Fly Fishing Report – May 25,26,& 27 – 2020

Teamwork

Sometimes it takes a team to get it done.

Daron was back on the banks of the White River in hopes of getting in on another amazing caddis hatch around Memorial Day.   Unfortunately, the bugs were pretty much ready to wrap it all up for the year.

Jeremy, was on the road and headed to the Little Red River, to get a fly selection set up at Sulphur Springs Outfitters.

With the number of trips, he has been running left only the Holiday to bring the entire fly selection down to the shop for them to pick out what they would need.

So, we may have had a bit of a scheduling mishap but at times like these we make a pretty darn good team.

With Jeremy having to hit the road, it was time for the second string to step up! Thankfully, Daron doesn’t mind letting me row him around the river.

After seeing that brown we decided to make another run and see if we could get it done, so rigged with a San Juan we got the monkey was off our back on the first day.

We felt like we did what we could do at the Dam.

The chance of thunderstorms was still actively forming around us, so I decided to load the boat and put in a Gaston’s incase the storms rolled in.

We were back at it and Sunday Specials were drawing the attention of a few fish with the sunny skies but as we headed for Cane Island the cloud cover increased significantly.

I was liking the flows and so I tied on the Peach Megaworm as we headed back down toward Gaston’s it happened for us one more time.

The river was good to us, despite the crowds.

We ran the caddis larva and it was able to find us a few bows, so we tried Root Beer Midges and the Super Midge dropped off of a small size 6 Fat Albert Hopper in tan after watching the rainbows try and take the indicator down several times.

After a few on both the hopper and the dropper we still managed to only find rainbows and not the big ones the White has been offering up as of late.

So, it was time to get dirty and dig into the worm and egg box and find something those brown might eat.

But at first, I wanted to see just what a little streamer would do in the lower flows so out came the often-overlooked Yellow Zoo Cougar.

On the third cast that big brown was ready and well we were not, so we just kept swinging and much to our surprise a nice rainbow was interested.

Day two Daron was back at it with Jeremy and they fished the caddis all the way down the river, they picked up up a few browns and several rainbows throughout the afternoon.

Day three the flood gates were open and the trout were just not interested in Jeremy’s Shad antics this go around.

Matt was also in the boat, so with two rods going Jeremy was able to figure out the somewhat tough bite, that everyone figured would be a sure thing.

They did not want white on that day.  So, it was back to the egg and worm game and it continued to pay off.

Daron was back running yellow streamers and was drawing some attention again.

I arrived with the lunches late in the afternoon and was going to fish Steve for a few hours in the evening with Daron.

So Jeremy headed back to the camper.

Matt soon noticed my streamer boxes and helped himself to a yellow sex dungeon and on our first run we had our brown and the brown soon had my steamer.

I looked at my phone and Steve had arrived at the State Park so Matt jumped out and Steve got in.

It was getting dark and windy the storms were getting closer but we figured we could get at least one drift in.

The fish were going crazy before the storm Daron turned so many browns, we lost count right before the ran hit he stuck a good one on a black and chartreuse circus peanut and when the down pour hit us he had another one on but the fly line wrapped around the anchor.

Jeremy was ready and waiting with the trailer in the water as we buzzed up through the rain.

Daron had a few hours before he had to get on the road.  So I was able to throw the streamer for a couple of hours, but it was clearly Daron’s trip as he continued to get all the follows and picked up a cuttie on a yellow slop mop to mark an end to another memorable trip to Arkansas.