STONEFLIES ON THE WHITE RIVER BY JOHN BERRY

A couple of years ago I was walking on the top island at Rim Shoals moving from one good fishing spot to another, when I looked down at a rock on the shore and spotted the nymphal husk of stonefly. The stonefly is the largest of the aquatic insects that inhabit trout streams. This nymphal husk is the exoskeleton that the insect emerges from when it goes from the nymphal stage to the adult stage during metamorphosis. This nymphal husk was huge. It measured about an inch and a half long. Though stoneflies are important on many of our local trout streams, I had never seen one on the White River. Since I only found one shuck I discounted it as an aberration.

When I first started fishing on the Spring River many years ago, the Entwhistle Spring River Creeper, a local golden stonefly pattern developed by the late Ralph Entwhistle, was the go to fly on the Spring River. I have caught many trout using this fly and I still carry them. When I fished the Eleven Point River with top Eleven Point guide, Brian Sloss, he had my wife, Lori, and I use double stone fly rigs to great effect. When I fished the North Fork of the White River Brian Wise, the best guide on that river, suggested that I use a stonefly nymph with a prince dropper. It should be pointed out that Lori out fished me that day with an olive woolly bugger. I did catch fish on the stonefly nymph.

While I have never actually seen a stonefly hatch around here, despite my spending a lot of time on the water, I have observed some spectacular stonefly hatches out west. My first encounter was on the Metolius River in Central Oregon about twenty five years ago. The stoneflies were abundant and the trout were keying in on them. I was able to land a couple of nice trout on a stonefly dry pattern. It was a thrill seeing a fat fourteen inch rainbow rise to the surface to slurp the huge fly. I ran into them again about ten years later. I was staying in a magnificent log cabin in the Paradise Valley section of the Yellowstone River in Montana. There were adult stoneflies all over the place. Unfortunately the Yellowstone was swollen out of its banks due to a record snowmelt and the trout did not key in on them at all. We ended up fishing the gray drake hatch on Slough Creek. We still had a good time but we were not able to fish the stonefly hatch.

A couple of weeks ago I was again walking the bank of the upper island at Rim Shoals. This time I was guiding two anglers and I was walking between the spots they were fishing scouting out potential places to fish them. As I was passing a tree at the end of the island, I noticed no less than two dozen stonefly nymphal shucks on it. There had been a recent stonefly hatch there at Rim Shoals.

Stoneflies are different from other aquatic insects in trout streams in that their emergence from the nymphal stage to the adult stage takes place on land rather than the water. The nymphs will walk from the water to the shore where they will emerge. As a result, you can find nymphal shucks on plants and rocks, where an emergence has taken place. They return to the water to lay their eggs where they become large tempting targets for hungry trout.

That week I had a conversation with Bill Thorne at Dally’s Ozark Angler, a local fly shop. He said that stoneflies had recently been seen in the Buffalo Shoals section of the White River downstream of Rim Shoals. He even had a large adult stonefly to show me that some angler had brought into the shop.

What does all of this mean to us? It is obvious that we have stoneflies in the White River. I know that the trout have to key in on these big bites. We should key in on these insects ourselves. I for one am going to experiment with fishing with stonefly nymphs and begin carrying the dry flies just in case I run into a hatch. Let me know if you see any out there.

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