Myself and a friend had planned on a week long, 35 mile river fishing trip. But all the recent rain storms had everything flooded. So we started looking for alternate places to go. We found one small river that hasn't had any rain in that area and was running clear. We mapped it out as 24 miles by the river and planned on doing it in 5 days.
Here is where we started. A small looking stream but it opened up bigger not far downstream.
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We got going. We caught a lot of fish but they were all small. Mostly rock bass and smallmouth bass.
It's a very scenic river and one of the cleanest looking that I've ever floated. No trash in the water or on the banks.
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We stopped to camp about every 5 or 6 miles that we fished everyday.
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The biggest problem we had on the trip was a section where the river went underground for about a 150 yards. It was like we made a wrong turn and the water just ended. We had to drag thru the rocks to the other end.
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Then when we get to the end, the river comes back out of a cave on the side of the bank.
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We didn't catch hatdly any decent size fish. These were the 2 biggest I caught.
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We were into day 4 and had fished about 3 miles. We had planned on fishing a couple more before setting up camp and finishing the trip the next day.
Well, about 3pm the heavy thunderstorms started rolling in on us. It got bad quick. This river is known to flash flood and rise quick. So we decided to put down the fishing rods and paddle, and paddle, and paddle to the truck. I don't know if it flooded or not, but we didn't want to stay and take that chance.
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WOW! That's a trip of a lifetime. Beautiful river.
Wish we had more rivers like that. Most of ours fall off of a mountain so steeply that they are short and mostly whitewater.
We're going to plan another trip about the end of September on the river we had planned on doing this time. Lots of big smallmouth bass and an occasional musky. We've done several 5-6 mile one day floats on different sections of it. We're still planning on a 35 mile trip.
Great scenery, fishing, time and a buddy, you had the ingredients for a grand time. I think you win. :yoyo: :yoyo:
Sounds like you had a great time Ed. Ya know, all the big ones are hiding in that underground portion of the river. :laf:
Dave
Thanks for the pictures so that we could go along on your vacation. I even worked up a sweat when I was reading about needing to paddle my butt off (or something like that) to make it out alive. I had to take a nap after that.
Jerry
Man dragging bites. But it looks like you had a grand time. Even if you did have to paddle for your lives.
The river disappeared and then came out of a cave on the other end.
THAT would been cool enough to see right there. :eyebrow: