Arkansas River, July 11, 2009

The 4:30 alarm sure was annoying.....

We got up in the dark and headed for the Arkansas and the usual spots. We spent most of the day around Spikebuck. It was all sunny in the morning and changed to partly cloudy later in the afternoon. Temps were HOT and winds were light. Water temps were in the high 50s. There were some PMDs and a few caddis around but the fish were not really looking up. The flows dropped from 1800 to 1500 during the day, so we expected things to be a bit slow.

We started off with a hopper-dropper setup with the dropper just a couple of feet below the hopper/stonefly. We picked up several fish but they were small. A little experimentation paid off and we started picking up bigger fish deeper. We had our big stonefly nymph about 4ft-5ft deep and the dropper a bit below that. The fish started getting bigger but a little less frequent.

We fished 3/4 of a mile of river all day long and never felt the need to move. I did make a run to the store for some cold water since the water we had brought with us got a bit hot in the car. The next time, we'll take a cooler with some ice to keep things cool. After 50+ years, you would think we would have learned that.