People Wading This Past Weekend!
It was nice to be on the water this weekend and look up stream and see lots of people standing in the water! Table Rock Lake has been below power pool (915) for over a week now. They continue to run water most of the time as Beaver is still about 6 feet over their normal power pool. However, there seems to be more of a pattern in how they have been generating. They actually turned the water off last Friday at 11:00 a.m. and left it off until 5:00 p.m. when they turned on two generators. Saturday and Sunday followed the same generation pattern so there was lots of good time to wade.
Don’t know if we are going to have a normal Brown trout spawn this year. Not seeing the numbers of Browns we usually see by this time of the year. The water is extremely warm (60s) and the dissolved oxygen is low. Have seen a few Browns, but it is getting late.
So far this week, they have started generation at 6:00 a.m. and run the equivalent of two generators until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. when they shut it off until the next morning at 6:00. The tailwater level has been holding between 705 and 706 feet elevation above sea level. When I checked on tomorrow’s flow, they stated they would be running the equivalent of one generator from mid-night to mid-night.
Had boats on the water all weekend and Monday this week. No one out yesterday or today, but have talked to several folks who are fishing up around the Hatchery Area and everyone is catching fish. Catching them on lots of different things. Of course, the gray scuds. Gina was out Saturday with Mary and Becky from Raytown, MO. First time for both of them to fish from a drift boat. Had a good time and caught fish on the black midge, and olive wooly bugger using a sink tip. Stan had Dan and Shelley from Kansas on the water. This was after they took a bunch of pictures of Caddis at the shop! They had fun catching trout on the Big Ugly with a burgundy midge dropper. Fish were hitting on both! Darrell had Jeff and his 12 year old son, Nate, out. Had a great time and think Nate will be back to do it again.
Sunday Stan took Eric from Kansas and Carolyn took Becky from Texas out for half day. They were really together, but we kept them in separate boats! Becky is a new fly fisher and actually got tired of catching fish. Both Eric and Becky were catching fish on the Big Ugly with a burgundy midge dropper. Again, the fish were taking both the dry as well as the midge. While we were waiting to take our boats out, we threw the olive filoplume out using the intermediate sink tip and caught several more this way.
Monday was another day of Big Ugly and the Midge. Stan and Bob, from Michigan, had a good half day just using this combination. Several nice size fish in the 16-17 inch range.