YELLVILLE -- We only needed a small window to salvage a day of tough fishing Monday on Crooked Creek, and we found it when hope was lost.
The occasion was an annual spring float fishing and camping trip on the Buffalo River with Bill Eldridge of Benton, Matthew Eldridge of Waco, Texas, Rusty Pruitt of Bryant and Ed Kubler of Benton.
We usually float from Spring Creek to Rush, but the Buffalo was at flood stage last week. Crooked Creek was the next best option. We looked it over at the new Mark Oliver Access at George's Creek, a fantastic facility that contains a fine boat ramp, parking lot and shaded picnic tables.
Crooked Creek was high and fast, too, but it was falling and clearing. We believed it would be acceptable the next morning, so we set up base camp nearby on a bluff overlooking the Buffalo River at Rush.
We'd never camped at Rush before, but we were delighted to find an immaculately kept campground with a large, level expanse for our five tents. We built a campfire, and Kubler went to work grilling our traditional fare of hubcap size ribeyes, corn on the cob and baked potatoes.
Kubler said he looks forward to this meal more than any other, and this edition was a tour de force. It usually takes me three days to consume my steak. I eat about a third on the first night, and then nibble on it for two days while floating. I ate the entire slab in one setting, and the corn seemed sweeter than usual, too.
After supper, we walked to the Rush boat ramp, where a small creek enters the Buffalo. Smallmouth bass were in the slack water and eddies where the creek meets the river, and Matthew Eldridge caught 16 in less than 90 minutes. Six were 14 inches, and he also caught a massive rock bass.
"I've never caught this quantity of fish this size before," Eldridge said.
Kubler, who used a different bait, caught about half a dozen.
At sunset, four bedraggled young people -- two guys and two girls -- struggled to maneuver a deflated rubber raft onto the ramp. Behind it, attached to a rope, was a foam cooler full of beer. It was a cheap raft suitable for a pond.
They'd left the keys to their truck in another vehicle at Buffalo Point and asked us to give them a ride. Their day started at Wild Bill's Canoe Rental, where they were told to stay off the river because it was too dangerous.
They launched anyway, and they were soon swept into a tree that punctured their raft. Luckily, the raft came with a small patch kit! They patched the hole, but discovered a second hole. Thank goodness they had a second patch.
Too bad they didn't have a third because they needed it. The boat was basically an undulating mass of plastic when they arrived.
Naturally, they thought it was a grand little lark, with apparently no thought to the baby the one couple left with relatives so they could take such a potentially fatal excursion.
The next morning, we launched our canoes at Pyatt Access on Crooked Creek for a day trip to Snow Access. The current was fast, but clear, with a milky emerald tint. Matthew Eldridge caught a smallmouth before the rest of us launched, and that gave us an unrequited sense of optimism.
For starters, the water took on considerably more stain less than a half mile from the launch, and it got considerably faster.
In water as fast as that, the best bets are to fish at the mouths and tails of the shoals. Only Bill Eldridge had success there. He fished small, Tennessee shad colored grubs and caught a big mess of very small bass.
Matthew Eldridge and I sought sheltered, shady pockets along the bank. We only found a few in the upper reaches, but they were too small to hold fish, and there weren't sufficient current breaks to allow a lure to sit stationary or even move slowly through a likely looking place.
Matthew Eldridge used a watermelon/candy Zoom Mini Lizard. I used a Mini Lizard in black/red glitter, believing fish would see it easier in the dark water. I also used various crankbaits and topwater lures to cover all strata of the water column. Nothing worked. I caught one smallmouth and a few longear sunfish until the end.
I am always amazed at the amount of baitfish that live in Crooked Creek. They teem in the shallows, but Pruitt noticed a large number of dead fish. We also noticed that they broke the surface in large numbers, and Pruitt wondered if they were trying to get air.
Late in the trip, I got two big strikes on a Booyah Pond Magic buzzbait as I dragged it over submerged wood at the edges of slack pockets. Neither fish actually got the bait, but I felt that we might finally be entering a feeding period. There was no way to know because there was so little of that kind of cover.
Our fishing ardor had long cooled when we entered a long pool about 2 miles above Snow. Matthew Eldridge and I noticed slack water beside a long stretch of mud bank that contained a generous amount of submerged wood, overhanging bushes and rocks.
Eldridge, who fishes very slowly, wedged the bow of his canoe into the bank and caught the day's best fish, a 16 1/4-inch smallmouth, from a spot where I had made a dozen casts. Shortly after, he caught another that was a little smaller.
About then, I felt a thump in my rod and caught a 13-inch spotted bass, followed by my day's best, a 16-inch largemouth bass. We enjoyed a flurry of activity that lasted about an hour, and it ended only because the sun was setting, and we didn't know where we were or how far we had left to travel.
I knew we were close when I rounded a bend to the base of a railroad embankment. We all stopped at the trestle where I scattered some of my son's ashes last summer. We have a lot of fond memories from that spot, and Matthew Eldridge and Kubler supplemented them by catching a pair of smallmouths as the sun dipped behind the ridge.
Sports on 05/28/2017