Tailwater Tribe

     After the hectic Christmas season, Laurie and I ventured north from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the Traveler State.  I had carefully planned this trip well in advance.  My strategy was to fish the midge hatches on the Norfork and White Rivers for two days, and then meet the Bouncer and his wife, Peggy at their place in Mammoth Springs to celebrate New Years.  I had meticulously checked the weather and the generation schedules for Bull Shoals and Norfork Lake, read John Berry's fishing report, checked in with the Ozark Fly Flinger website and all the prospects looked favorable.      When we left Gulfport it was 57 degrees.  By the time we got to Hardy, AR, it was hovering between 32 and 33 degrees and snowing like crazy.  It seems as if every time I have a window to trout fish, that Arkansas is having a major weather event.  Over the past ten years I have seen blizzards, ice-storms, epic floods, hailstorms, and tornadoes--just about everything short of a tsunami.  This tr

                 I’m not a fan of overvisited, public-access areas, but when I see rising trout tipping and sipping, my fly-fishing purist, virgin-remote-wilderness, not another angler in sight indignation, is quickly forgotten and I am consumed with the entomology and ichthyology of the moment—not where I am.                   There is no ugly place to catch a trout, at least none that I’ve found.   Trout love clear, cold water, and you don’t generally find such hydrology in areas that aren’t clear and cold, too.   A couple summers ago while hiking and fishing a remote stretch of the Gallatin River in Montana, I encountered a graveyard of rusted automobiles lined up door-to-door along the bank.   I didn’t consider this oxidized scar on the landscape an ugly sight because there were too many beautiful things to offset it:   azure skies, mountains on every horizon, and clear currents of melted snow rolling over freestone.   Even in the back Urbana of Denver where the South Platte R