I have been writing a fly fishing column for several years. One of the things that I am often asked is, how do you think of something to write about every week? The simple answer is that, whenever I am stumped (also called writer’s block), I go fishing and something always happens. The river is constantly changing, conditions are always changing and the fish will sometimes surprise you. Such a situation happened last Sunday.
I was fishing with my brother in law, Larry, a retired policeman from Germantown, Tennessee and an avid fly fisher. He is married to my wife, Lori’s, sister, Terri. They came up last weekend to visit and to take advantage of the greatly improved water conditions on the White and Norfork Rivers. They fished the Norfork on Saturday and did well. On Sunday morning, Larry and I made plans to drift fish the White River at Rim Shoals. Lori and Terri slept in and fished the Norfork that afternoon.
We began the day with a hearty breakfast of omelets, rice, beans and tortillas at Letty’s Mexican restaurant in Gassville. We arrived at the river around 8:45 AM. It took us a few minutes to rig our rods and get the boat ready. I decided on a size fourteen hare and copper fly beneath a cerise San Juan worm. We both started with the same flies because I had a lot of confidence in them. It was about sixty degrees and sunny. The winds were fairly moderate but the weather forecast called for much stronger winds beginning around noon. We decided to fish until the wind got to be too heavy.
I caught a couple of nice trout on the first drift and Larry got in on the action on the next drift. We really got into them. We caught several on every drift and managed to get a couple of doubles. We were fishing a large pool with a bit of current and some nice structure near the bank. When we drifted down to the tail out of the pool, I would start the engine and run back upstream, so that we could drift through it again. We were catching about equal numbers of trout on either fly, the cerise San Juan worm and the hare and copper.
We noticed that during the drift we would often have a trout hit the strike indicator. This is usually my cue to switch to a grasshopper pattern. There is something about taking a good fish on the top. We chatted about switching but were reluctant to do so because we were doing so well fishing the worm and dropper.
Then it happened. Near the tail out of the pool, Larry had a trout hit his strike indicator a couple of times. At the end of his drift, his flies rode up to the surface. Just as he was preparing to cast, the trout hit his cerise San Juan worm. He deftly set the hook and fish on! We usually think of the San Juan worm as a deep water fly and therefore always fish it like a nymph, on the bottom of the water column. This time the fish hit it on the top of the water like a dry fly. In my four decades of fly fishing, this is the first time that I have seen that.
We fished a while longer. Then the wind picked up and it was difficult for me to control the boat and fish myself. We finished the half day with around thirty trout including some nice eighteen inch rainbows and one on the top with a San Juan worm.
You never know what is going to happen, when you go fishing. Life is good!
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