough, careful, and writing from his obvious affection and knowledge. You may from time to time get some information out of me, but I assure you, it’s purely accidental and completely unintended. Dan on the other hand knows Spring Creek, and he willingly shares the considerable stuff he knows. It’s not casual knowledge, either, he’s worked for it. It’s a small book, but it’s a glimpse of love for a place worth loving.

No wonder I envied these guys.

Postscript

Before we left, at the end of the evening when we were losing the light, while I was moping about feeling wistful and debating with myself whether I had ever actually seen a spinner, or knew what one was, Kris caught one last trout. Sometimes I envy my fishing partner too.

* For some reason, I have one blog post that gets hits almost every day. It’s about Pyramid Lake ladders, and was published April 1, 2019, which should tell you everything you need to know. I feel sorry for the poor people who stumble across that post looking for information.

**I’m guessing that’s where State College got its name.

***I’m guessing that’s where Spring Creek got its name.

****This may qualify as the worst sentence I’ve ever written, and since I’m a lawyer it’s got considerable competition. I thought about rewriting it, but it was so marvelously bad, I had to let it be. It reads like I stole it from the introductory paragraph to Chapter 4 of your 8th grade earth science textbook.

*****Daniel L. Shields, Fly Fishing Pennsylvania’s Spring Creek, DLS Enterprises, P.O. Box 41, Lemont, Pa 16851. Dan’s book is self-published in the best way, by taking it to a local printer.

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Brandywine Creek, Delaware, May 10, 2021.

Last year I read some about Delaware, and wrote some. A couple of weeks ago I read some more, and wrote some more. I tried to imagine the place, and I mostly got it wrong. In my head I pictured grimy streets and run-down buildings full of sketchy situations, and I’m sure there’s some of that in parts of Wilmington. Where we were though was lovely.

We did make it as far as the center of Wilmington, but for the most part we were in the suburban buffer between Wilmington and Philadelphia. Suburban Wilmington is what mini-mansions aspire to. Graceful houses with some age, screened by trees, bordered by lawns, adorned in the spring with flowering everything.  I think if somebody threw a beer can out their car window, in a couple of hours it would flower. It was clean, lush, established, and with just enough unmanicured space. 

Terry Peach guides out of his shop, A Marblehead Flyfisher. When we planned this trip pre-Covid, Terry warned me that fishing near Wilmington was urban fishing. I get why Terry said that. Most of us imagine fly fishing in a mountain wilderness. This wasn’t wilderness, so Terry did his job: one expectation managed. For me though “urban” conjured scrambling down the slope of a half-eroded, half-concreted drainage ditch in a sketchy part of town to get a cast to a carp.  What Terry told me was that we’d be fishing in an urban park, probably solely to knock notions of wilderness out of my head. All I heard though was urban. When I got to the Brandywine I was surprised that it was a nice park, a lovely park, the park of the morning of the world. Ok, it wasn’t really Eden, it wasn’t Yellowstone, but it was pretty. This wasn’t ditch water.

This park, Brandywine Park, runs along both sides of Brandywine Creek and is populated by joggers, people walking dogs and pushing strollers, rose gardens, anglers (all of whom seemed to know Terry), bank riparian zones, and safe parking. It’s location was apparently blessed by Frederick Law Olmstead, though that was probably before the nation’s eastern-most interstate, I-95, transected it on its way from Miami to the Canadian border. Where we fished, upstream of the interstate overpass, the park is a mix of natural and pampered green growth. If Delaware mangroves could survive the cold, they’d be pretty lush mangroves.

Google Earth

The Brandywine (which is the best name for a body of water ever, and which is also the name of the river in the Shire) flows out of Pennsylvania and into Wilmington where it meets the Christina River and then flows into Delaware Bay. The Christina in Wilmington is tidal, but we were too far upriver, about two miles I think, to be affected by the tides. Terry put us fewer than 10 feet off the right bank, just below the first dam, née the second dam. The former first dam was removed because it was in bad shape, and as a side-benefit the open water encouraged shad migration, and there’s plenty of discussion about removing more dams for the shad. The first dam, née the second dam, is part of the Wilmington freshwater supply system though, so it’s unlikely it will ever be removed. Kris asked why there wasn’t a fish ladder, or elevator, or some such. Terry said ladders were expensive, both to build and maintain, and the local government had other priorities. Shad don’t vote.

