STELLAR DAY AT RIM SHOALS BY JOHN BERRY

As I have mentioned in previous columns, I was pretty busy this spring. During this time, I was unable to fish much on my own or even worse, I wasn’t able to fish often with my favorite fishing partner, my wife, Lori. We had been out a time or two either wading or kayaking but we had not been out in my White River Jon boat. 

The White River Jon boat is arguably the most effective fishing platform for the White and Norfork rivers. They are large steady boats with comfortable seats and plenty of room to cast. In a pinch, they can accommodate three anglers and they can easily handle either extremely low or high water. Unlike drift boats, you can easily move upstream to access new water or fish a productive section over again and you can also avoid the use of shuttles. 

The down side is that like drift boats somebody needs to steer it. When you are fly fishing in a White River Jon boat you are essentially drifting downstream and casting out from the boat and the fly is moving at the same speed as the river. This makes for a drag free drift. We float backward so that if we encounter obstacles all we have to do is turn on the motor and go upstream. The key to success is to keep the boat parallel to the current. There are a few ways to accomplish this. 

One is to keep the motor running at all times. I find this distracting at best. I got into fly fishing to relax on stream and enjoy the environment. Sitting there listening to an outboard motor is not my idea of fun. I also believe that the noise from the motor can spook fish, especially big ones. 

The current trend is to add a set of oars to your river boat to control the drift, when not using the engine. This totally eliminates the rower’s ability to fish. It is also a lot of work. At the tender age of sixty seven years, I am not too keen on taking up rowing. I have more than one fellow guide that is encountering serious health issues from rowing a Jon boat or a drift boat day after day. The addition of oars also requires the use of another seat at the center of the boat for the rower to sit. This limits the capacity of the rowed Jon boat to two anglers and one rower. 

Then there is the old school method of dragging a chain. It is actually a length of rope with an eighteen inch section of chain secured to it (make sure that the rope/chain combination is shorter than your boat so that it doesn’t interfere with your propeller when you are under way. The down side is that this method can be dangerous at high levels of generation (with four or more generators the chain can grab the bottom and sink the boat). It can also not be as effective with heavy winds. This is my chosen method and I use it most of the time. It is most effective with little or no wind. Under these conditions, I can use a canoe paddle to refine my drift from time to time and I am able to fish myself. 

Last weekend we got a perfect day with a generation prediction that called for minimum flow (700 cubic feet per second or CFS). The weather report called for warm sunny conditions with a slight chance of rain and very light winds. We had planned to wade but when I verified the real time generation on the Corps of Engineers website, I found that they were actually running 2,000 CFS or the rough equivalent of a bit over half a generator. This was too much to wade but, with the predicted light wind conditions it would be perfect for me to drift in my White River Jon boat and actually fish myself. 

We arrived at Rim shoals around 10:00 AM. It took a few minutes to prepare the boat and rig a couple of fly rods. It was nice to fish with Lori because she rigged her own rod and we got on the water sooner. I motored up to a riffle and began my drift with the drag chain keeping me straight. We had purposely rigged the two rods differently so that we could zone in on the best fly combination. I had a bead head flash back pheasant tail (#14) with a size 18 ruby midge below it. Lori had a cerise San Juan worm with a copper John below it. 

I was the first to hook a fish. In fact, I caught the first three (one is a fluke, two is a coincidence and three is a trend). We stopped to change Lori over to the fly combination that I was fishing. After that, it was Katie bar the door. We caught trout after trout. Most were on the ruby midge but the pheasant tail claimed enough trout for us to leave it on. 

The weather got pretty hot. We had a light shower. We continued fishing with no rain gear because the rain felt good and cooled us off. It didn’t last long and the overcast conditions made us more comfortable. We fished till around 3:30 PM and finished the day with over fifty trout brought to the boat. I definitely had the hot hand and caught more trout than Lori did. She did however catch the big fish, a nice eighteen inch rainbow, and a couple of nice seventeen inch browns, one of them being a wild brown as pictured below. I consider that we both were successful. 

 By using a drag chain I was able to fish from a boat without having someone else run the boat. I just had to choose the right day. 

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