Rain triggers dreams of big fish
Abundant rain in early February has me thinking of going to the upper Ouachita River to chase walleyes and striped bass.
Right about now, walleyes and stripers are swimming into the main tributaries to spawn. Walleyes go upriver and start spawning at the last shoal they can reach. Stripers accompany them. They attempt to spawn, but the hydraulics of our mountain streams are not conducive to striper spawns. If there is any natural reproduction of stripers in the Ouachita River, it isn’t much.
Accessing these waters is the biggest challenge. There is not a ramp upstream from the Hwy. 27 Access. That means you’re looking at a very long boat ride just to reach the fall line where the Ouachita River dumps into the lake. In low water, a steep, rocky shoal at that point prevents any kind of boat from advancing upstream.
In really high water, you can take a propeller-driven boat several miles upstream into some of the premier water without much trouble. You can make it as far as Striper Corner, a deep hole at the mouth of the next really steep rapid. To go any farther requires a jet-drive outboard motor.
In levels best suited for fishing, a jet drive is the only way you can get past the fall line, and it’s most certainly the only way you can ever get past Striper Corner.
We’ve often covered the tactics for fishing for walleyes and stripers in the upper Ouachita River, so we won’t rehash them now. I’d rather relive some of the memories, of which there are many.
The first that comes to mind is my inaugural fishing trip with the late Scott Hunter. We took my canoe and an electric trolling motor. We launched at River Bluff Float Camp. Ordinarily the camp is too far above the river to launch a canoe, but that day the river was almost flush with the high ground. My first cast attracted a strike from a fish that hit so hard that it broke my line. I am certain it was a striper. We trolled the River Bluff pool to know avail, but things got interesting in the pool downstream from Saltpeter Rock. There I caught my first walleye, but we really got into them in the Powerline Hole below Striper Corner.
I learned these waters and their secrets in subsequent trips with Hunter, and then I started going on my own.
In March 2009, while I was being treated for cancer, I was deathly ill with pneumonia. I honestly didn’t think I would make it to summer, so I talked Mark Roberts of Maumelle into taking me for what I believed would be my last time. Roberts beached his boat at Striper Corner to deal with some kind of malfunction, and I went to work trying to untangle a hideous backlash from my reel.
I tossed a jerkbait into the water while I picked out the snarls. I had just finished the job when a mighty splash engulfed my jerkbait, which had been sitting idle on the surface.
Roberts started the boat and threw it into drive as the fish tore downstream. Line evaporated from my reel, and I saw the spool when Roberts finally caught up to the fish. After that, it was a mere battle of attrition to land what turned out to be a 19-pound striper, my biggest to date, caught on 6-pound test line and a light-action baitcasting rod. That fish had amazing recuperative properties. I felt like $99.99 for the rest of the day.
The best trip of all was with Chris Larson. We caught a few walleyes that day, but stripers were stacked in the Powerline Hole. We caught and released one after the other, so many that I got a bruise in my side from pressing the rod against so hard for so long.
The last fish of the day was a brute. After every run, it went to bottom in the heart of the current and sulked before building up another head of steam. And then it ran again. And again. And again. I fought that fish for 55 minutes through three pools and two sets of rapids. When I finally got it to the surface, it was too big for Larson’s giant net. My biggest striper was just south of 50 pounds. This one was bigger. All I could do was break the line and let it go.
A bunch of anglers fished from the bank in a line. They saw the whole thing and gave us a big ovation.