COTTER -- When I fly fish for trout or bass, my goal is to catch one fish.
My fly fishing goals are minimal because I am not very good at fly fishing. I know it and I'm OK with it. One fish represents success to me because it means I found the one fish that is worse at being a fish than I am at fly fishing. My friend Rusty Pruitt describes my fly casting this way: "You get it there, but you make one hell of a commotion doing it."
This mystifies highly capable fly fishermen like Chad Hamlin of Little Rock, and it thoroughly astonished our guide John Ikonomou, owner of Ike's Ozark Fly Fishing in Cotter. Hamlin and Ikonomou are longtime friends. As such, they fish as a team instead of the typical client/guide relationship.
Because of my relationship with Hamli, Ikonomou assumed that I was equally capable. I quickly demonstrated that I am not, but it did not matter. Ikonomou treated me as a teammate, too, in the way that a coach would treat a backfield teammate of Eric Dickerson, Earl Campbell, Emmitt Smith or Barry Sanders. I was OK with that, too. Fishing with these two, I knew I would be better at the end of the day than I was at the beginning.
We started the day on the low water. That's a good for soaking sculpins for giant brown trout or prepared bait for stocker rainbow trout, but it is incompatible for fly fishing from a boat. Trout are very skittish in low water because they are vulnerable. There isn't much cover or structure in the White River to give trout shelter. It didn't help that the overcast sky cleared shortly after we launched. With direct sunlight in shallow, you can see every fish within the refractory zone, and they can see you.
Higher water is its own form of structure. It conceals trout from the air and gives them the confidence to roam and feed out of sight from great blue herons, bald eagles and ospreys.
Generators were scheduled to begin running Thursday at about 9 a.m. Expecting this, we launched at 10 a.m., in order to allow time for the rise to arrive at Wildcat Shoals. However, the generators were still idle at 11 a.m. This caused much grumbling among the fishing guides with whom Ikonomou visited. One guide was so disgusted that he trailered his boat and drove it to the North Fork of the White River below Norfork Dam.
"I don't know where he got his information, but I just called, and Norfork isn't expected to generate today," Ikonomou said. "That's a big risk. If you get over there and they're not running any water, you've pretty much blown your whole day."
The White River is loaded with trout. We saw them everywhere in the low water. We saw a lot of small rainbows in schools, but we also saw some big brown trout. Some were solitary, but others were in pods. Hamlin and Ikonomou call the big ones "tanks." We saw a lot of between-size fish that any angler would be proud to catch, but none would bite.
To entice them, Ikonomou gave me a rod with what he called a Colorado rig. The terminal fly was a Size 16 purple midge. A smaller fly was attached on the leader about 24 inches above. In the clear water, the purple midge flashed like a beacon. I could not believe a fish could resist it, but they did. The strike indicator plunged three times, but either the fly hit something on the bottom or I set the hook too timidly.
With Ikonomou crab-walking his boat across shallow shoals, we motored all the way to Bull Shoals Dam. About noon, the horn finally sounded to announce that generators were activated.
With Ikonomou using oars to position and orient the boat, we drifted downstream along the bank. Ikonomou kept close watch on our strike indicators. Quietly but authoritatively, he coached Hamlin and me.
"Keep it there. Keep it there," Ikonomou said. "Mend your line. Keep it there. Great positioning. Good. Good. Good. Now cast again."
Despite his vast experience, Hamlin obeyed without question. That's why you hire a guide. Ikonomou is on the water every day. He knows.
Mending is an annoying necessity in fly fishing. It is a method of flipping your fly line so that it does not impede or accelerate your fly's drift speed. A fly must drift naturally in time with the current. If the drift looks unnatural, a trout will ignore it. These fish see thousands of presentations, most of which are novice, amateur, or downright incompetent. They know.
You must mend constantly. You do it by flipping your rod tip over to remove loops in the line that catch water and hasten the drift or repel water and slow the drift. Practice is the only way to get better at anything, and by the end of the day I had greatly improved my mending technique. I could tell from the tone of Ikonomou's voice.
Lately, there has been a consistent hatch of sulphurs on the White River. A sulphur is a small yellow mayfly. When they emerge, trout eat them. If you find yourself amid a sulphur hatch, you had better throw a sulphur imitator.
All of the guides with whom Ikonomou visited said that the sulphurs had been hatching lately between 4-7 p.m. Until then, we drifted the banks with Hamlin throwing a grasshopper imitator and me throwing my Colorado-rigged nymphs.
"Throw that hopper six inches from the bank," Ikonomou said to Hamlin. "Browns cruise the banks in high water, and they'll hit stuff right at the edge."
We found a school of browns gathered over a rock shelf in a stretch of calm water. They made quite a commotion taking prey on the surface. Hamlin and I made perfect casts to them. Fish looked at our flies, but they turned away from them without attempting to take.
Eventually, Hamlin and I traded rods. I threw a single sulphur while Hamlin threw the Colorado rig. It is an awkward, cumbersome thing to cast, and soon Hamlin was throwing into the trees, getting snagged on stickups and tangling his tippet and leader. Meanwhile, I made long, graceful casts with the sulphur that made me look ... made me look like Hamlin. Ikonomou noticed the juxtaposition, too, and it made him laugh. I granted myself a brief indulgence in schadenfreude.
"That rod was like swinging a broom handle," Hamlin said later. "That thing wore me out."
That was at the end of the day, long after our hope at the generator horn had exhausted. Within an hour of the horn, I hooked and landed a chunky rainbow trout. Shortly after, Hamlin hooked and landed a small brown trout. We grinned at each other. The bite was on, or so we thought. Unfortunately, we did not land another fish. I missed two strikes. A few fish flashed at Hamlin's fly about 30 minutes before we ended the trip.
Ikonomou apologized profusely for the slow action, but that was not necessary. I caught one fish and I ended the day a better fly fishermen than I started.
That is all I ask.
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