We don't associate mid winter with float fishing, but right now is an excellent time to catch smallmouth bass, walleyes and even stripers on our mid-size rivers and streams.
For the last seven years, Bill Eldridge, Rusty Pruitt and I have done an annual February float on the Caddo River, and the fishing was almost always stellar. On one such trip in 2011, I caught one of my biggest smallmouths in shin-deep water below the dreaded S-Turn rapid. It bit a black/purple Yamamoto curly-tail grub, but we do just as well with the same lures we use in the spring and summer, namely Zoom Mini-Lizards and Tiny Brush Hawgs in watermelon/red flake.
Pruitt usually catches some chunky Kentucky bass on fly fishing gear, as well.
On the 2014 trip, I hit an especially hot topwater bite about 3 miles above Glenwood. A succession of big smallmouths hit an Excalibur Zell Pop off a high bank with a lot of chunk rock at the bottom. When we got to the end, we paddled back to the top and continued anew.
As we floated to the next pool, smallmouths hit the Zell Pop in the rapids. It hasn't happened since, but I keep trying.
One trip on the Caddo that stands out actually took place in March, but the temperature that day was 10-12 degrees. Al Fisher, the longtime sales manager and lure designer for Norman Lures in Greenwood, caught a couple dozen smallmouths with a White Little "N" crankbait.
Of course, right now is also the time to catch walleyes as they move upstream from the lakes to spawn. The upper Ouachita, upper Caddo, upper Little Red and its tributaries above Greers Ferry Lake and the tributaries of Bull Shoals Lake are prime places to catch these tasty, toothy perch.
You can also catch some big stripers in the same waters. During a trip to the upper Ouachita in February, I caught and landed a 19-pound striper on an ultralight baitcasting rig with 6-pound test line.
That happened, appropriately, in a spot known locally as "Striper Corner."
-- Bryan Hendricks
Sports on 02/05/2017