Tailwater Tribe

Taco Bag in Evening Shade   Original Cast of "Evening Shade"   Remember the TV sitcom “Evening Shade”?   I don’t really, other than Burt Reynolds was one of the stars.   I believe he was a high school football coach and Marilu Henner was his wife.   I also believe the show was set in a fictional town in Arkansas.   A few years ago as I traveled from Heber Springs to Mammoth Springs after the Little Red River had been blown out by an epic rainstorm, I passed through Evening Shade and thought: “what a coincidence.”   After doing a little research, I know now Evening Shade, Arkansas was the location for the show.   Since then, I have passed through Evening Shade many times chasing water; attempting to find wadable trout water after the USACE performed their daily buzz-kill: elevating the water I was fishing from docile to treacherous.   Each time I passed through, I thought about a TV series I never watched, but other...

Randy Berndt's Logo                 God has blessed me in so many ways.   My beautiful wife, Laurie, allows me to fly-fish all over the country.   Sometimes she accompanies me.  But more often than not, due to a demanding work schedule, she is unable to go.   I want to begin this post by thanking her for loving me enough to let me roam and scratch my itch whenever possible.                   My latest trip was a year removed from initial planning and originally was to be an extension of a two-week jaunt out west last summer with two of my closest friends, Randy and Jean Carr from Louisiana.   We fished various trout rivers in Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana and were scheduled to swing over to the UP (Upper Peninsula), or “upstate” Michigan to fish with another dear friend, Randy Berndt. ...

 Sweet new net with a sweet fat rainbow I have not created a new post since December, so much to my disbelief, this is officially my first post of 2014.  Drunken Prayer "Into the Missionfield" Really, in the fly-fishing realm of reality, not much has happened.  I've made two trips north over the past six months: one during Spring break, and the other a couple of weeks ago.  I did pretty well on both of those romps, taking a good number of trout on the Spring, White, and Norfork Rivers.  Each time I go fishing, I take my old friend the GoPro with me and alternate between vids and pics as I attempt to capture the action.  This has caused a backlog on my SD card of footage dating back to last Summer's epic adventure out west.  I am winding up the final couple weeks of summer school teaching at the local college here and am currently (of course) planning new trips for July and August.  It is time to clean my SD card and make room for additio...

Once in a while, the planets, The Army Corps of Engineers, and the Weather Man get together and allow a fishing trip to be successful.  If there is one thing I have learned from years of planning fishing trips: the more you plan, tweak your plan, and anticipate every aspect of your plan, the faster you set yourself up for disappointment.  This trip, however, was a spur-of-the-moment affair.  Randy, my friend from Wisconsin, was traveling south to visit relatives in Texas, and asked if I'd like to meet in Arkansas for a couple days fishing.  Of course, I was more than happy to accommodate him as my teaching semester had just ended.  What transpired, was an epic two-day trip where we caught more big browns and rainbows than you would believe.  Randy is a fantastic fly-fisherman and guides in the UP.  We met three years ago at Montana State University in Bozeman.  We were there to defend our Master's theses. ...

Finally got to go fly-fishing last week and had an epic experience on the North Fork of the White River, or "Norfork" to the locals.  Since all of my prior attempts to head north had fallen through, and I missed the caddis hatches of April, I was more than ready for good weather and prolific bugs.  On this trip, I got both!  The annual Ephemerella (Sulphur) hatch was in full bloom on the Fork and I took advantage of a predictable generation pattern by the USACE and wonderful, albeit, unseasonably warm, weather to rack up forty or so, fat, colored-up rainbows.    Another amazing thing about the trip was the fact that I never pulled the waders out of the Taco bag.  I wet-waded the entire trip, and even though the water was shockingly cold at first, the afternoon sun soon made it a very comfortable place to be.  It was nice for all things to come together for this trip!  Once again the guys at Steve Dally's made my trip a successful one as...

Before the Gun:  BOB IV The Shed:  BBQ, Blues and COLD beer! For those of you who aren't familiar, the Battle on the Bayou is one of the premier paddle watercraft races in the Southeastern United States.  This year's event featured over 230 paddlers in 15 categories, each with the common goal of finishing the 9.5 mile race.  The course is a section of Old Fort Bayou and begins at Gulf Hills Hotel in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and ends at The Shed-a popular BBQ and blues joint.  The Shed terminus offers great incentive to finish as there is, in addition to the fantastic food, all the free cold beer you want. The ladies and gentlemen who paddle this race are an eclectic mix of fun-loving outdoors people with a broad range of ages, skill-levels, watercraft, and motives for being here.  I've found that the paddle-crowd is very similar to the fly-fishing crowd: friendly, talkative gear-heads that talk in a language of inside jargon that others outsid...

     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, ha...