Water was apparently high, and not as clear as it might be with lower flows. To avoid backcasts–which because of bank growth would have caught a lot more trees than fish–we fished Terry’s Sage Z-Axis spey rods. They were shorter than some two-handed rods, 11-foot 7 weights. I’d last cast a spey rod more than a year ago in Washington State, and then only for a day. I broke my rod, but I didn’t mention that to Terry. I learned my lesson, to get the tip down to the water on the snap-T, and anyway some things are better off forgotten. 

We fished skagit lines without a sink tip. Terry said some interesting things about lines, that different lines worked differently with different rods, and that some lines made some rods sing–of course you have to be able to cast worth a damn to make that true, and I doubt I’d know the difference. He said though that as a local fly shop owner it was his job to know which lines worked best with which rods.

American shad are mostly filter feeders, plankton is their favorite gamefish, and coming from the salt into freshwater to spawn they’re not eating anyway. They have one thing on their tiny fish brains–par-tee! It’s orgy time, and Terry said they would move fast upriver to spawn until something stopped them and they stacked. That’s where he said we wanted to fish, where they stacked, either to rest in front of an obstacle before their next run or because they couldn’t go any further. Our job was to set up and let the fish come to us. There were natural obstacles that would work, slots where the river changed levels for instance, but we set up below the dam because that was the biggest obstacle of all. The dam stops fish. 

There are plenty of theories about why filter-feeding American shad take a fly; anger, curiosity, raging hormones, maybe even that shad don’t just filter feed and they’re taking small fish out of habit. Terry said that because they don’t have fingers, the only way a shad can swat an annoyance is to use its mouth. It sees something in its face, and it’s like swatting a mosquito, but look Ma, no hands!

Because shad aren’t really feeding, the flies don’t really match anything. Shad fishing is extreme attractor fishing; maybe distractor fishing would be more accurate. The flies are various heavyweights of bright stuff. A combination of hot pink and chartreuse isn’t a typical selection of fly colors, even in salt water. The shad flies are meant to hang in the water column in fast water and provoke a response, not to imitate.

We were on river right, so to cast we used a double spey cast over our left downriver shoulder. The casts were across, sometimes even a bit upriver, and at specific targets. They weren’t long, I was at most 10 feet into the running line, which may have been because that’s about as far into the running line as I could cast. Watching Kris, it looked like she was casting much better than me, though I am proud that I didn’t break any rods. She wasn’t shooting any line (I could shoot a magnificent five or six feet), but her loops were tight and consistent. Terry did a great job coaching both of us.

Terry had us cast, mend, try to follow a current line as far as we could, and then let the fly swing. Then wait. Then wait. Then wait some more. The dangle, he called it. Terry said that was where shad most often hit the fly, when it was unnaturally dangling in the current. I told him he ought to come up with a song for people to sing to hold the dangle as long as he wanted. I tried singing “Happy Birthday” because it was all I could really think of, but I got sick of it. Next time I think I’ll memorize the lyrics to “Cool Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers, or maybe Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” There has to be something better than “Happy Birthday,” and singing Al Green is always worthwhile.

Because there will be a next time. One of us didn’t catch a fish. The problem wasn’t us, not completely us anyway, and Kris caught what Terry called a fall fish, which in Delaware is anything that’s not a gamefish. It was some kind of chub. Kris doesn’t have to go back to Delaware, but I do, and I suspect she’ll come along. We really didn’t spend nearly enough time there.

The big problem in the Brandywine was that the water was too cold and the shad weren’t there. It was cold when we got to Delaware, and it never really warmed. Terry said we’d picked the perfect time of year, but that it was freakishly cold, that the water temperature needed to be above 60 or the shad would run back into deeper water in the Christina. I’m afraid we all need to get used to saying that: I didn’t catch a fish because the weather was freakishly [cold][hot][dry][wet][windy][whatever]. It’s our new global warming paradigm for not catching fish.

It’s also the problem with allowing one day to catch a fish. We’re already burdened with less than stellar skills, we’re fishing in unfamiliar places, and sometimes it’s just not going to happen. That’s ok. I’d like to see more of Delaware.

