Catching fish isn't the goal anymore when I head to the White River. No, just going is what it's all about.
Oh, it helps when you catch a big brown trout like I did on three of my last four trips over the last 10 days.
But my last trip Wednesday wasn't anything special, but just as much fun. I field tested a new rod and some new fly fishing hooks. It was delightful.
I caught only five or six rainbow trout over two hours of fishing at one of favorite spots below Bull Shoals Dam. It wasn't electric like Sunday when I caught 43 in three hours. On my latest trip, I had two browns on for a bit, but didn't get either one to the net. They came unbuttoned about the time I began to reach for my net.
It still was great fun because I might have helped a stranger catch some brown trout on his weekend trip to our great river. At the end of the day, a man from Claremore, Oklahoma, walking past me as I rested on the bank sipping a water. He stopped to ask about my dead drift technique and my tiny midges.
It hit me that he didn't have anything like my flies. He had been swinging a wet fly and with not much luck. I remembered what my mentor David Knowles always did on the Beaver Tailwater. He...
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