BACK ON LOW WATER

My wife, Lori, was out of town attending a dog show in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with our beloved English Lab Tilley, as I watched the Norfork finally fall to the level of power pool. I knew that wadable water was on the way. I finally saw that we would have wadable water on Monday. As luck would have it, Lori had asked that I swap Monday (my usual day off at Blue Ribbon Fly Shop) for Tuesday as she would not get back into town until late Monday afternoon and she wanted to spend the day with me. I like to fish but I prefer to spend as much time as I can with Lori and with any luck at all maybe we could fish together on Tuesday.

She got in on Monday as predicted and I was pleased that the generation prediction for Tuesdayindicated that the Norfork would be off all day. When I got up on Tuesday it was raining. I considered that a good omen. Nothing thins the herd like a little rain. The sky cleared and after a gourmet breakfast (I don’t eat as well, when she is gone) we got our gear loaded up and headed out. We made a stop at Cotter City Hall to vote. We then headed to Norfork and decided to eat an early lunch at Heidi’s Ugly Cakes, so that we could concentrate on our fishing and not have to stop for a meal.

We got on the water around 11:30 AM. It was fifty one degrees, sunny and the wind was howling. There were no lake wind advisories posted but there should have been. Lori decided to fish her six weight Winston figuring that a heavier rod would be easier to cast in the wind. I chose my five weight Sage and decided to work close. We were pleasantly surprised to see just a few cars in the parking lot. Once we waded upstream into the Catch and Release section, we found that we had it to ourselves.

I began fishing the flies that I still had on my rod from my last excursion, a cerise worm with an egg dropper. I landed a nice sixteen inch rainbow on the third cast. I picked up several nice trout the largest being eighteen inches long before a decent rainbow decided to swim into a log. In an effort to try and extricate him, I broke off my flies. I decided to rerig with a fluorescent pink worm and a scud (I had heard a lot of chatter about the effectiveness of scud patterns lately). I was immediately rewarded with a trio of fat trout.

Meanwhile Lori was struggling. I gave her my spot and a couple of scuds. I then headed up stream to try some different water. I fished several spots and caught fish everywhere that I went. It was great that we had it all to ourselves and could move about freely. I finally has satisfied my desire to catch trout and headed downstream to link back up with Lori.

In the meantime, Lori had moved to a different spot and had switched to fishing an olive woolly bugger. She was having some spectacular results. I sat and watched while she landed several nice trout. This included a fat nineteen inch rainbow that was a hook jawed male. I should have taken a photo but didn’t. It turned out to be the fish of the day. We fished until three PM and decided to head back home.

It was great to be back on wadable water and to spend my day with Lori. Life is good!