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Arkansas Packing List, Part I

Vaccines

We had ’em, two of ’em each, plus the 10 days’ grace period. No side effects, though I’m certain that Hillary Clinton is telling me it’s time for another trip to Arkansas.

Besides mind control (of which I’m all in favor–not having to make decisions seems like a real boon), my friend Limey tells me that the CDC has determined that with rare exceptions the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines prevent virus infections, and don’t just lessen the symptoms. I need to check to see where Limey got his information, but part of me wants not to check and believe what’s most favorable to my world-view. I guess I’m having a fake news moment.

Apparently everybody in Arkansas and East Texas has already had the vaccine, because there wasn’t much social distancing or mask wearing. In a gas station, the cashier pulled down her mask so that I could hear her answer my question. I’m pretty sure I’d have heard her anyway, but I guess she figured I needed to read her lips. In a cafe, another cashier told the couple waiting for a table at the register that I was brave so they didn’t need to move. I told her I wasn’t brave at all. Actually, I think I’m brave enough, but I’m not stupid. I am both a baseball fan and a fisherman, so my outlook starts from superstitious, and as a lawyer I’m always belt and suspenders. Why test fate?

We wouldn’t have gone into restaurants without the vaccine, which leads me to

Where We Ate

It’s just as well that fine dining is a consideration but not a requirement, because there isn’t a lot of fine dining in Arkansas. There is some, in Bentonville and Little Rock, but Arkansas doesn’t really rival Paris, France. On the whole it’s a cheap-food-and-lots-of-it kind of cuisine. There’s nothing wrong with that, but as often as not it’s not something one wants to remember.

Kris and I both like to cook, and even before the pandemic we cooked at home most days. Restaurants are rare, so maybe I think more about them than I should. What good things make me remember a restaurant? I can remember some places vividly, a fish place in the Keys where the fish was great and the couples next to us argued about Donald Trump, a dinner at Three Brothers Serbian in Milwaukee with our friends Tom and Sal, a weekend of ethnic eating in Chicago suggested by Tom, a Basque place in Reno (again suggested by Tom) where we sat at a communal table. . . As often as not I remember places because they are great food, sure, but I think as much because they tell me something about the place. I hated Voodoo Donuts in Portland, bad service, bad food, too many gimmicks, but it did tell me something about Portland. That’s not, though, memory created by good things.

On our January pre-Arkansas fishing excursion, we ate at the Hive in Bentonville. The Hive is generic American imaginative–the kind of place you can now find in almost any urban area From Sea to Shining Sea, with pretty similar menus. It was just fine, had a good wine list, and could have been anywhere, from the Wine Country to Connecticut.

So for this Arkansas trip I tried to figure out where Arkansans thought was essential Arkansas eating. A lot of the places were further west than us, a lot involved fried catfish (which I like), and none were in Heber Springs where we stayed. We had been to Heber Springs before, and pretty much knew what was there. I wouldn’t let the food keep me away from Heber Springs, but I wouldn’t go back for it.

On the way to Heber Springs, we drove out of our way to the Bulldog Restaurant in Bald Knob, because (1) who doesn’t want to visit Bald Knob, and (2) they were supposed to have excellent strawberry shortcake. It has excellent strawberry shortcake because Central Arkansas is, apparently, a strawberry-growing region, and there were no strawberries yet, so no strawberry shortcake. We had a good burger and fries, thought it looked like the people at the next table ordered smarter than us. They always do.

On the way home, we ate breakfast at Cheryl’s Diner in Cabot for their chocolate gravy. Apparently chocolate gravy on biscuits is a breakfast thing in Arkansas. If you can imagine a slightly creamier version of chocolate pudding slathered onto a biscuit, you have chocolate biscuits. I like biscuits. I like cream gravy. I have now had chocolate gravy on biscuits. It was certainly memorable. I would go back for Cheryl’s cream gravy on biscuits.

We skipped a last meal in Arkansas and made it to Jefferson, Texas, to Riverport Barbecue, which is on the Texas Monthly top-50 list. It was 3 in the afternoon, and they were out of just about everything. Except for me and one teenager, no one wore a mask. That teenager was a rebel, and so was I.

We did eat at a great place in Shreveport, Strawn’s Eat Shop, recommended by my high school classmate Cindy (who lives in Shreveport). Great strawberry and coconut icebox pie, and chicken fried steak as part of it’s meat and three lunch special. Larry McMurtry once wrote that only a rank degenerate would drive across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak. We weren’t in Texas, but still. Avoiding rank degeneracy should always be a goal, though some degeneracy probably doesn’t hurt. Cindy texted that Strawn’s would be a good place for a reality TV show: The Waitresses of Strawn’s Eat Shop. Thanks Cindy. You’re right, both about the waitresses and Strawn’s Eat Shop.

The Drive

What’s it like driving up I-40 through Arkansas? It’s like this:

Gear

We took trout stuff; a 9-foot 6 weight for streamers, a 10-foot 4 weight and a 10-foot 3 weight, and a couple of 9-foot 5 weights (because you have to have a five-weight when you fish for trout, even if you never use it). All had reels with floating lines. We fished them all except my Winston 5 weight.

There is a story with the 4 weight, a Thomas & Thomas Avantt that four years ago I’d bought on sale. This year Kris gave me a Thomas & Thomas 10-foot 3 weight for my birthday. 

Here’s the thing about all that weight stuff: with fly fishing, it’s usually the weight of the line that lets you cast the fly, so you match a 3 weight rod to a 3 weight line. You can overline, you can match a 3 weight rod with a 4 weight line, or underline–I’ll let you figure that out yourself–but all of that is nerdy fiddling. Weights and lines are pretty much standardized (if a bit esoteric).

Anyway, I thought I’d taken the new 3 weight, but had accidentally taken the 4 weight. Do I need both these rods that do pretty much the same thing? What a silly question, of course I do. The thing was, I thought I’d taken the 3 weight until I got home. I put a 3 weight line on the 4 weight, and never noticed anything wrong. We had so much weight on the rigs, both with heavy weighted flies and split shot, and all the casts were so short, it made no difference. Not to me anyway. 

All the weighted flies and split shot were to get the flies down in the river as quick as possible and then keep them there. And also to smack me in the back of the head if I tried to get fancy with my casting.

Flies

I’m a firm believer that if I’m fishing with a guide, I should use the flies that the guide brings to the river. It’s funny though, I always look at what should fish in a place, and usually try to tie a few things to fish there. This time I tied some big streamers, Barr’s meat whistles, and fished them for a bit. I foul hooked–snagged–one rainbow in the gill plate, but nothing else. I decided streamer fishing was a lot of work for low reward and stuck to the guide’s stuff. I’ll use the excuse on the streamers that my shoulder’s been hurting.

Drew started us out with mop flies (and I could go into a long digression on mop flies, but won’t), but then switched me to a marabou jig fly, and that worked better. He really liked the jig flies, and bought them pre-tied from Little Rock. He claimed that you could catch anything with a jig fly, and frankly I thought they looked like the perfect fly for crappie and white bass.

Thirty years ago in Arkansas, scud flies were all the rage. Scud flies are an underwater fly that is supposed to look like a shrimp-related crustacean called, of all things, a scud. I don’t think it has anything to do with the missile. Think roly-polies, doodle bugs, but in water. I have never been able to imagine the fly, though from time to time I’ve tried to tie them. Drew said that a study from ASU (translation, Arkansas State University) had determined that scuds were Arkansas trouts’ primary food, and that Arkansans still heavily fished scud flies because Arkansas trout still ate them. He put one on a dropper on Kris’s rig. I thought Oh boy, I’ll see a scud fly, and then I forgot to take a look. I guess I was busy watching my orange bobber.

The second day we fished shallower, and Drew had us fish hare’s ear nymphs, which are about as traditional a fly as nymphs can be. His flies were sparse, and tied on tiny jig hooks. 

When we came back I tied more Barr’s meat whistles–I wanted to go ahead and use up my cache of streamer jig hooks, and yesterday I fished a purple one at Damon’s. I caught my largest bass in a while, and I watched it crash across a sandy flat to hit the fly. The meat whistle’s usually thought of as a trout streamer, but as often as not, fish are fish. Next time I’ll try a marabou jig fly.

Terrible picture, I know. But it was a big fish, and I wanted to keep it in the water. The purple smudge in the vicinity of its mouth is a purple Barr’s meat whistle.

