At our fly shops we often get asked what to use and where to go. Much more rarely do we hear questions like “how should I fish?” or “what type of water should I fish?” or “what sort of food is available and what are the feeding patterns throughout the day?” However, these are really the more important questions.
We can show you our vast selection of flies and we can spend hours scrutinizing the map, but once one is out on the stream it really comes down to how one fishes and the observations that guide those decisions. Whether it’s one’s first time on the Arkansas, or it’s simply been a long time, a review of the traits that distinguish this river from others is helpful. The more one understands about this fishery, the better one can integrate observations on the stream into a more meaningful framework.
The Arkansas River is not a tailwater.
Many visitors to the Arkansas come from Colorado’s Front Range communities and have cut their teeth on rivers like the South Platte, North Platte, Frying Pan, Green or Bighorn. The controlled water flow and water temperature and the specificity of foodstuffs on these rivers make fishing them both challenging and formulaic. Hence the common question in our flyshops, “What are they hitting?” and the sort of bewildering response that can result.
It is rare to find Arkansas River trout totally keyed onto any one bug, much less any one artificial representation. Rather, at any time there are particular aquatic insects that are active and others that are plausibly available to the fish. Representations of these aquatics, or attractor patterns that are simply too enticing to ignore, will often induce a hit from fish whether they are actively feeding or not, whether they are keyed onto a specific emergence or not.
Take mid-April as an example. Most mornings there will be a midge emergence, with midge pupae drawing trout into the riffles and pocket water to feed. If one pumps fish stomachs at that time of day, the majority of what is found will be immature midges. However, one will likely also find a caddis larva, a mayfly nymph, maybe a stonefly nymph or cranefly larva as well. There may be a cased caddis in there. Similarly, when fishing at that time of day, a well-presented chocolate midge pupa in a size 20-22 will take a lot of fish. But to present it well, one needs some weight and so fishing it behind a golden or yellow sally stonefly nymph will get it to the right depth in the faster water where the fish are feeding. Being plausible, even if not active, those stonefly nymphs will take fish too. Sometimes a lot.
So it’s not so much about what precise fly the fish may be eating but the type of water they are working and the range of options that could work there. Understanding the dynamic at work is key to figuring out where fish are holding and what they might then be willing to eat.
See our post "The Arkansas River is a Brown Trout Fishery" for even more insight into fishing the Arkansas River, or stop by our shops in Buena Vista and Salida, Colorado.