BISMARCK -- For fishing, Thursday's trip to DeGray Lake could have gone any of three ways.
So it did.
At 5 a.m., I met a group of avid anglers in Arkadelphia that included "Big" Sam Richardson of Malvern and J.O. Brooks, Rick Norwood, Mark Hedrick and Ray Tucker, all of Little Rock. We would fish for white bass/striped bass hybrids, which have been thrilling anglers lately at DeGray Lake.
Hedrick talked of a recent outing in which he and his son Matt caught and released more than 100. Fighting that many fish that average 4 pounds apiece is an endurance test that leaves one happily sore for days.
Brooks, a legendary hand at Lake Maumelle, was the subject of one of my first feature stories when I began at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette nearly 10 years ago. That was a Lake Maumelle white bass feature in March 2005. He's practically taken up residence at DeGray lately because the hybrid fishing has been so good.
"J.O. is like a little kid when it comes to fishing," said Hedrick, one of Brooks's proteges. "When the fish are biting, he can hardly sleep the night before a trip because he gets so excited, and you can hardly pull him off the water."
Richardson is one of the premier hybrid anglers on DeGray. He's famous for his fishing prowess, but also for his homemade spoons. Some are as heavy as 2 ounces, with bright powder coat paint jobs.
His spoons are custom to DeGray and are in high demand. He keeps them tightly packed in peanut butter jars in his boat, and anglers buy them from him on the water, sometimes in the heat of the action, which happened Thursday. Hedrick concocted a name for these baits.
"Peanut butter Sam Rich's," Hedrick said, as the group burst into laughter over breakfast.
"Steve 'Wildman' Wilson did a show with me down here not long ago," Richardson said. "I gave him one of my baits and wrote my name on it. I said, 'This here is my Signature Series.'" More laughter ensued.
For this trip I rode with Richardson in his jet-driven Express flatbottom. Brooks and Norwood rode together in Brooks's new boat, a specially designed hybrid fishing machine of which he is exceedingly proud. Hedrick and Tucker rode in Hedrick's Ranger bass boat, powered by a 250-horsepower Yamaha.
Takeoff is where the day took its first departure.
Brooks and Richardson launched at Caddo Bend, which is close to where they fish. Hedrick and Tucker launched at the Damsite ramp. We waited at the end of the point for Hedrick to arrive. We saw his boat in the distance, but it wasn't moving. Mine and Richardson's cell phones rang at once. Hedrick called Richardson, and Tucker called me.
They were dead in the water, victims of a blown motor. Their day was over before it began. Brooks' was too, because he spent the better part of the morning towing them back to the ramp.
That left only Richardson and me to do the fishing. We approached three other boats and exchanged pleasantries. The surface already boiled as hybrids thrashed and slashed at shad on the surface. We cast 2-ounce yellow/white spoons as far as we could, let them fall to the bottom and quickly reeled them back.
"I like to let them fall on slack line, but J.O. likes to bomb them," Richardson said.
"Bombing" is letting the spoon fall on a tight line, which imparts a different action.
"He gets a lot of strikes while it falls," Richardson explained. "I get most of mine on the retrieve."
There's a trick to casting big spoons. First, you want the lure almost flush with the tip of your rod. Then, with all the might you can muster from your back and shoulders, you whip the rod directly overhead and launch the spoon in a high arc. Richardson uses smooth casting, low-profile Abu Garcia reels, but the stress from a big spoon really makes a baitcasting reel sing.
"J.O. likes those round reels like what you have because he can rebuild them," Richardson said. "But I can throw a lot farther than he can."
It took me several casts to get the hang of it. All my casts landed a good 40 yards short of Richardson's. When I finally got it, I thought that spoon would fly forever.
"Man open deep. Touchdown, Arkansas!" I yelled as the spoon splashed down almost in the next county.
Richardson laughed.
"When you yelled that 'Touchdown, Arkansas,' I thought your line broke and you threw it in the woods," he said.
Why spoons?
When fishing for schooling hybrids, many anglers use topwater lures or small, shallow-diving crankbaits. However, these often catch small hybrids because they are the ones pounding bait on the surface. The biggest fish wait below the school, scarfing up wounded and isolated baitfish. A big spoon falls below the small fish before they can react to it, and it comes up through the big fish during the retrieve.
We both caught fish on our first two casts. Because I had only 10-pound test line, I kept my drag set light so my line wouldn't snap when big hybrids ran and surged. The fights were intense, and we boated four decent hybrids before the sun topped the distant ridges. Richardson also caught a big largemouth bass, followed two more hybrids.
That's the time I put one of the worst backlashes of my life into my Ambassadeur reel. It locked the reel up so tight that I couldn't even disengage the spool. It took about 20 minutes to pick it out. I caught one more fish, but by then the action was about finished.
"I know it sounds like one of them 'Shoulda been here yesterday deals,' but it's nothing like it was earlier in the week," Richardson said. "The wind's shifted, and we've got a little bit of a front coming in. And they've been hit pretty hard lately. They're not staying up like they were."
We spent the rest of the morning cruising around looking for schooling hybrids. We saw plenty, but they were always distant. The schools sounded as soon as we got in casting distance.
"They don't like the sound of these motors," Richardson said.
Even so, he managed to catch two more to fill his limit.
Richardson was like the Pied Piper of DeGray. When he moved, every other boat in sight followed him.
"These fish don't stand much of a chance out here anymore with these cellphones," Brooks said. "Everybody tells everybody else where they're at. There ain't no secrets anymore."
He was already eager about doing it again tomorrow.
Sports on 08/31/2014