I just wrote my weekly fishing report. In it, I said that fishing had been tough on the Norfork Tailwater this past week. That is not totally true. I had a guide trip this past week where my client landed well over thirty trout. The difference was that he was an accomplished angler that was an exceptional dry fly fisher. The Norfork is popular locally and nationally for the quality of its top water action. There are several local fly fishers that fish nothing but dry flies on it.
The problem is that the majority of dry fly action is on midges. For those of you that are not familiar with this aquatic insect, they are incredibly small. The most popular patterns fished on the Norfork are midge patterns. The midge larva patterns start at eighteen and go down from there to size twenty four or smaller. The problem with these patterns is not seeing the take because you are invariably using a strike indicator. No, the problem with the larval patterns is getting the tippet through their incredibly small hook eyes. It should be noted that I carry a pair of reading glasses (cheaters) in a pocket of my fishing vest, to aid in my tying on these small flies.
With the dry flies, size does matter. Not only do you have the problem with getting the tippet through the eye of the hook but you have to see the fly on the water and you have to see the take of the fly by the trout. If you can’t see it, you can’t fish it! This means that with a smaller fly you need to fish closer. In addition, it is best to have the sun on your back to cut down on the glare of the sun on the water.
The essence of fishing dry flies is line control. The dry fly has to float freely on the surface of the water in a perfect drag free drift, in order to look natural. If it is moving too fast or too slow, the trout will refuse it. This means that you need to have slack in your line, to achieve the proper drift but have a tight enough line, to be able to set the hook, when you have a take.
On our trip on Monday, we began fishing around 9:00 AM, when they turned Norfork Dam off. We began fishing at Quarry Park just below the Dam. We caught four small brookies on a root beer midge. There was no top water action, while we were there. About an hour and a half later, we thought that the water downstream at the Ackerman Access had dropped out.
I drove to the access. We put our lunches and a few bottles of water into a back pack and headed upstream into the Catch and Release Section. When we arrived, the water was still dropping out but there were fish feeding on the top of the water column. They were keying in, on tiny midges. We began with size twenty Adams parachute dry flies and we took a couple of trout immediately. The fly quit producing and we switched to a similar sized parachute Cahill. After landing a nice rainbow, the second trout was an eighteen inch brown. Then the Cahill quit producing. I had hoped to run into a caddis hatch. We saw some nice size fourteen inch insects but they were not hatching. They were laying eggs and the trout never keyed in on them.
It went that way for the rest of the day. We would catch a couple of trout and then try another fly. We got smaller. The last fly we used was a size twenty four midge dry. We had run into my fishing buddy and fellow guide, George Peters, a dry fly guru. He gave us this fly and even helped tie it on as the eye of the fly was incredibly small. We took a couple of trout on it. About that time, I noticed that the water was beginning to rise. It was time to go.
As we walked out, I realized that we had landed over thirty trout, while the anglers around us were struggling. The key was fishing small dry flies.
John Berry is a fly fishing guide in Cotter, Arkansas and has fished our local waters for over thirty years.
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