The wife and I just returned from a week long stay in Branson. The wade fishing was good! Little or no generation most of the week. Monday we were able to get her first trout to hand and she was very excited, to say the least. We concentrated in the area below the boat ramp to avoid some of the crowd. Good numbers of fish were evident the whole time. We noticed a few with "heron bites", but other than that all seemed to be in excellent shape and beautifully colored. Her biggest was a 16" rainbow on a soft hackle and I took one about 18 on a woolly bugger.

The hot flies for us were olive soft hackles in the AM, black soft hackles later in the day and olive woolly buggers. I also tried a black woolly and had a ton of hits on it, but no hook ups. I tried scuds when it was breezy, but I had no takers at all. Come to think of it, I've never caught a fish on a scud fly...

When there were two generators on line, I had the most luck with the woolly's early and a large weighted red San Juan worm under and indicator @7 feet deep. I hooked one large bow on the SJ worm that felt like I had hooked a power boat. After it got about halfway through the fly line, I decided to put a little more drag on the spool with my fingers. Big mistake...the handle of the reel hit my wedding ring and stopped the spool. Needless to say, the tippet snapped! Oh well, lesson learned!

We used 3 and 4 weights for the soft hackles and 5 and 6 weights to throw the woolly's and indicator rigs. All flies that I tied myself, which was very neat! Can't wait to get back!!!