Chain lightning

Pickerel stand in for stripers, walleyes on Ouachita outing

Rusty Pruitt caught a mixed bag of chain pickerel and a rainbow trout Tuesday on the Ouachita River below Blakely Dam.
Rusty Pruitt caught a mixed bag of chain pickerel and a rainbow trout Tuesday on the Ouachita River below Blakely Dam.

MOUNTAIN PINE -- If not for Rusty Pruitt's warning, Tuesday's fishing trip on the Ouachita River below Blakely Dam could have ended badly.

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Striped bass and walleyes generally go for Long A Bombers and jointed Long A Bombers in rainbow trout pattern on the Ouachita River in the spring, but they have eluded Rusty Pruitt and the author so far.

It was the third stop in our informal Ouachita River tour, and this time we hoped to catch stripers and, if lucky, some walleyes in the Lake Ouachita tailwater. The last time I visited this stretch of the river was before Christmas in 2015, when I caught a striper that weighed more than 40 pounds. My daughter Amy caught one that weighed about 17 pounds.

Cool and rainy, that day was similar to Tuesday except for one major difference. The river was low and slow, which is like fishing on a slack tide in the ocean. Without strong current, it's probably not going to be good.

Of course, a classic Hendricks fishing trip entails some sort of weird drama, and it happened early. As we idled away from the ramp, Pruitt yelled that a log was caught against the lower unit of my outboard. I tried to lift the motor, but the wood wouldn't budge.

I pivoted in my seat for a closer look. What the ...? It looked like a bunk from a boat trailer. That's exactly what it was, too. Good thing we caught it or we would have never known what happened to it, and since we left in the dark, we might not have noticed it when we trailered the boat in the evening. I shudder to think of the damage it would have done.

There was nothing to do about it at that point, so I placed the bunk on the trailer, and we fished for a couple of hours. We trolled stickbaits to the buoys below the dam. I used a rainbow trout-colored Long A Bomber, and Pruitt used a small silver Rapala with a blue back.

Trolling was difficult in the low water because the lures kept snagging in the moss. Even so, Pruitt caught a couple of rainbow trout and a chain pickerel.

We fished about a mile below the water intake station and trolled back upstream, but we didn't get a bite.

By then, Pruitt fretted about being stranded on account of the crippled boat trailer.

"You stay down here with the boat," I said, "and I'll take the trailer into town and see if I can get it fixed."

"Pick up a cheeseburger for me when you come back," Pruitt said.

I was bound for a home supply store that just happens to be next door to an establishment called Arkansas Furniture, which just happens to be owned by Mike and Elaine Muzzy, dear friends since the 70s. I stopped in to visit, which eventually brought us to the subject of the maimed boat trailer.

"You don't happen to have a socket set and a ratchet, do you?" I asked.

"As a matter of fact, I do," Mike said with a flourish. He handed me a bag that contained sockets, an assortment of wrenches and, best of all, a DeWalt drill and a set of bits.

The bunks on this Diamond City trailer were originally attached to the trailer with only unsecured lag bolts. There should be three per bunk, but there was evidence of only two per bunk. They had evidently worked free and fallen out of the free bunk. It took 12 years, so it held up pretty fair, I'd say.

I drilled all the way through the wood and flushed the bolt heads into the wood, and then secured the bolts on the frame with washers and locknuts, the way it should have been done to begin with. I modified the other bunk for good measure. It's better than new.

I picked up Pruitt's cheeseburger and returned to the ramp, where two men and a woman frantically plucked trout out of the water and tossed them on the bank.

Rainbow trout were everywhere. About 70-80 lay on the bottom -- dead -- about 4 feet deep at the ramp. Many others were caught in the moss beside the bank. The trio collected almost three limits without wetting a line.

"How'd all these trout get here?" I asked.

"They just stocked them," the younger man said. "The truck left a few minutes ago."

Healthy trout jumped out of the water like a fantasy fishing video. I nudged a few lying on their sides and backs near the bank with my boot. They righted themselves and swam away quickly.

"If they just stocked these, the stripers should go on a tear," I said. "This is just like chumming to them."

Pruitt and I wolfed down our cheeseburgers and resumed trolling our stickbaits, but the stripers refused to play. Chain pickerel were more than willing to pick up the slack, though, and Pruitt continued catching rainbow trout.

When water is really clear like it was at Blakely, I like to experiment with my jerking technique to see how to get the most dramatic presentation from a stickbait. It flashed like a strobe as it darted this way and that. Any striper nearby could not possibly resist a lure in such despair.

The sky darkened, and a gray wall settled over the river. The moisture in the air was so dense that it was hard to tell where the river stopped and air began. Then the rain began. That's usually the exact moment fish start biting, and they did. Chain pickerel, that is. Not stripers.

"Where do you think they are?" Pruitt asked.

"I think they're hunkered down in those deep holes," I said. "Without current to push them, they just hang out down there and chill. As soon as it gets dark, I'll bet they come up and go on a rampage. Walleyes, too."

A fellow at a gas station in Mountain Pine confirmed that suspicion a couple of hours later. Slack current isn't any good for stripers, he said, but it's great for catching walleyes at night.

"Run you a red jig across the bottom," he said. "They'll tear it up. That's what I'm fixin' to do."

We were tempted to turn around and join him.

Sports on 02/26/2017

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