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Little Red and Norfork Rivers, Arkansas, March 18-19, 2021

We planned to fish Arkansas last April, but then coronavirus. We delayed. We delayed some more. We finally delayed a year, less a couple of weeks.

We should have gone last April. People now are maskless and uninhibited, and we might have been safer traveling during the first days of the pandemic. At least more people were worried then. Traveling this week through East Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, people are done with being careful. Some of it I suspect is mulish stubbornness–contrariness (can you imagine an East Texan or Arkansan being contrary?); I don’t need no stinkin’ seat belt and you don’t need one either. Some of it is exhaustion and the strong gravity of normalcy. There weren’t a lot of masks, and no particular effort to distance. Restaurants were packed. My guess is that we’re in a close race between vaccinations and another upsurge. 

At least it’s spring. Ok, technically today when I’m writing is the first day of spring, and we fished the last days of winter, but this is the South. The dogwoods and redbuds are blooming and beautiful. It was cold though. We caught an unseasonable cold front and it was 36° when we left Heber Springs. It was as cold or colder the two days we fished. I wore long underwear, ear flaps, and wind gear because not only was it cold, it was blowing. And blowing. Don’t forget the blowing.

It never rained. That’s a good thing, and the second afternoon it warmed up and the sun shone. Shined? Was shining.

We fished with Rouse Fly Fishing. I finally re-booked because Jamie Rouse was a February guest on Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis podcast, which always inspires me. There are three year-round trout rivers in Arkansas: the White, the Little Red, and the Norfork. The trout are all below dams built for power generation and flood control. The White is the longest of the three, with its headwaters in the Boston Mountains in Northwest Arkansas. It flows first perversely north into Missouri, then turns southeast again to cross the state and meet the Mississippi near Rosedale. Rosedale, as you may know, is where you sell your soul to the devil to play the blues. I don’t know whether the White is interested in the blues, but at 720 miles, it moves a lot of water.

Rouse’s guides guide in all three rivers, though truth be told it’s 100 winding miles from Heber Springs to the main fishing on the White. For the White they may not be the most efficient guide choice. It’s ok though, fly fishing is popular in northwest Arkansas, and if you really want to fish the White, Rouse will guide there, and if not you can’t throw a rock in towns like Cotter without hitting a fishing guide. Every hamlet and holler seems to have its fly shop.

Both the Little Red and Norfork are tributaries to the White. Of course none of these rivers were originally cold water rivers, none of them originally held trout. Arkansas is in the southern native range for smallmouth bass, so before the dams they presumably held some combination of smallmouth and largemouth bass, catfish, sunfish, and plenty of other stuff: the Ozark Plateau is one of the richest areas in these United States for different documented fish species. Seventy-four different species of fish have been identified in the nearby Buffalo River.

With the steady cold water releases from the dams, the species list in the three rivers below the dams narrows until only two are ever talked about, rainbow trout and brown trout. The Little Red is an eight hour drive from Houston, even closer to Dallas and Memphis and Oklahoma City. While there are other trout streams that are closer, the three rivers are a draw for trout anglers, and they hold a lot of catchable trout. Stocked fish mostly, and the rivers are not really wadable (though I’ve read that it is possible to wade near the Norfork dam). Still, they have produced world-record brown trout, and there is reproduction of wild fish. All of the brown trout in the Little Red are wild. In any event, when your home fisheries in Texas and Kansas and West Tennessee don’t include a lot of trout, the three Arkansas rivers are a draw.

Our guide was Drew Wilson. I don’t think Kris and I are particularly hard clients to guide. We didn’t hook Drew, not hard anyway. We didn’t break anything on his boat or any of his equipment. We didn’t even get tangled more than the national average.

The first day with Drew we fished the Little Red. Kris and I had fished the Little Red once before, four years ago in summer, and it was a different fishery then. I guess every river every day is a different river. In a river where, depending on dam releases, it can rise or fall nine feet in a day, that seems especially true. When we fished with Rouse four years ago flow was low, and I threw mostly streamers, big Barr’s meat whistles and smaller clousers. I caught some big fish, and some browns. Like I said, brown trout in the Little Red are always wild.

