My buddy and I floated on the White River North of Indianapolis - the same river that was 'sterilized' by a toxic chemical dumping (intentional) from a large manufacturing plant. If memory serves me correctly (and it seldom does any more), I believe that was about five years ago this coming January. However, all reports have been that it has come back and is now an excellent smallmouth fishery.
Our guide - yes we actually hired a guide - put his Hyde drift boat (another first for me) in at "Potter's Bridge" on the far North edge of Noblesville, a small city just North of Indianapolis.
We floated down to Forest Park, a total of about 3.5 river miles, all basically within the suburbia of Noblesville. It was a beautiful float on a beautiful stretch of river - park on one side and homes on the other side for the majority of the float.
Unfortunately, there had been a fairly heavy rain on Tuesday that hit this area and also up-stream of where we were fishing, so we had high raging muddy water. I was highly impressed at how well the Hyde boat handled and how comfortable it was to stand and cast (if you stood in the casting braces). We tried many flies, Clousers, Wooly Buggers, Thing-a-ma-jigs (the guide's creation - I don't have the pattern, but it's basically a Marabou-bugger with rubber hackle), all very heavily-weighted to cope with the high water. As a result, we ended up leaving quite a few of them on snags in the bottom. When you got snagged, the water was rushing so hard that we just had to pull and pray most of the time. We were able to retrieve some flies in the more quiet areas. A lot of the time you were casting from fast water into slack water in the shallows, so you had about 10 seconds of fishing time per cast. Which meant we were doing a LOT of casting.
After we got to the take-out point four hours later, we were still fishless, although our arms were tired from casting the heavily weighted flies. The guide, however, had not given up. So he took us on downstream a few hundred yards to fish some rip-rap as well as a couple of bridge abutments where he had been successful in the past. Nada. Then he went over to a concrete wall that comes down to what is normally a fishing ledge behind a bait-house. We anchored and flung flies off the ledge for a few minutes. My buddy by this time was really tired. This was his first time for "in-depth" fly fishing and his arm was worn out. After he got snagged on a stump three casts in a row he just plain gave up. About one cast after he quit, I set my hook on the same blasted stump. But a few seconds later the stump started shaking. Funny, I never felt a stump shake before. After a short tussle, the guide looked at the bend in the rod and said, "I'd better get the net." I ended up actually catching a 16" smallmouth, which ruined our slogan of the day: "There are no smallmouth."
We have decided that White River now does have smallmouth bass in it. Only one, but it's a feisty sixteen incher.
Allan --
Allan Fish Greenwood, IN [EMAIL PROTECTED]
