Welcome to Fly Fish Arkansas. The leading fly fishing guide service on the White & Norfork rivers. Fish with the best! Forget the rest. Providing safe, educational and enjoyable fishing adventures since 1995. Take your next fishing trip to the White River and fish with Jim at Fly Fish Arkansas. Call 870-404-8906 or send an e-mail to jim@flyfisharkansas.com
This past weekend the 2010 Sow Bug Roundup was held in Mountain Home. On wednesday I had a trip with Mike D. and Donny H. from Heber Springs. Generation began early at 6:00 am so I put my boat in at Gastons Hole to stay in front of the water so we could wade fish. We worked our way down to the wildcat shoals area until the water hit us and then went back upstream and fished the Cane Island area for the rest of the afternoon. Mike D did catch this nice cutt in White Hole while we were drifting from the boat. Donny and Mike landed some bows and a few small brown trout and all Mike needed was a brook trout to complete his Grand Slam of all four species but these brook trout are hard to find on the White River at this time. In the morning the tan San Juan worm was a good fly and in the afternoon the SJ worm continued to produce some good bows. Mike has been experimenting with some new midge patterns and as it turns out a new one he came up with called the Alien midge worked pretty good.
For the next three days Mike helped me out at the Sow Bug. It was a good show with a good turn out. Lots of talented tiers along with some great vendors it gave both Mike and I a chance to hook up with some friends and check out the tiers and some new vendors. Thursday and Friday were both beautiful days and we were surprised at the number of folks coming through as the water was shut off at both dams. It was about time we had some good weather and some cooperative non-generation wadeable water for the sow bug attendees which game the folks plenty of time to fish. Throughout the weekend we heard lots of reports of how well the fish were taking flies. Lots of flies. It sounds as though the fishing was so good that it really didn’t matter what fly was used.
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Weather Forecast:
As of yesterday our weather began to change with temps getting a bit colder. Rain also began to move into the area with snow to the west and north west of us. Today our highs will reach the lower 40’s with north winds at 15 to 20 and the chance of precipitation near 100%. The rain will continue through the evening with lows dropping into the mid 30’s. Monday brings a chance of rain and snow in the morning with highs in the lower 50’s and northwest winds 10 to 15 mph. Tuesday should be warmer and sunny with highs in the upper 60’s. Wednesday will be the same with highs in the mid 60’s. Thursday will be cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms with highs in the lower 60’s and a 50% chance of precip.
Friday also brings a chance of thunderstorms in the morning at 30% with highs in the lower 60’s.
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Generation Forecast:
Generation for today Sunday March 21 is for no generation and on Monday is scheduled to generate from 5:00 am till 11:00 am at which time it will be shut off. It’s hard to predict what will happen after that but my guess is there will be generation windows in the mornings for a couple of hours with shutdowns on the weekends barring any heavy rains that could bring up the lake levels.
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Stay fishy my friends
Jim
The Alien Midge is in the book by Rick Takahashi .. Modern Midges. It’s about a 30 second tie and in certain colors really works well. I’ll be trying more colors here on the Little Red.
Jimmy, the Free State Fly Fishers had the best trip for fishing down there in the history of our club: nobody got skunked, and there were plenty of us that had 20- or 30-plus hookups on the best days, a few with more than 70. Weather wasn’t great except for Friday, but it didn’t matter: one of our members spent 13 hours on the river on Saturday: we had to pry him out of the water to come eat.
We’ll be back in the fall. In the meantime, I’ll get you those flies you ordered, and will keep in touch.
niki