On Sunday morning, I think the post-traumatic stress caused from consuming the Alaskan Burger at the Three Legged Mule kept all of us in the rack a little longer than we woulda liked. Plus it was raining off and on early that morning which is like a lullaby to me, I dont know about anyone else. Anyways, it didn't help that it wasn't our typical Sunday morning on a fishing trip where we are all hurrying around to pack gear up, breaking camp, and hitting the river before heading home. We didn't have any kind of schedule to keep since we still had Monday off to fish and go to F3T. It was freaking awesome to be honest...
We all finally crawled out of our bunks after Billiam got the coffee pot perculating and the smell of fresh hot coffee started to fill the house. It was a very relaxed morning as we drank coffee, sorted out gear, and discussed floats for the day. We decided to float the lower section together since the shuttle would be quick and easy with the 3rd vehicle plus we had some overcast skies and patchy rain so the plan was to chuck that chicken for some brown trout. It was beginning to feel like one of those days where things were gonna be....dare I say...epic?
After the normal chore of launching the boats and running the shuttles, we jumped in the drifters and pointed them downstream. Once again, we were armed with our 8wts and big nasty bugs with high hopes of sticking some trout faces. We even left the 5wts at the cabin, no excuses this time. It was hero or zero today! I had JoeyC and DonnyB in my boat while Cole and Billiam was in The Professors Hyde for the day. The guys went to work with the 8wts and didn't take long for the fish to turn the feedbag on. The 1st few fish in the boat was kind of a comical situation. We were anchored up while one of the guys was doing a fly change. Donny was in the front of the boat just casting to the bank and letting his bug swing out below the boat when he got a tug! Hooked up on the other end was a good ol' NFOW brown trout. The skunk was off the boat, time to do work! As I was doing a little film work with Donny and his brown, Joey had re-rigged, made a cast to the bank, and then hooked up on another brown trout!! Brilliant! Wait...the ridiculousness doesn't stop there! Donny went right back to swinging his streamer below the boat and hooked again!! Always a good sign of things to come when you hook up 3 times while anchored up in the river. We finally hauled anchor and proceeded on down river...
As you can tell from the pics, yellow was the flavor of the day for us. The browns were just eating it up. They were holding in the shoals, chasing down sculpin and baitfish was our guess. They would crash the fly almost as soon as it hit the water, it was bad ass. A few fish even hit the fly so hard that they knocked it out of the water and totally missed it! The boys were getting tugs on just about every nice bank with a good current or in the shallow fast water on the shoals. We hadn't stuck a big brown yet, mostly just your stocker browns and slightly larger holdover fish from previous stockings but when they are eating streamers like that, who cares! I wanted a piece of the action so we swapped out on the sticks above a nice shoal and run that has been fishy for us in the past. Just a side note here, due to the rain that was in the forecast, I had left my Nikon camera that we were using to film and take pictures with at the cabin so it wouldn't get wet. If it had gotten wet, my wife probably woulda murdered me and you wouldn't hear from The Cajun anymore. Anyways, we were just using the GoPro plus our cell phones for pictures and video. I had forgotten to give a tutorial on how to use the GoPro with the guys in the boat so someone else could film if I was fishing. This bit me in the butt on my 3rd cast when I hooked up with a really nice brown, easily over 20", and was trying to tell Donny how to turn the GoPro on. He was having technical difficulties. The fish was struggling below us in the fast water. I was trying to tell him how to do it. Then the line just went slack....fish off. FML....
The lower section float on the NFOW is only a few miles so it didn't take us long to knock it out since we were streamer fishing and covering water pretty fast. It had fished really well and it was still early in the day so we decided to run back upstream to float it again. I mean, why not? We jumped in the trucks and ran the shuttle again before Billiam had to leave to head home. He was gonna have to miss out on the F3T activities the next day sadly. The responsibilities of being a parent, I know them all too well. Anyways, we piled back into the boats and headed back downstream. This time around, The Professor and Cole lead the way since we kinda hogged all the fresh water on the first float while they had to deal with our sloppy seconds...sorry guys! The 2nd float wasn't near as productive for us as you might of expected but we still were able to put a few good brown trout in the boats before we finished up. The elusive 2 footer had eluded us on this day but when you have a numbers day on streamers....you can't gripe too much about the fishing. No sir...not at all....
After we finished the 2nd float, we headed back to Sunburst to break camp at the cabin. We took our time getting everything sorted and loaded back up into the trucks for our trip back south. I think everyone was a little hesitant to leave the NFOW and our riverside cabin after it treated us so well the past 2 days. Once again, we'd like to thank Justin and Amy Spencer at Sunburst Ranch for their hospitality. You guys are the best!
We were headed south back to Arkansas. Destination? Mountain Home and the CTD preferred place of accommodation, The River Rock Inn. Our plan? Fish the Norfork tailwater the next morning in hopes of finding a unicorn before we headed back to Fayetteville for the F3T show...
Stay tuned for Day #3...
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