PANGBURN — I couldn’t have dreamed up a prettier sight on a broiling summer day than the Little Red River at Lobo Landing.
Picture a bright, clear day where the thermometer is in 4WD high climbing toward 100. Cicadas whined in protest, or was it approval?
Ray Tucker and I began sweating the instant we stepped out of my truck, and the sweat rivulets became rivers as we prepared the boat for the reward located down the steep hill at the bottom of the concrete ramp.
The Little Red River was low and still, melding into a thick ribbon of fog caused by the collision of cold water and hot, humid air. A full, dense aroma rose from the water that can be described only as “Eau de trout stream.” It was a mixture of moss, mud and decaying plant matter with a bit of a fishy overtone. Such an odor emanating from my little corner of Hot Spring County would be suspicious, but from this little corner of Cleburne County, it was heavenly.
[Video not loading? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHNaCrckSMs]
Within minutes, my War Eagle boat was packed with the necessities for a day on the river. We each had three spinning rigs and a selection of stickbaits, inline spinners and soft plastic swimbaits. We had a cooler full of cold drinks, submarine sandwiches and snacks. We had two tanks of fuel, sunscreen, inflatable lifejackets, ballcaps and water shoes.
Before boating, Tucker and I dropped in to the Lobo Landing dock to visit Beau Saunders, who we learned was in northwest Arkansas guiding military veterans on the White River for a Wounded Warriors outing. Instead, we chatted with his wife Renee Saunders and, of course, we bought a couple of additional lures, just in case.
My 2006 Yamaha 25-horsepower outboard roared to life with one push of the electric start button. It smoothed to a low purr as I opened the choke. With a twist of the throttle, we plunged into a cool shroud of fog that blunted July’s acid tongue.
Our destination was Libby Shoal, a popular walk-in area on Arkansas 337, but we flung our stickbaits overboard and started fishing at a slow trolling speed. Tucker used a blue/white Long A Bomber. I used a rainbow trout-colored Trout Magnet minnow that drew a strike immediately from a stocker-size rainbow.
We caught three more small rainbows in a short span, but we did not catch another from about 500 yards above Lobo to Libby.
As we neared Libby Shoal, a big fog bank mushroomed at the tail of the bend. The temperature dropped about 15 degrees as we passed a young man on the right fly fishing at the edge of a drop. Farther up, on the left, a teenage boy dapped a short line with a fly rod. His tackle and technique looked like Tenkara, a method that has a bit of a cult following. In the shade at the edge of the gravel bar, his mother sat on a crate and watched.
My Yamaha outboard has two shallow-drive settings. The first level will get through most any water, but the second level gets the prop even with the keel. We were going to try to motor up the shoal into the next pool, but I lost my nerve upon encountering a garden of big rocks.
We wished the teenager good fishing, floated back past him at idle and continued back down to Lobo.
Even though that part of the river is wide, it is very shallow in places where silt has accumulated into mossy humps. Large snags imbedded in some of the humps can shear the prop off a motor.
By then, the fog had evaporated, and summer directed its fire upon us. One does not notice heat when fish are biting, but one notices it acutely when they are not. We noticed it acutely.
The only remedy was to open up the throttle and create some wind by running downstream to Mossy Shoal, a fabulous catch-and-release area that harbors some big brown and rainbow trout.
Of course, the river had fallen by then, which exposed additional humps. At the boundary of the Mossy Shoal Special Regulations Area, we turned around to troll upstream, and that’s when the real fun started. As Tucker hoisted a rainbow trout into the boat, the fish seemed to hurl itself at him. It plunged a treble hook into his finger, then drove the hook deep when it jerked itself free.
I persuaded Tucker that I could remove the hook painlessly if he would let me. The technique involves looping a length of heavy line around the bend of the hook. Press down on the eyelet to open the wound channel and pop the hook with a hard jerk. It will come out the same way it went in, with no blood, and no tissue damage.
On the first attempt, Tucker let his hand follow when I jerked the line, which caused him great pain. He insisted we return to Lobo Landing Marina, where Renee offered her assistance.
Tucker did not want to attempt the line trick again, so we tried driving the barb out of the finger with pliers. That attempt was short lived because it was extremely painful.
“The fishing line trick works, but you’ve got to trust me,” I said. “It’s either that or the emergency room.”
“I’m not going to any emergency room,” Tucker said. “I want to fish.”
I cut all three treble hooks away from the lure with wire cutters, leaving just the embedded hook. With Renee videoing — and groaning and gasping for effect — the procedure worked flawlessly. We heard the hook bounce off the wall, but we never found it.
“That didn’t hurt one bit!” Tucker exclaimed. “There’s no blood. It’s not even sore.”
The episode convinced me that barbless hooks are the way to go. You might lose a few extra fish, but it’s worth it to avoid all that trauma. Plus, it’s healthier for the fish.
With Tucker reinvigorated, we returned to Mossy Shoal. The water was beginning to rise from a hydropower surge at Greers Ferry Dam. That got the trout to feeding, and we caught them all the way back to the ramp.