This trip the river ran deeper, and on the Little Red we fished marabou jig flies with plenty of weight, eight feet deep on a straight six pound leader below a two foot stiff butt section and a big Thingamabobber indicator–a bobber. It’s funny. Fly anglers are language squeamish. Kris drives me crazy when she calls her fly rod a pole, and I suspect she does it on purpose. Flies are flies, not lures. But with bobbers anglers don’t let their squeamishness get in the way of the truth. We take joy in calling those big round indicators bobbers. What did we see in Arkansas? We saw a big orange bobber floating down a river.

Usually when Kris and I fish with guides, we talk with the guide about everything; children, significant others, schools and jobs and where each of us came from and where we think we’re going. With Drew there wasn’t much of that. I doubt if Drew knows that we’re both lawyers, or have children, and we don’t know whether Drew finished college or whether he has a significant other. Kris never once talked about politics (which may be a sign that at least for Kris the election is finally over). We talked about fish, about rivers, about rigging and flies and boats and rods. The conversations were easy and amusing and we liked Drew immensely. As a guide he was attentive and capable, knowing and unflappable. As a companion for two days he was fun. He even mentioned books he liked, though all of them were about fishing.

And we talked about our dogs. You can’t not talk about dogs. And we caught a lot of fish.

Northwest Arkansas is also popular with gear fishers, and the second day on the Norfork there was a spin fish armada. Out of maybe 15 boats, we were the only fly anglers I saw. The Norfork below the dam is a short river, about five and a half miles long, and because of lower flows we only got within a mile or so of the dam. By day’s end we’d been pushed even further down river, and boats were stacked at the confluence with the White. We were motoring up and floating down the same mile over and over. We started the morning with the deep-water rigs we had used on the Little Red, but ended with a tiny foam tab indicator five or six feet over, of all things, a hare’s ear nymph. It almost felt wrong using such a traditional fly, and a single fly to boot. Where’s my mop fly! Where’s my squirmy worm! Don’t you want me to catch fish?

We caught a lot of fish.

Maybe it was because of the sunshine and the afternoon’s warmer weather, maybe it was the novelty of the river or the pleasure of the lighter rigging, or maybe I just finally caught the rhythm of the fishing, but notwithstanding the crowds I enjoyed fishing the Norfork more than the Little Red. We didn’t catch more fish on the Norfork, but we caught a lot of fish.

Two fairly technical notes. First, Arkansas river boats are unique. On the three rivers gear fishers and fly fishers fish from more or less the same boats, with fly guides likely to have added oar locks and oars. They’re long, fairly narrow, shallow draft rectangles, Jon boats, built from aluminum or fiberglass. Motors are relatively small, Drew’s boat had a 40 HP, and guides favor jet motors instead of props. With their flat bottoms they’re probably more like rowing rubber rafts than the classic high-rockered drift boat, but they’re comfortable to fish from and well designed for Arkansas.

Second, the first day I fished a 10′ 4 wt Thomas & Thomas Avantt rod that I’d bought a few years ago. Nine foot is kind of the standard for fly rods, but there’s a theoretical advantage to a longer rod because they can cast farther. There’s a theoretical disadvantage in loss of accuracy, but none of the theory mattered anyway. None of our casts were much more than 20 feet.

Kris fished a 9′ 5 wt on the Little Red, but the second day she fished a 10’6″ Orvis Helios 3 wt that she’d bought herself for my birthday. It maybe the longest single-handed rod on the market. I don’t know about the other theoretical advantages of the longer rods, but they shine at managing line on the water. Most of the work fishing rivers isn’t casting or playing fish, it’s the constant adjustments to the line to achieve a drag-free drift. It is the hardest work of the day, and that extra foot, or in Kris’s case that extra foot-and-a-half, is a noticeable advantage.

Interestingly, I liked the Thomas & Thomas better than the Orvis, but I suspect it was because we had a much lighter reel on the T&T, and because I’d fished it for a day before before I tried the Orvis. Plus it was Blue. Color matters.

On our last drift of the day, down through the spin-fish armada and into the White, the fish got hot. We landed fish after fish, and when we landed a double the gear fishers in the next boat applauded. When we reached the White (at least I’m saying we were in the White–that way I can claim a fish in all three rivers), I landed my final fish of the day, and the only brown of the trip. Drew offered to take us on another drift, but why would we? How could things get better?