Fishadelic Foto Friday…..Silver Surfer edition, dos.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Top 10 list for Spring 2010:

10. Drift Boats Rule

9. Tornados suck

8. “Aren’t you hot wearing long sleeves” (says a sunburned floater to me)

7. hit him, Hit Him, HIT HIM!!

6. Fly Fishing Guides can get a tangle out of anything

5. Bats eat flies that are dangling from a tree limb.

4. mend….mend…..mend….mend

3.  Drift Boat anchors crush beer cans awesomely!

2. Aiming a drift boat anchor to crush a beer can just right…not so easy

1. Big Fish like the Big Black and Meaty fly!!!!!

To listen to the podcast click the link below or the Liv2 Fly Fish Logo to the left.  While there check out some of his other podcasts and photos.

Click Here for the North Fork of the White Podcast with Brian Wise.

With the addition of another drift boat the fleet of ROLF guide boats has just become even more awesome! 

The tackle that will best suit you for the North Fork of the White river is your standard 9′ 5wt to 6wt rod combined with your favorite streamer rod as Spring can bring some higher water and some great streamer action or a smaller 3-4wt for swinging wet flies and tossing dries.  Leaders should start at 9′ and can go as long as 20 with certain techniques.  Weight-wise leaders should be from 3x to 5x and tippet will go from 3x to 6x.  

As for the actual fishing there is no doubt that any given day the best producing method is nymphing.  When nymphing on the North Fork of the White river the main thing I will tell people is to make sure you are nymping deep.  These fish generally hold on the bottom…which works out pretty well because that is where most big fish hang out too, but more on that later.  If you are indicator fishing a good start is usually around 6′ from your lead fly on a 2-fly rig.  To me, if I am nymphing and regulations allow it I will be fishing 2 flies on almost any water I go to and the North Fork of the White lends itself to fishing a 2-fly setup very well.  Having a heavy lead fly aids in getting your smaller dropper fly down deep quickly and you still have the comfort in knowing that the main weight on your line is a fly and not a bunch of split-shot without a hook in it.

I am asked all the time about dry fly fishing on the river.  My usual answer is “come prepared but count on it” but Spring is one of those times of year where if you keep an eye on conditions you can catch fish on dry flies.  As usual most hatches are in the morning and evening but some solid BWO and Caddis hatches can literally happen about anytime.  The fish in the North Fork of the White tend to be called fat and lazy meaning they want the food to come to them but what can and does happen is you can run into a massive caddis hatch with very little fish activity on the surface and then you can run into a great BWO hatch and the fish can go absolutely crazy…go figure. 

Before, during, and after any hatch is always a great time to swing soft hackles, winged wet flies, and various emerger type patterns.  Actually on any given Spring day a fisherman can completely concentrate on these types of patterns and do very well in both numbers and size of fish.  So for sure come prepared with plenty of soft hackles!

Spring is probably most notorious for some epic fish numbers days.  In the right conditions you can run into fishing that is simply out of this world.  But Spring is also a very good time to get into those big fish as well.  It seems that everything needs to come out of the winter “funk” and fig fish are no exception.  We tend to find them in the riffles feeding on the many, many insects that are on the move as much as we see them in the deep pools which automatically makes them a ‘little’ on the easier side to get a hook into….but fast water and big fish equals a pretty massive fight on your hands so have an exit strategy for every stop you make.

I don’t know if it is the nicer weather with the warmer temperatures that makes me completely love spring fishing or the usual great fishing that comes with spring…but BOTH of those scenarios work pretty well together in my eyes.

We were staring down the tail-end of the trip as we woke up in our hotel room in Ava, Missouri.  We had three streams we needed to knock off today, so that would mean a lot of driving as we fished our way east across the bottom of the state.  The first stop on this leg of the trip was Brian’s home waters, the North Fork of the White River near Dora, Missouri and the Blair Bridge Access.

The North Fork of the White River is a fly-fisherman’s nirvana.  This stream is what every trout stream in the state wishes it could be (well maybe not the Eleven Point..).  I rigged up the rod, and there was something about this morning that I just knew I was going to have my ass handed to me on this river…again.  Brian Wise couldn’t save me as I had my first take only to not get a solid connection and like that it was off.  The more I threw the 12ft long indicator, #4 rubber leg stone, #14 psycho prince dropper rig the more I became frustrated with this river.  The more I became frustrated, the more I loved it.  It is a vicious cycle.  But all good things come to an end, and we needed to get moving, so after the berating I was taking from Brian on the stream I quickly handed him the rod and he hooked up with a dink brown just as we were walking out (but he too….had to work for it….eggs really do catch fish anywhere).

