PENCIL BLUFF -- I had forgotten how beautiful the upper Ouachita River is, but Tuesday was a fine day to get reacquainted.
With a clear forecast, I hastily convened an outing with my frequent fishing partners of late, Rusty Pruitt of Bryant and Ray Tucker of Little Rock. We thumbed through the roster of our usual destinations, but crossed them all off for various reasons. Crooked Creek was too high, as were the trout sections of the White and Little Red rivers. We fished the Caddo River last week, and besides, I was hungry for something new.
My mind kept coming back to the Ouachita River, which Pruitt and I fished exhaustively in early spring. We fished below lakes Hamilton and Catherine, and a section between High Shoal and River Bluff.
In my 12 years with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, I have not fished the highland section between Oden and Rocky Shoals. In fact, the only time I ever fished it was in 1994, when my late son Daniel was a toddler. He screamed and cried through the entire float, and we didn't catch a fish, so I didn't remember it fondly.
It's close and convenient, though, so it was definitely worth a fresh look.
Around 10 a.m., we met Ric Sharp, proprietor of M&M Canoe Rentals at Pencil Bluff, and rented a pair of canoes for a 7-mile float between two private accesses.
"The river has been high all spring, so nobody's fished it," Sharp said.
Sharp said a pair of anglers reserved a spot in the coming week. They're fine anglers, Sharp said, and they watch the conditions closely to time their visit for optimum fishing.
"We'll try to leave them a few," I said.
Sharp laughed and said, "Heck, no! Don't leave 'em any!"
As we approached the river in his dilapidated old Dodge van, Pruitt asked how Pencil Bluff got its name.
"A long time ago, when folks out here couldn't get pencils, schoolkids used to get shale from the bluff to use for writing," Sharp said. "At least, that's the story."
As we descended the approach in Sharp's rickety Dodge van, a great blue heron took loft from the river's edge.
"I've been here 20 years, and that heron has been here as long as I have," Sharp said.
The Ouachita was stunningly gorgeous. It was full and swift, but not high, with a wide ribbon of water willow stretching from the shoals to the bank. It was cool on our bare legs but not cold.
Everything presaged a fine day of fishing except the water color and the wind. The water was deeply stained, with visibility of less than 1 foot deep. The wind was fierce and gaining speed by the minute. We spent about 40 minutes fishing near the put-in when it was mild, but when we finally got underway, it was in a straight-line rip of 20-25 mph.
Such a strong wind made any kind of fishing difficult, but especially for fishing soft plastics. The wind was much faster than the current, and it took strong paddle strokes just to stay stationary. If we let off the paddles at all, we got blown backward fast enough to make a wake.
On most rivers, hairpins give you respites from the wind, but not on the Ouachita. It was in our faces almost until the end, when the river finally turned and put it to our backs.
It didn't take long to get discouraged, and with the wind gaining intensity, we wondered if we should even try to fish.
The third pool was the worst so far. It was in a canyon bordered by a high bluff. The water whitecapped, and we were all mighty dissatisfied. Tucker and I pulled over beneath the bluff and grabbed hold of a bankside rock to catch our breaths while Pruitt pinwheeled around the pool in his canoe.
"With the water colored up like this, the smallmouths are probably feeding in the open," I said. "We need something fast and flashy that will get down where they are. I'm thinking a crankbait is the deal."
Squarebills run too shallow. The Rick Clunn Freak digs deep, but it's too slow. I thumbed through a collection of jointed Rapalas until my eyes rested on a big silver/black Rapala Shad Rap. I don't use it much, but when I do, the results are very satisfactory.
Through my polarized sunglasses, I discerned two long, rock ridges bracketing a deep cut in the channel. A deep flat was on the inside bend and a deep hole extended to the bluff. That's textbook smallmouth water, and I guessed they would be in the slower current to the sides of the ridges.
On the first cast, the Shad Rap ricocheted when it bounced off the top of the ridge, and a 16-inch smallmouth slammed it. It happened again and again.
That seemed to fire up every fish in the hole. Pruitt started catching them in the middle with a Zoom tiny lizard in watermelon/candy color. I tied on a jointed Rapala crankbait in clown color for Tucker, and he immediately caught his first and biggest fish of the day.
When the crankbait went cold, I switched to a watermelon/red tube bait made snagless by an internal weight. I also squirted a glob of menhaden-flavored Lunker Sauce into the cavity, and I also smeared it all over the body. I switched back and forth between that and the Shad Rap when either went cold.
We caught 30 smallmouths from that hole. We could have caught a lot more, but with a productive pattern in our pockets, we figured we had conquered the river.
I was mistaken. We picked up a fish here and there for the rest of the day until late, when we caught a tailwind and the fish went wild over Pruitt's watermelon/candy lizard. I tried watermelon/red and pumpkin/red, but I only got a fraction of the bites that Pruitt got.
The river's beauty more than compensated, though. The hillsides were awash in vibrant, shimmering shades of green, and we had a genuine feeling of solitude. Aside from a few homes high on the bluffs, the banks were untouched and clean. There was scarcely any trash or flotsam.
"It doesn't get as much traffic as other rivers," Sharp said. "There's not as much developed access here as there is on the Caddo and other places, and to tell you the truth, it's just not that well known."
One thing I remember from my 1994 visit was how many wood ducks there were, and the amazing number of ducklings they had in tow. It's like that still.
Despite the wind, 7 miles passed all too quickly, and we took out at an uncharacteristically reasonable time. The wind had exhausted us physically, but our spirits soared.
"All these years we've been taking these all-day trips to the Ozarks, and this has been right here, practically in our backyard," I said.
We will definitely return.
Sports on 05/21/2017