You won’t find live bait in Brett Rader’s guide boat on Lake Taneycomo.
Night crawlers, minnows, sculpins — that’s fine for some trout fishermen, but not for Rader. All he needs is a handful of the flies he ties.
“I’ve fished with live bait out here only once,” said Rader, who has guided for 20 years on Taneycomo. “One of my customers heard the trout were really biting on night crawlers, and he insisted we fish with them.
“There were 10 other guides fishing with bait in the same area, and no one was catching anything. Finally, I said, ‘Why don’t we try it my way for a little bit?’ We started fly-fishing, and we caught fish.”
Fifteen minutes. That’s the extent of Rader’s experience with live bait.
He isn’t the type to drop an anchor, cast out a worm, kick back and wait for the fish to bite. He has to be whipping a fly into the swirling current of Lake Taneycomo, much like the characters in the hit movie “A River Runs Through It.”
Rader is a fly-fishing purist and is very much attached to the romantic side of trout fishing. He ties his own flies, sometimes the night before a guide trip to meet the conditions of the day, and he is attuned to what it will take to get big rainbow and brown trout to hit those tiny offerings.
He and the fishermen he guides usually cast his homemade lures on fly rods as long as 10 feet. But he also offers a hybrid technique in which anglers use 8-foot spinning rods and small reels spooled with 3-pound test line to cast flies.
That’s what we did on a recent weekday on Taneycomo, the famous trout fishery that flows through Branson. We cast tandem fly rigs under feather-light strike indicators and let them drift along a seam separating the current and slack water.
Rader set up rigs with a larger white fly on top and a smaller midge as the dropper. The trick was getting the rig to drift just above the bottom but still move along in the current. The trout were in the slack water, waiting for food to drift past in the current.
The plan worked to perfection. We caught and released many rainbow trout during a period when the day fishing had been tough.
If we had caught all the trout that hit, we would have had an exceptional day. Time and time again, the strike indicator shivered when a trout struck and then continued on its way.
That came as no surprise to Rader. He learned long ago that trout rarely pull the strike indicator completely under as some fish do with bobbers. They get a taste of the fly, then quickly spit it out. If you’re not quick on the draw, the trout is gone.
“You can get an idea of how that works if you watch fish in an aquarium,” said Rader, who runs the Chartered Waters Guide Service. “When you feed them, they’ll come up and suck in those flakes. But if there’s something they don’t like, they’ll quickly spit it out.
“It’s the same way with flies. But if you pay attention and learn to react quicker, you can catch those fish.”
Rader has learned plenty of ways to trick rainbow trout.
He often ties scud patterns either in gray, tan or olive. He also likes to use midge and sculpin patterns to imitate the natural forage of the trout. He even uses white fabric to fashion flies to imitate the minnows in the cold, clear water.
“The key is coming up with something a little different than what everyone else is using,” Rader said. “These fish get pressured. They see the same things a lot.
“When you can come up with something they haven’t seen, it will make a difference.”
Knowing where to find rainbow trout under different current conditions is another key.
Taneycomo is more of a river than a lake, with dams on both ends. When water is released from Table Rock Dam, the current often activates the trout.
“It doesn’t take much to hold fish,” Rader said. “Maybe a little hump, a rock pile, a little dropoff, a bend in the river, a seam … they’ll all hold rainbows.”
One thing is certain: Taneycomo has plenty of trout to target. The Missouri Department of Conservation stocks the cold-water fishery with 560,000 rainbow trout and 15,000 brown trout annually, ensuring there are good numbers of fish for both beginners looking for numbers and veteran fishermen searching for quality.
Rader has guided customers to rainbow trout as big as 14 pounds and brown trout as large as 25 pounds.
“I fish here 200-plus days a year,” Rader said. “The great thing about Taneycomo is that you can catch fish year-round.
“The guide business slows down in the winter, but the fishing doesn’t. You can come out here on the coldest days and still catch fish.”
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