That Caddo feeling

Sometimes you just know the fishing will be good

The author pulled this lamprey off a smallmouth bass that Rusty Pruitt caught last Saturday on the Caddo River.
The author pulled this lamprey off a smallmouth bass that Rusty Pruitt caught last Saturday on the Caddo River.

GLENWOOD - Sometimes you remember things as being better than they really were, but sometimes things really were as good as you remember.

For some time I had regaled Rusty Pruitt with tales of great fishing trips on the Caddo River between Glenwood and Amity. We often fish the Caddo, but only the eight-mile section between Caddo Gap and Glenwood.

“I’ve just got this feeling we need to fish that lower stretch today,” I said. “I can’t remember ever having a bad trip down there.”

Of course, I have had a few, and I remember them well.The first was the worst. That was on Thanksgiving Eve 1995 with Glenn Clark of Vilonia. We had never seen that part of the Caddo before, and we got a very late start on a dim, gray, thick overcast day. We floated the last five miles in the pitch darkness of a cloudy, moonless night and reached Amity around 11 p.m.

We contacted our outfitter as he was calling the Pike County Search and Rescue team.

We didn’t catch any fish.

Then, there was the trip in early 1997. It was 12 degrees, and I flipped my canoe within the first two miles. That might be the coldest I’ve ever been, but at least I caught some fish. Three, as I recall.

That was the last time I floated that stretch.

None of this sounded at all promising to Pruitt, but he was receptive. The weather was hot, he reasoned, and there would be lots of revelers on the Caddo to help us if we ran into trouble.

“Uhhh, not down there,” I corrected. “Not many people float that section. The outfitters discourage it because they don’t like having to drive to Amity to pick them up.”

“Lucky,” the proprietor of Lucky’s Canoe Rental in Glenwood, didn’t mind. “Just call me when you get there,” he said.

Immediately, Pruitt and I sensed that we missed a great morning top water bite, but we were optimistic.

Although the water looks inviting at the Glenwood shoals, I don’t fish until I reach a certain pool at the end of a long, winding rapid.

“It’s real deep where the water pours into it, and there’s a lip on the backside,” I said. “Bass stack up on that lip. Throw your lizard at the tail of the rapid and let it wash down. It should be ‘Katie bar the door!’ ”

Katie had already barred that door. We fished for an hour and didn’t get a sniff. In fact, we didn’t get a sniff for a couple of hours. We tried everything, including Zoom Mini Lizards in assorted colors, 4-inch worms, topwater plugs and even Luck-E-Strike crankbaits. After about three hours of futility, I got discouraged. When that happens, my focus turns to my surroundings.

It was a lovely day. Not unbearably hot, with a slight breeze. The hillsides were lush and verdant. The water was swifter than usual and very cloudy.

“As stained as this water is, the big ones ought to be out hunting,” I said.

We paid closer attention to how the current swirled around exposed rocks and noted the shadow lines against the bank. We observed how the current poured into the mouths of the pools, and which fallen trees jutted into deep water. And slowly, the puzzle came together.

We finally solved it at the tail of a rapid between a long, deep pool upstream and a twisting, narrow run downstream. The rapids formed two prongs at the tail of the pool where they looped around an island.Pruitt caught a succession of smallmouth and Kentucky bass downstream. I cast to pockets between rocks at the edge of the shadow line below the overhanging bank on the other side. I also caught a few smallmouths, but then I hooked and landed a 2-pound largemouth.

We discovered that the biggest concentrations of bass hugged gravel banks. By midafternoon, they also prowled the tails of the big pools and herded shad in the shallows.

This section of river has changed a lot in 16 years. Floods have rearranged it, mostly for the better. A lot of new cover is in the water, and in a couple of areas, the channel appears to be changing course.

There’s one spot where Lucky picks up his tubing clients that’s conspicuous by the huge boulder in the middle of the river. That channel is about a third narrower than it was 16 years ago. The banks used to have a gentle slope, but now gravel has piled up high, almost like a tunnel, with a thick wall of shrubbery.

In the next pool below, Pruitt caught the biggest smallmouth of the day.

Later, we floated through another pool that passes a cliff. A small shelf rock formation juts into the river below a cabin and gives way to a long stretch of chunk rock bank. Pruitt caught a smallmouth on every cast. We paddled back up and hit it again and again and again.

Pruitt fought one smallmouth. Just as he reached down to grab the fish, he yelled and jerked back his hand. I thought he had jabbed himself with the hook.

“What in the world is that, a snake?” he shouted.

Attached to the bass was a lamprey, a parasitic fish that looks like a cross between an eel and a giant leech. I yanked it off with pliers.

We hated to leave a hot hole, but time was against us, and we still had a long way to go. We didn’t catch much after that, but in terms of the number and quality of the fish we caught, it was one of my best trips ever on the Caddo.

I rank it in my top three.

Sports, Pages 30 on 06/16/2013

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