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Trout fishing enthusiasts packed the Town Center in Fayetteville on Saturday for the Trout Unlimited Chapter 514 annual conservation banquet.
In addition to its fundraising component, the event honored the local TU chapter’s volunteers for their efforts in trout conservation and mentoring youngsters and new anglers.
Trout are not native to Arkansas. The federal government stocked them in waters where hydroelectric dams irreparably damaged native fisheries. The White River is the most prominent example. When Beaver Dam, Bull Shoals Dam and Norfork Dam impounded the big reservoirs that bear their names, cold effluent from the lower part of the water column made the tailwaters below the dams uninhabitable for native smallmouth bass, catfish, Ozark bass and other warm-water species.
The federal government provided rainbow trout to stock in the newly created cold-water fisheries. It is said that local anglers were so angry about it that they abandoned the rivers for several years. In the absence of intensive fishing pressure, the Bull Shoals and Norfork tailwaters blossomed into some of the world’s finest trophy trout waters.
Brown trout are not stocked in Arkansas streams. They never were. Brown trout are present because TU volunteers purchased brown trout eggs and placed them in nest boxes. Those efforts were phenomenally successful, creating the world’s finest trophy brown trout fisheries.
In the 1990s, when I was the South and Midwest region field correspondent for Outdoor Life, anglers set new line class records on the White and Norfork almost every month. Mike Manley caught a 38-pound, 9-ounce brown trout in 1989 that held the all-tackle world record until 1992, when Rip Collins shattered it with a 40-pound, 4-ounce brown on the Little Red River. That record stood for 20 years until a fish from Michigan’s Manistee River displaced it.
There are also brook trout and cutthroat trout in the White and Norfork tailwaters. Regrettably, an attempt to propagate cutthroats on the Little Red River was not successful.
Hailey Robinson, president of the state Trout Unlimited chapter, cited these efforts in her remarks. She also talked about how she infuses trout biology and stream biology into her curriculum as a science teacher at Lincoln High School.
Trout fishermen are passionate, especially the fly fishers. Their enthusiasm for their sport and for our trout fisheries set a highly charged, festive tone for the event. Everything was first class, too. There was no rubber chicken or boot sole roast beef for supper. The main course was a thick slab of prime rib done to perfection, and salmon. The side dishes were excellent, as were the desserts.
Of course, the live auction was superb. One of my favorite offerings at the live auction was an L.L. Bean 9-weight fly rod and a Lamson fly reel that belonged to the late Dave Whitlock. A giant among fly fishermen, Whitlock lived in north Arkansas and was an authoritative voice for stream conservation. His widow Emily Whitlock prefaced the auction by explaining how Dave loved L.L. Bean fly rods. The rig came with a letter of authenticity. It brought a very high winning bid.
It was way beyond my means, but I have a bead head squirrel hair nymph that Whitlock tied for me in 1994 at a fly shop in Fort Smith. Whitlock would be appalled to know that I never used it. I can’t bear the thought of losing it.
I met Sasha Foster at the McClellan’s Fly Shop table. Sometimes you see someone and think,
