DECATUR — The arrival of the autumnal equinox Sunday morning didn't feel like fall, but the scenic setting of Crystal Lake made up for it during an afternoon outing with the Tightlines Flyfishers. While the small lake's green waters didn't classify as crystalline, it emerged at first sight as a jewel nestled in classic Ozark terrain.
About a half-mile long and about 200 yards wide, the lake is bordered on the far side of the access by a high and steep ridge providing a line of bluffs at the water's edge along nearly its entire length.
On the approach side, the shoreline of a small park is lined with flat boulders and low ledges that form ideal perches for a dozen or more bank fishermen.
A parking lot, shaded picnic area, one-lane boat ramp and fishing pier round out thesimple amenities of the park squeezed between the lake and the green and groomed grounds of the Peterson Farms airport.
A fisherman's eye, however, was drawn to the patches of cattails along the banks, the weathered trunks of trees sticking above the surface, the logs lying in small coves along the bluff banks and the wealth of coontail moss visible in the shallows. The slightly opaque cast of the water also suggested the presence of nutrients rich enough to foster a robust aquatic food chain.
FISH FACTORY
Altogether, Crystal Lake appeared to have all the requirements of a little fish factory.
It is a lake I have heard big things about from fisheries biologists Ron Moore and Stephen Brown with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission office in Rogers.
Their intriguing reports came to mind when the fly-fishing club announced its outing and were enough to lure me for the first time to the little lakewith the pretty name.
Well, if pretty is as pretty does, the fishing wouldn't bepretty, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
I reached the lake by heading north on Arkansas 59 for a little more than a mile from downtown Decatur and turning east at the sign for Crystal Lake.
Fishing guide and club President Ken Richards of Bentonville was already in the parking lot unloading three small inflatable pontoon boats. Each with a single seat and room for tackle, the oar-powered inflatables would prove to be an ideal combination of stability and maneuverability for fishing the small body of water.
Richards said he regularly uses the inflatables with clients for fishing low-water conditions on streams like the Kings River and noted that his clients took to them quite easily.
He also talked about experiences on Crystal Lake going back more than a decade.
"This used to be an awesome little lake eight or 10 years ago; it was just common to catch a 5-pound bass," Richards said. "Then something went wrong - I'm not sure what - and the fishing went into a decline."
Water sterility certainly wasn't the problem. The lake is supplied almost entirely by runoff, and a lot of it runs through chicken farms. The ridge bordering the far side of the lake is known as Turkey Ridge and is flanked with an abundance of chicken houses.
After several years of decline, however, the lake's fishing began improving in the past several years.
LAKE'S COMEBACK
"It has come back pretty good and we've started to see some pretty nice bass again," Richards said.
The electro-fishing samples Moore and Brown conducted in 2005 and this year certainly suggest a comeback.
The first time I heard of Crystal Lake was after the 2005 sample when Brown reportedturning up a couple of lunker largemouths.
"We had one over 8 pounds and one right at 8 pounds," he noted at the time.
Reviewing the reports Monday morning, Brown said the 2005 sample turned up 291 bass, all of them largemouths. "That was really, really good," he said.
This year's sample was even better.
"This year we hit the mother lode," Brown continued. "We averaged 384 bass per hour, which is very high. We found a good size range of bass up to 22 inches, and they were healthy fish scoring a health index of 85 to 90 on a scale of 100."
He also noted that the lake's largemouths had produced a great spawn with good survival in the spring of 2006.
"We averaged a catch rate of 125 per hour of 9-inch bass from that 2006 spawn," Brown said.
Knowing the exact figures from those reports would have only increased the anticipation of action on a Sunday afternoon blessed with good fishing conditions: a light breeze and clouds to shade the lake and bring anoccasional sprinkle.
Richards was soon joined by several more club members including Wayne Patton of Bella Vista, Ralph Gresham of Springdale and Sam Morrow of Tontitown. Of the four fly casters, three were geared to fish from the small pontoon rigs, while Morrow fished from his kayak.
As the men rigged their tackle and selected choice flies, Richards perused a brightly colored assortment of poppers, streamers and divers in predominant colors of yellow, chartreuse and white. His sample of choices included a popper, a Clouser Minnow, a Zoo Cougar, a Sneaky Pete diver, a Sparkle Grub, a Cease Fly and a crawfish fly.
YOUNG SPORTSMEN
While the fly casters were rigging up, I took note of the bank fishermen perched on the rocks along the park's shoreline. Most were youngsters fishing with spincast rigs and using earthworms for bait. No one was catching anything except an occasional sunfish. Most of the kids appeared quite content to sit quietly and contemplate theeye-catching surroundings.
The Tightliners would surely do better.
Launching the personal watercraft was a simple matter of picking it up and walking it into the water.
Richards and Patton made remarkably quick progress oaring across the lake to fish the bluff line along the deeper water of the lake. Richards didn't know how deep the lake was at its deepest, but there were times he could reach bottom with 20 feet of anchor line.
He concentrated on casting and stripping his flies along the edges of the bluffs, around submerged boulders and at logs in a small cove. He proved the stability of the pontoon rig by spending a good bit of his timestanding up to cast.
Patton headed to the lower end of the bluffs to cast around patches of cattails at the water's edge and wooded cover back in a small cover.
Morrow paddled nearly out of sight to the upper end of the lake where the water was shallower and stickups were more prevalent, while Gresham gravitated to the shoreline below the park to cast around stickups and along the outside edge of grass beds.
The experienced fly casters were also fishing what appeared to be good locations for bass to be in a variety of conditions, and they went through a gamut of fishy-looking flies.
Yet, they could hardly entice a bite during more than two hours of casting from one end of the lake to the other.
For some inexplicable reason, the bass all developed lockjaw at the same time.
Toward the end, Richards oared over to display, with a rueful smile, his catch of a little largemouth that must have been a product last year's spawn.
"I got this one only because I saw it laying on top of a [submerged] boulder and was able to cast right to it," he said.
In a lake loaded with bass, the catch of the day turned out to be a channel catfish of 2 1/2 pounds that Morrow caught on a black Woolly Bugger.
"My fly didn't sink more than 6 or 8 inches below the surface when the fish jumped on it and headed for deep water, I thought I had a big ol' bass," Morrow said.
One slow afternoon of fishing for notoriously fickle largemouths is not enough to knock a lake's fishery. Besides, one thing can't be argued: Crystal Lake is a pretty little thing.
Three Rivers, Pages 116, 117 on 10/07/2007