I spent four days fishing Bull Shoals tailwater this past week. We saw the heaviest caddis hatches I can remember in some time. The hatch was late, but I will take them when we get them. There were lots of dry fly fishing opportunities, and the nymphing and streamer fishing was good also. We boated a couple of quality browns and a lot of smaller ones.

Hatch cooled Friday with the weather change. The first of the cream mayflies came off downriver below Norfork confluence also. I think they were cahills, but I just saw a few and couldn’t get a sample. Sulphurs should be starting. If they are like the caddis this year, we may not see a good hatch until mid-May or later.

Moss was heavy Tuesday and Wednesday, and high wind was a pain Thursday and Friday, but it didn’t slow the fishing much.

Fish are feeding heavily on the caddis and are fat. Browns will move into the riffles this time of year to take advantage of the hatches.

Caddis have primarily been two types at Rim Shoals: the large brachycentrus size 14 green bodied caddis and a size small darker bodied caddis with mottled wings. For dries, a darker natural deer hair caddis with a dark green body in a size 16 has been working quite well.

Straight from the stomach pump, this shows how heavy the fish are gulping these down. Separated with a little water you can see two species and a pupa shuck in the foreground. A lot of shucks in the sample indicates the fish prefer the caddis just subsurface. But the preference changes as the hatch progresses.

Good fishing!

© 2010, Scott Branyan

Flip Putthoff and I ran up to Capps Creek today to fish. The water in the stream is higher than the levels two years ago when he and I hit the stream just before Christmas in 2007. Weather was stupendous. T-shirt weather felt mighty fine. It’s apparent that Capps had serious flooding last year also as debris fields are still very obvious and the old channels have been modified some. It looks as if floods were over the top of the dam there at the old Jolly Mill. But today water levels were perfect. Enough water was covering the moss beds in the park to make it productive fishing and one could still wade at the dam and catch fish.

Flip Putthoff plays a Capps Creek rainbow trout.

We ran into a number of anglers. I suspect some of them normally fished Roaring River State Park which is closed currently and preparing to open for no-creel season November 13th.

It was a great day to be out.

© 2009, Scott Branyan 

I fished Beaver tailwater with the Moore brothers on Monday. Fishing didn’t produce the usual large number of stockers, but then I don’t think anybody really cared. It was a special day and deserved a write up in my Morning News column for this week.

© 2009, Scott Branyan

Read Flip Putthoff’s Morning News article on our trip to Crane Creek. Flip always gives me the grandest reviews, but I take that with much less than a grain of salt. He gets most of the other stuff right however. The article will run in Thursday’s outdoors section of the paper.

© 2008, Scott Branyan

Flip Putthoff and I fished Crane Creek in Missouri today. It was Flip’s first time to fish the small wild rainbow stream.

I gave him the nickel and dime tour first and then we fished the upper most part of the Wire Road Conservation Area. The creek in the middle of the upper area was running shallow and thin. We found better flows upriver by the springs and discovered a beaver dam across the stream about a quarter mile downriver. I suspect there might have been yet another one further down stream also causing the flow to run slow by the time it made the lower parking lot.

Tough fishing, but I managed one fish before lunch, and Flip got to see the beauty of these special rainbows. We found some Baetis (Tiny Blue Winged Olives) coming off but nothing rising to them. I brought one home (a female spinner) and keyed it out. We see these on the White River tailwaters also from time to time in the winter months mostly.

After lunch we moved downstream to the lower section where water flows were very good and fish have more cover and are easier.

We each hooked some fish—I landed my three. Ha! Flip had a good sized one break off. There were some pretty good midge hatches coming off and a very rare riser or two.

It had been 2-3 years since I had fished Crane, and we had a pleasant, leisurely day of it. These fish are wild, and if you hook one in a hole, it may be the only one you can hook afterward for a good while in that spot. We saw few fish in the upper section. The lower section below the dairy farm seems to hold more which is usually the case; but I still like the challenge and the character of the upper stream.

© 2008, Scott Branyan

This is the time of year I do some outings to fish Missouri spring creeks, and I’ll have a report coming up in a few days.

Here is MDC’s page of links with maps on where to go fly-fishing for trout in Missouri.

If anyone has a good fishing report to share on one of the creeks, feel free to post a comment here.

© 2008, Scott Branyan

Wednesday was a day off for me, and Moose Watson and I floated from Bull Shoals dam to Wildcat Shoals access. Traffic was light. Streamer fishing was slow. The weather and comaradarie was great.

Nice guy that I am, I started off letting Moose fish. On his third cast he caught the biggest brown of his fly-fishing career. I foul hooked one rainbow. That pretty much sums up the day–well–except for the photo, of course.

Moose's Big Brown

© 2008, Scott Branyan

Flip Putthoff and I fly-fished Capps Creek in Missouri the Friday before Christmas. Flip is my outdoor editor at the Morning News, and he had emailed me about a question on knots. I told him he needed to practice and suggested we head up to one of Missouri’s spring creeks. We made time before the Christmas break.

Capps Creek is located west of Monett. The creek is the site of the old Jolly Mill which was a distillery run by slaves in the mid-1800s. There was also a town there called Jollification, but it was destroyed in the civil war. Several years ago, the Missouri Department of Conservation and a Missouri Trout Unlimited Chapter partnered to buy some land, and extend public access to the stream. They stock rainbows and browns.

Flip Putthoff reads a plaque at Jolly Mill

The date of the mill’s construction

Like most of the spring creeks in Missouri, Capps Creek is overgrown in the summer time. This, along with ticks and chiggers and the possibility of running into a copperhead or cottonmouth, keeps most folks out of the woody section during the summer months.

Brush and woody debris mean anglers have to slow down, fish close, and use a lot of patience.

Flip landed the nicest fish of the day, and I caught one almost as nice on the next fish.

This was Flip’s first time to fish Capps. The small stream takes some adjustment from fly-fishing the tailwaters. Short roll casts, line flips and dangling leaders into holes are appropriate techniques for the stream.

Towards the end of our day, Flip found yet another sweet spot and pulled several trout out of it including the nice fish pictured above. A really fine stocked rainbow of 18-19 inches. An unexpected catch for a short winter’s excursion. 

© 2007, Scott Branyan