In a pinch

Spotted bass save day when walleyes don’t bite

Rusty Pruitt admires one of the three spotted bass he caught Tuesday on the Ouachita River.
Rusty Pruitt admires one of the three spotted bass he caught Tuesday on the Ouachita River.

Thank God for bass. They bite when nothing else will.

This is the time of year when I get obsessed with walleye fishing, specifically walleye fishing in the Ouachita River. I think about them the way a stockbroker analyzes the markets. I watch U.S. Geological Survey water flow tables and rainfall data in the Ouachita River watershed and try to match the numbers with solunar tables.

When everything lines up right, I go.

And when things don't line up, I go anyway.

I'm not alone. I have plenty of enablers, and they're impatient, too.

Chris Larson of Roland and I faced that situation last Saturday. This is roughly the time when walleyes run up the Ouachita River to spawn. They'll go as far upstream as water levels allow, and they spawn in the shoals. We are a little more driven this year in the wake of the recent passing of our good friend Scott Hunter, who taught us the ways of the Ouachita River walleye. We were eager to honor his memory by enjoying a meal of fresh walleye fillets.

In the meantime, we shared Scott Hunter stories, like the time he and Larson launched Hunter's jet-driven War Eagle into the upper Ouachita during a flood. It wouldn't start.

"Did you put any gas in the tank?" Larson asked.

"Not since last time," Hunter replied.

"Last time? As in, last time last year?" Larson asked, alarmed.

"Yeah," Hunter replied, nonplussed.

"The most important link in the chain is the one he skimped on," Larson said, laughing. "The gas was full of water."

Hunter only used rainbow trout pattern Long A Bombers for walleyes. When he wasn't using a rod, he clipped the lure to a keeper at the reel seat. Most people merely reel until there's no slack in the line, but Hunter always reeled until his rods were bowed into question mark shapes. When he picked up a rod to use it, he almost always impaled his hand when he tried to remove the lure from the keeper.

The problem was the fishing conditions were all wrong, including the date. We usually start catching walleyes consistently above Lake Ouachita in the third week of February, and the fishing peaks in concert with the Little Rock Marathon. We know that Feb. 10 is too early, but we were tired of waiting.

Because of drought conditions, Larson and I realized that walleyes probably hadn't ventured into the river above Lake Ouachita, but we reasoned that they might be stacked at the fall line, the last set of shoals where the river tumbles into the lake. If walleyes were present, then so too would be striped bass and maybe even some white bass.

The weather last Saturday was ideal for walleye fishing. A low-pressure system had parked over western Arkansas, bringing cold temperatures, high humidity and a threat of rain. The only detraction was a mild east wind because, as the saying goes, "wind from the east, fishing is least."

We launched Larson's boat at the Arkansas 27 ramp, which was empty. That was our second clue. If walleyes were running, there would have been half a dozen vehicles there.

The lake is extremely low, so we motored very slowly upriver through a maze of snags and sandbars. We hugged the river channel, painfully aware that Larson's electronic graph showed no shad or big fish.

As we passed the Arkansas 27 bridge, the clouds descended like a Gothic curtain. The landscape and waterscape melded into a hazy, swirling, disorienting blur.

"This is what we want," I said. "When you can't tell where the water ends and the sky begins, that's when the fish bite."

Larson nodded confidently.

Those were the conditions when we finally reached the fall line. We threw jerkbaits and soft plastic swimbaits into and against the current with no effect, so we moved into an eddy and fan-cast the baits perpendicular to the current. Still we got no bites, so we went downstream about a quarter of a mile and made a few trolling passes to the fall line, again with no encouragement.

Desperate for a revelation, we drifted down to a section of bluff on the south side of the river. The current eddies in two spots where jagged sections of bluff poke into the river. There also are a lot of big boulders there and some logs on the bottom. I threw a 1 1/2-inch white paddletail swimbait on a 1/4-ounce jighead at the bluff where it enters the water and swam it over some boulders. As it neared the boat, I felt pulse through the rod. It felt like a walleye bite. I cast a few more times over that spot but got no more input. That convinced me it was a walleye because walleyes don't come back for seconds.

Shortly after I snagged the swimbait in the rocks and broke it off. In its place I tied on a Berkley Flicker Shad, a thin-bodied, deep-diving crankbait that often does very well in tough conditions. Casting to the edge of the bluff, I drove the lure deep and bounced it off deep rocks perpendicular to the current. It didn't take long before I got a bite, a soft, mushy presence much like that of a walleye. I slowly swept my shoulders around as I flexed my waist to set the hook.

"Got him!" I said.

"Need the net?" Larson asked.

"Don't know yet," I replied.

It wasn't a walleye. It was a chunky spotted bass that came to the boat like waterlogged cardboard.

I caught a second big "spot," followed by a third. Next came a smallmouth bass, the first I've actually caught in the lake. The fifth fish had the head of a smallmouth with the body shape and markings of a spotted bass. I thought it might be a "meanmouth," a hybrid of the two species.

Eventually I lost that bait and tied on another Flicker Shad in a different color. I caught just one more bass with it the rest of the day.

At day's end, Larson and I concluded that either we were too early or that the first wave of walleyes might already be in the river above the fall line.

There is only one way to confirm the latter.

photo

Rusty Pruitt tows a motorized canoe through a shallow pool Tuesday during a walleye fishing trip on the upper Ouachita River.

Sports on 02/18/2018

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