Caught a nice brown and me friday
Friday was a beautiful day here in Northwest Arkansas and I had the day off so I took my new motorized kayak up to the river below Beaver dam to do some fishing. We?ve had a wet winter and spring so I suspected that they would be running all generators to try to lower the lake level a bit, thus I decided on the motorized kayak as opposed to one of my paddle powered ones. I put in at the ramp by Spider creek and ran up river to the ?artificial only? area. It was still early morning when I took off and the river was still blanketed by a thick fog giving the landscape an ethereal air. I found a back eddy and began tossing a wooly bugger. The current was strong so I had some trouble keeping the fly down in the strike zone. I caught a couple of fish but decided that the high water conditions called for a different approach. I switched to my spinning rod, put on a jointed rappalla lure, and headed further upstream to just below the dam. Drift fishing the high water tossing bigger baits produces big fish on occasion. I was hoping this would be one of those days. I had drifted downstream about a mile with my mind drifting perhaps even further, when I hung into a big fish near an undercut by a deep run. He motored around my boat for a while and I didn?t want to try to muscle him in with my 6 lb test line so I took my time. Once I got him to the boat I grabbed the back hook which was embedded in the trout?s lower jaw with my fingers and gave a twist to release the trout (I was pumped as it was about a 5 lb brown). Anyway as I gave the twist the trout gave a big flop and sure enough the hook came right out of his jaw and unfortunately right into my thumb. I sat and starred at my thumb in disbelief at the sight. I had one of the hooks embedded in my thumb way beyond the barb. Holy Moly! Now what? The day was early and I didn?t want to call it quits and I thought to myself well if I go to a doctor he will just probably give me a shot in the finger the deaden the pain and then yank it out. Soooo how much worse could it be to just yank it out myself. If I would have had some booze with me I would have taken a solid swig at this point, but I didn?t so I just pushed the hook back against the shaft to try to minimize the barbs engagement with my flesh and then gave a big yank. Nothing happened. I felt the pressure in the thumb but the hook didn?t budge. I took a deep breath and gave a second stronger pull and a felt some flesh tear but the hook was still not out. Thanks heavens on the third yank the hook gave and I was free. Thank you Jesus! The thumb bled for a couple of minutes but it really didn?t give me much trouble after that. I continued fishing for the rest of the day.
