Widespread Panic, Stoneflies, Bouncers, and Gurus...

Widespread Panic is one of my favorite bands. Their unique blend of eclectic jam music is contagious. Now that I've moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, my tailwater adventures involve a ten hour drive (one-way) which allows plenty of time to scan the iPod.  My musical tastes involve almost every genre of music, so if you are listening to my iPod on shuffle, you never know what you're going to hear next.  For whatever reason, Widespread Panic has become my Spring River "theme music."  On my last trip, after a long dry spell of not being able to fish, I was in "Panic mode."  As usual, the USACE was running water on the Norfork, White, and Little Red so those options were off the table.  I managed to score a couple nights with a good buddy of mine at his cabin in Mammoth Spring which is always a good time.  My friend, whom I'll call "The Bouncer" for reasons I won't discuss in this posting, is always a breath of fresh air.  His wife is cool, too and absolutely hilarious when talking about her adventures with the bouncer.  The bouncer is quite the picker, too and often entertains everyone with his covers of everything from Jimmy Buffett to Johnny Cash--but certainly not Widespread Panic.  The bouncer and I are a generation apart, so he doesn't always embrace my diverse musical tastes, or so I thought.  After we arrived in Mammoth, the bouncer and I were out on the deck drinking beer, and watching the river flow by in the moonlight.  As usual he had his guitar and was doing a few songs.  In passing, I mentioned that Widespread Panic was my theme band."  He sat on the edge of his seat and said, "I've heard of them!  I googled them...I love the song "Ain't Life Grand."  You could have knocked me over with a grizzly hackle.  Hopefully, when the bouncer and I meet up again, he'll be able to cover it with no problem...

Another cool thing I learned on this trip was the entomological significance of stone flies in the Spring River.  This handy piece of information was given to me by a man I met after a long, windy day of fishing, whom hereafter I will refer to as the guru.  As I walked upstream to the Lassiter Access parking lot, the guru was coming out of the water ahead of me and we struck up a conversation.  The guru was driving a vintage Harley and fishing a custom bamboo fly rod.  As we shed waders and tubed our rods, the guru and I swapped tales of Montana, Key West and other fly-fishing points in-between.  He was from Michigan and grew fishing the Au Sable but was now living in Mammoth Spring and fished the Spring on a weekly basis, so I decided I must garner all the information I could from this obviously knowledgeable guy. 

"How'd you do?" he asked.

"Great," I said, "got a dozen or so nice bows."

"On what?"

"Brownies and Olive woollies."

"Oh."

I detected a sense of disappointment in his voice and got curious.

"How about you?"

"Did really good up in that top riffle."

"What were you using," I asked, expecting him to be using something similar to me, but he caught me off guard. 

"There are trout in the Spring River that act like normal trout," he said, as he opened his hand, revealing a #12 beadhead brown stonefly imitation with rubber band legs.  Up to now, except for one magical Indian summer afternoon where I experienced the mother of all caddis hatches and netted a dozen or so nice rainbows on Elk Hair Caddis dries, I had never caught a Spring River trout on anything except hardware--streamers, clousers, woolly buggers, bunnies, sculpins, crawfish imitations, brownies...And believe you me, I have caught a LOT of trout on the Spring!!!

I won't go into the details of our conversation and will only say that after leaving the river I headed straight to my good friends at the Spring River Fly Shop for some #12 hooks and rubber band legs!  From there I headed back to the bouncer's cabin and tied up a dozen "guru stoneflies."