As we rolled out of the access, I marveled at the ridiculous concrete work that the access had just received.  This must be the biggest MDC waste of money, since stocking trout in Hickory Creek.  Of all the things to spend money on, turning a perfectly good gravel parking lot into a concrete parking lot is not one of them.  Hell, I would rather see another boat ramp or the money go to raising the bridges at McKee Bridge and Patrick Bridge.  At any rate, I digress.

We had thought about adding the tailwaters of Arkansas on the trip, but I had really wanted to get back to the Spring River, as I hadn’t been on it since October.  So we set our sites across Hwy 160 towards Hwy 63 and headed south to the town of Mammoth Spring, Arkansas.  I didn’t have the Bayou Access marked on the GPS, but we found it just fine.  Bayou Access is one of the nicer sections of the Spring River with plenty of different habitat to fish.  The water was up, and the wading was very limited, so Brian grabbed his rod and headed upstream to give it a shot.  He worked a section of stream right in front of the access and was rewarded with a rainbow on a psycho prince.  It had started to rain a bit (the first time on the trip), so it was time to put the camera gear up and with that, we found a drive-through for lunch and headed towards the Eleven Point River having just fished 20 streams in 4 days.

What can I say about the Eleven Point River, it is a beautiful untouched jewel of an Ozark trout stream.  The Eleven Point has always fished well in my previous trips to it (I wonder why I don’t fish it more), and this trip would be no exception.  The thing about the river is that it is a river that needs to be floated (moreso than any other river in the state).  Unless you are willing to hike the Ozark Trail, the wading opportunities on this stream really are not that present.  We pulled in to Greer Spring Access, we met up with one of Brian Sloss’s newest employee’s, Tito.  He was a really good guy, gave up a handful of his personal flies and pointed us in the right direction and after some general chit-chat we were off.  The Eleven Point held true to form and I was rewarded with two fish pretty quickly while fishing a 12ft indicator rig with a rubber leg stonefly and an egg dropper (both fish took the rubber leg).  Just as we were heading back to the car, Brian Sloss (Eleven Point Canoe Rental) rolled in and we stood around as we de-wadered and recounted the trip we had just completed.  It was good to catch up with Brian and had we stood there much longer, I am sure the beers would have been opened and a campfire would have been found; but we were haunted by th skunk on the Current River and needed to head north back to the Current River and towards Rolla (our original starting point).

On the drive north on Hwy. 63 we stopped just south of Licking, Missouri and had to have one of the finest dinners I have ever had on a fishing trip at Black Forest Grill.  The ham steak that I had, was simply amazing.  If you are looking for a great place to grab some eats when around Licking, I would definitely check them out.  After dinner, we headed towards the Scenic Rivers Inn to sort through video and photos and gear before hitting the Current River in the morning.

Photos for Day 4 are below.

[View with PicLens]

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I just wanted to introduce you to the new Fly Fishing the Ozarks.  As you can tell we have made some pretty drastic changes to the blog and now it is more like a site/blog….if that makes sense.

The first thing you’ll notice is how different the blog looks.  We now have several pages listed at the top and below is kind of a map explaining those pages(not in any specific order):

Home -  This is the Blog….probably the reason you came to Fly Fishing the Ozarks in the first place–unless you came to see more of Matt Tucker.

Guide Services -  Pretty self-explanitory.  I am a guide, it has a bio and contact information–mostly River of Life stuff.

Photo Archive -  This is, well, a photo archive.  This is going to be changing as much as possible.  There is an archive of all of the crazy Fishadelic Foto Friday photos along with some guiding photos and personal fishing photos.

Fishing Videos - Just some fishing and distance casting videos including the epic 2008 Missouri Trout Odyssey videos.

The Authors – Introduces you to the guys that type on the blog.

Tying Videos – An archive of the Fly of the Month videos (or the Fly of whenever I can get them uploaded)

So there it is, browse through and check everything out…let us know what we can do better, let us know what we are AWESOME at (if you have that much time to type) and let us know what you would like to see or see more of.

Thanks!