I AM HUNG UP

BY JOHN BERRY

I have been fishing with my friend, Richard, for over a decade. He is an executive for a major electrical supply company in Dallas, Texas and he brings his customers and employees to the twin lakes area fishing several times a year. They are sizable groups with generally a dozen anglers and six guides. Most of the anglers have never fly fished before. These are my absolute favorite trips because of the way Richard treats the guides. Usually we are expected to come by at a designated hour, fish all day, catch a bunch of fish, deliver the clients back at the lodge and then leave. With these groups, we are more like family members. We are invited for breakfast, furnished lunch, offered drinks at happy hour and invited to dinner. There is even a group picture with each trip and we are always included in that.

 On our last trip, we fished together on the Norfork. I wrote about the early part of the first day of fly fishing with Richard last week. It involved an incident with poachers on Dry Run Creek at the same time that he was landing a trophy brown trout. We had begun the day at Quarry Park because they ran some water in the morning and we fished there, while the water in the Catch and release section dropped out. Picking up a trophy brown was an unexpected bonus.

 Around noon, we drove to the Ackerman Access. We ate our lunch, checked our gear and made our way upstream. I t was not as crowded as I have seen it recently but there were plenty of anglers there. We caught some nice trout and had a really good time. Mid afternoon the bite slowed and we were ready for a new challenge. I mentioned that several years before we had caught a fine brown (Richards biggest to date) at a spot just upstream. There was no one there and we thought that it was worth a try.

 The spot is located near some really heavy water and it is difficult to get to. This is what makes it a great spot because it doesn’t get much pressure. We carefully waded in and got settled. There was just enough room for both of us to stand. We were fishing a tan scud (#14) under a pink worm. The first trout was an incredibly fat eighteen inch rainbow that fought well. We pulled three others in the sixteen to eighteen range over the next few minutes. This is a tough place to fish with a lot of cover to hang up on. We lost at least one fly per trout landed and we hung up often.

 We had just rerigged with fresh flies after losing them in yet another hang up, when Richard said “I am hung up”. He was jerking the rod up and down in an effort to get the fly free. He handed me the rod and I moved upstream in an effort to back the fly out. The fly seemed to be stuck and I was jerking the rod up and down when the line moved. The fly was in a fish. I handed the rod back to Richard who was immediately into a serious fight with a big trout. He fought the fish for several minutes and finally landed it in the heavy current. I was relieved, when it finally surrendered to the net. It was an incredibly heavy twenty two inch rainbow. Though he had caught longer rainbows, he had never caught one that large.

 How we managed to keep the trout on with both of us jerking the rod up and down, I will never know. My best guess is that the trout took the fly and then sought shelter among the heavy rocks that litter the bottom for this hole. It finally came out and the fight was on.

 Sometimes you get a bit lucky and catch a trout that could have easily got away.

John Berry is a fly fishing guide in Cotter, Arkansas and has fished our local streams for over thirty years.