A 'Crooked' path

Blue-ribbon smallmouth stream at its best on sultry day

Matthew Hendricks (left) fishes a crankbait, while Rusty Pruitt casts a fly Thursday evening on Crooked Creek.
Matthew Hendricks (left) fishes a crankbait, while Rusty Pruitt casts a fly Thursday evening on Crooked Creek.

YELLVILLE -- The weather was hot in the Ozarks on Thursday, but the bass fishing was torrid on Crooked Creek.

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Bill Eldridge caught this big smallmouth bass on the last cast of the day Thursday on Crooked Creek.

In fact, it was one of my best smallmouth fishing trips ever, made even sweeter by the company of some of my favorite people.

The lineup included Bill Eldridge of Benton, Rusty Pruitt of Bryant and my son Matthew, who last week floated the Buffalo River from Ponca to Shipps Ferry on White River with his mother, Miss Laura. That trip usually takes about nine days. They did it in three. The flow was normal, and they covered 51 miles their last day.

Matt took about a week to recover and was so exhausted that he would not join me for a trip to the White River on Monday and Tuesday. I arrived at the Buffalo City Access at sunset Monday and caught two big brown trout off the boat ramp. The first one was big, but the second one was about 22 inches long.

Photos of that fish hastened Matthew's recovery in time for a lightning strike trip with Eldridge and Pruitt.

We got on the creek at about 9 a.m. The heat and humidity were withering, but heavy clouds mitigated the effect somewhat.

Eldridge and I began fishing immediately in a swift run, while Pruitt and Matthew went downstream to the next shoal.

Eldridge and I used Zoom Tiny Lizards in pumpkinseed/red flake, and we caught fish immediately in the heart of the current. They were small fish, so I pulled away from the middle and fished a seam at the edge of a gravel flat where an eddy swirled away from the current.

I also switched lures to a Kalin's pumpkin/red flake twister tail grub. In the 1990s, a pumpkin/red twister tail was one of my most dependable baits for big smallmouths, but I haven't used it in nearly 15 years.

It was like old times. I felt a solid strike and set the hook on a fish that fought viciously in the strong current. It was a bit longer than 15 inches.

A light rain started and seemed to perk the fish up even more. When we finally exhausted that hole, I had caught eight smallmouths and Eldridge caught four.

"With this rain, I'll bet we can catch a few on topwaters if we take a notion," I said. Eldridge agreed, but it's hard to switch when fish are hitting soft plastics so well.

We rejoined Matthew and Pruitt, who floated with us to the next shoal where the current splits and flows around a wide patch of water willow. Eldridge took one sluice and I took the other, and our good fortune continued.

I switched baits again. This time I went to a pumpkin/red Zoom Tiny Brush Hawg, with some modifications. With a knife, I split the paddles and made them look like crawfish claws. I dipped the edges of the claws in red dye, and I dipped the two feet in chartreuse dye. It looked garish, but it was more visible in the deeply stained water than regular pumpkinseed. My third cast with that bait hooked a brawling smallmouth that measured 16 inches.

Another important element was my sinker. I usually like 1/4-ounce or 1/8-ounce bullet weights to get a bait to the bottom quickly in moving water. This time I used 1/16-ounce. It takes a bit longer to reach bottom, but it doesn't deaden the lure's action the way heavier weights do. It also doesn't snag as easily in the rocks, so I didn't break off as many as usual.

A little farther on, I caught my third "pig" of the day, another 16-incher.

"If I don't get another bite, I'll still be perfectly happy," I told Eldridge. "I couldn't have diagrammed a better day."

"Me, too," Eldridge said. "I haven't gotten to fish hardly all summer, and I really needed this."

My intensity waned from that point forward. I experimented with unfamiliar baits and concentrated more on casting to tiny pockets and targets that I thought might hold fish. I continued catching at a steady rate, but they were a lot smaller.

Conversely, Eldridge's fish got progressively bigger, and he hit his stride with one that measured a tad longer than 15 inches.

Pruitt loves to fly fish, and he used a lead-eye leech to catch multitudes of longear sunfish. When he decides he's ready to catch bigger fish, he switches to a spinning rig with a Zoom Tiny Lizard. When he gets that out of his system, he goes back to fly fishing.

Matthew started the day with a Zoom lizard, too, but competition is tough among four people fishing close together with essentially the same bait. He switched to a Luck-E-Strike square-bill crankbait. He caught his share of smallmouths, but he had exceptional success catching Ozark bass, including one that was so big that we initially mistook it for a smallmouth.

The Ozark bass -- or goggle eye -- is very tasty. We tossed those into a cooler and had them for dinner Friday.

Fishing aside, Crooked Creek was in prime shape for floating. It was full from recent rains, so we didn't drag or hit a rock for the entire seven miles.

The rapids were lively but easy, and I took great delight in steering into the maws of the biggest standing waves and drenching Eldridge. With the thermometer in the mid-90s, he didn't mind a bit.

As the hours passed, we all settled into a relaxed rhythm. Pruitt stopped to teach Matthew how to fly fish while Eldridge and I worked each pool with mechanical precision.

The last casts of the day were showstoppers. Eldridge won a long battle with a smallmouth that measured nearly 16 inches. One of equal size slammed Matthew's crankbait and broke off at the boat.

Each of us caught about 30 fish, and it could have been a whole lot more. They started biting again about the time we took out.

Sports on 07/26/2015

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