It’s amazing what you can learn by watching.
Thursday was a tough day for trout fishing for Rusty Pruitt and me on the White River below Beaver Dam.
Known as the Beaver Tailwaters among trout anglers, this is the shortest stretch of trout water on the White River system. Legitimate trout water stretches from Beaver Dam roughly to Housman Access, which essentially marks the beginning of Table Rock Lake. Right now, hydroelectric power generation at Beaver Dam is light, so low water creates ideal wading conditions from the end of the restricted area at the dam to Parker Bottoms.
I fished the Beaver Tailwaters a lot in the 1990s when I was outdoor editor of the Morning News in Springdale. Northwest Arkansas was just beginning to grow. Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville had not yet morphed into a single continuous city. The population was still small and sparse. The tailwater was popular in the spring and summer, but in the winter you had it mostly to yourself.
It’s not like that anymore. Northwest Arkansas teems with people, and a lot of them are fishermen.
Pruitt and I arrived at Parker Bottoms in mid morning. The parking areas at every access were full. Anglers were everywhere, spaced just far enough for courteous fishing. When I entered the water, two young local guys were baiting up to fish from the bank. I asked them if I could enter the water there to go downstream. They seemed very surprised and also very pleased that I asked.
This was the first time I’ve visited Parker Bottoms since 1997, and I was shocked at its condition. The tailwater was a lot narrower then, with only a narrow gravel spit on river left in low water.
Beaver Lake filled in 1967, but the floodgates were first opened to let excessive water out of the lake in 1989. Since then, opening the floodgates has become almost routine. The force of that much water has scoured away the banks and created what is essentially a vast gravel beach. It looks scarred and wounded.
The water is very clear, but also very dark thanks to a very dark algae that grows on the rocks. Even with polarized sunglasses, you cannot see fish on the bottom as you can in the Bull Shoals tailwater and in the Norfork and Greers Ferry tailwaters.
It was extremely windy, which made casting a fly extremely difficult. In 1991, while casting in the wind here, my wind-driven backcast plunged an olive wooly bugger into my eyelid. This taught me the value of tight fitting sunglasses and barbless hooks. I remembered that day Thursday every time my fly zinged over my head.
Pruitt and I fished nymphs most of the day. I hooked one fish on a tandem fly rig I used on the South Fork of Colorado’s Gunnison River in July, but that was our only excitement.
Pruitt deduced that trout were biting tiny midges. We didn’t have any, so we took a lunch break and visited the Beaver Dam Store. The proprietor said that midges are hot right now but that anglers had about exhausted his supply.
Discouraged, Pruitt and I continued to fish until 3 p.m., when he called it quits.
Another angler, one of the most intense people I’ve ever seen on a river, entered the water about 75 yards downstream of me. He caught one fish after another, so I tucked my rod under my arm and watched him.
He cast at a 2 o’clock angle to the current, let his fly soak for a few seconds and retrieved it by slowly stripping line in an almost continuous motion. I couldn’t tell what he used, but it was probably a midge.
He noticed me watching him, which caused him to perform with more elan than he had at first. After awhile, I think my scrutiny began to unnerve him. He migrated farther downstream when anglers departed and left a spot open.
I tied on an elk hair caddis fly, the smallest dry pattern I possessed. I cast at a 2 o’clock angle, let it soak for a few seconds, and then slowly retrieved it with a near continuous motion. A trout pounced on it.
The elk hair caddis was still the wrong fly. A lot of trout swirled on it but didn’t take it, but enough did take it to save my day.
At about 5:30 p.m., the horn sounded at Beaver Dam to announce that hydropower generation was about to begin. It was time to leave, but I drove home aglow with satisfaction.
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