Well, I am, at last, back!!!

A back injury (nothing major) has kept us off the rivers for a while but I'm back in the swing of things now.

So, let's catch up on this past weekend. We hit the Arkansas early Saturday morning. The stones were hatching on some parts of the river and, according to Bill Edrington at Royal Gorge Anglers, the fish were really looking for the big bugs and any wayward caddis that happened by. The flows were 2300 to 2500 cfs depending on where we were. The water was kind of silty but not to bad with a couple of feet visibility. The weather was mostly overcast with a little bit of sun here and there. Temp were in the 70s with water temp in the mid to upper 50s. It was WINDY!!

We started near Spikebuck and, to be honest, fishing was only fair but we were fishing in conditions we had never fished before. We were fishing with a stone dry and a general search pattern dropped a foot or so behind the dry. We caught several smaller fish but the larger fish were eluding us. At long last, we found the secret.... The larger fish were so close to the bank they were almost walking in place of usual swimming thing. Once we figured that out, the bigger fish started to show up little more frequently.

We then moved up to Wellsville but that turned out to be a mistake. We did not find any fish up there so we moved back down river to the Vallie Bridge area. By this time, the wind had laid down and we were under mostly cloudy skies. We had also figured out the patterns the fish were after and we were fishing a stonefly with a dry caddis as a dropper. We caught several fish including one of the biggest, by weight, fish I have ever caught on the Arkansas. It really was a pig and very fat compared to the "normal" brown.

All the fish we caught were browns. No 'bows.

As an after-note, we stopped by Coyote's Coffee House in Penrose because they had live music and BBQ for dinner. Don't waste your time.... The music was ok but the BBQ tasted like it was out of a can and the prices for that canned BBQ were a bit outrageous.