June is a fun month in my family. Lauren and I both share birthdays in this month, and to celebrate we decided to take a little road trip to Heber Springs, Arkansas to just kick back and take it easy for a few days, wade the river to escape the heat and fish the famous river that still holds the world record brown trout of more than forty pounds.
Having never before fished in Arkansas, I was immediately impressed with the beauty of the rivers and the pristine water that flows through its many dams. Like most of the country's famous rivers, the Little Red is a tailwater that gains its consistent fifty degree water temps from the depths of Greer's Ferry Lake. Unlike most of the country's other rivers though is the fact that this river hosts the highest population of sow bugs in the world, a protein packed trout morsel that contributes to the highest number of public and fishable brown trout per square mile in the world. After understanding these facts, it is easy to see why this river has been given the prestigious Blue Ribbon Fishery Award, an award reserved for the nation's top ranked trout rivers.
Once in the river, one can't help but notice the massive amounts of bug life. Any trout fortunate enough to be born here has one lucky fin, as the extreme amounts of sow bugs, scuds, caddis, mayflies, midges and terrestrials make the river comparable to a constantly flowing buffet of a trout's most desirable treats. The river's edges hold many downed trees from flooding and powerful generation, providing shelter for trout of all sizes from the force of the current, and this characteristic paired with the available food supply allows the trout to grow very quickly and consistently year round. Look closely at the rock above and you'll begin to notice the hundreds of midges that just this single rock supports.
So with such large quantities and varieties of food available to these trout, how is an angler supposed to just open up a well stocked fly box and magically pick the right fly? The first step is to do a little research and observation. Trout are the most energy efficient fish in the world, not by choice but by necessity. A river's current force constantly affects the amount of energy required of a trout to hold its present location and not be moved downstream. It is a God given gift that every trout is born with a calorie meter inside their brain that instantly informs the fish of the most prevalent food source flowing downstream, the total calorie amount of each bite of various sizes of species, and the amount of extended energy that must be burned to capture each specimen. If a trout were to feed in a manner that did not provide a positive relationship between its caloric intake and the amount of energy required, it would either not grow because of the lack of nutrition or it would starve to death because of the unrational amount of energy exerted.
An angler might naturally think that it would make sense then for a trout to only eat the largest food available in the drift on a daily basis, but a young and growing trout has a skyrocketing metabolism. Greater amounts of food in a body of water yield greater fish populations, and with steady competition from other nearby trout and the fact that being so selective as to only eat the big bugs wouldn't possibly be enough unless competition were scarce, the trout would again not be taking in enough calories to sustain itself due to not only the effects of the river's current, but also because of the trout's high metabolism.
Upon further investigation, it makes much more sense then for a fish to key in on the most prevalent food available in the drift as a steady intake of nutrition because of the little movement that is required for capture, and to only occasionally exert a little extra effort to capture the larger specimens as they present themselves throughout the day as sort of a bonus.
So the questions an angler should first ask himself are:
1. What is the largest commonly presented food specimen available?
2. What specimen is providing the most prolific hatch at this time?
After these questions are answered, any logical angler should then choose a fly that at least resembles the larger specimen and use it as a lead or attractor fly, and match the hatch by choosing as close of a fly as possible to the natural for the dropper, which will most likely be the fly that the fish is focused on during a hatch situation.
Just as the rock above was littered with midges, so was every other rock in the river's system, and to add to that, the fish were so preoccupied with gorging on the tiny flies in the drift that we were able to sneak behind a few to watch them feed for a few minutes and verify the trout's selectivity before dropping a fly in front of one. The first prolific midge hatch for the next few days of our stay would be an olive and gold ribbed size #22 midge pupa that began around 10am, and the madness ended with a black and white winged size #30 midge adult come 6pm. Paying close attention to the various midge hatches throughout the day, adjusting accordingly and attracting the fish to our fly by fishing sow bug and scud imitations was enough to keep our rods bent over for the majority of the day.
Posts
