On Tuesday April 15th, Jim Craig, Matt McClure and Glenn Haake headed to the Niangua river for a couple of days floating and fishing.    We stayed at Ozark Hills lodge, who has re-signed up to provide FATC discounts.   

We arrived Tuesday morning to fish Bennett Spring park.   With the recent rain and flooding, the water was murky.    Starting below the bridge, we had a good day, each doing well.   Later in the afternoon, we headed upstream to the spring, where there were NO fish.   No one was fishing, we didn’t see any fish and didn’t get a strike.    Evidently, there was some flooding which pushed the fish downstream, plus the prior weekend was veteran fishing (veterans only below the bridge).   All non-veterans had to fish above the bridge, we believe a large number of fish were harvested.    The people at the lodge indicated that they are trying to restock up there, but there were just no fish up there.

On Wednesday, we broke out the kayaks and floated from Bennett Spring to the Barclay access.   It was a beautiful day to float, catching many fish along the entire stretch.    We didn’t see another person, the entire float, it was an awesome day.

On Thursday, we had to wait for rain storm to pass, then headed back to Bennett, where we fished below the bridge until about 1:30.   Once it stopped raining, the sun came out immediately, which produced another beautiful day.

We stopped at Charlie Reading’s fly shop on the way down and found some black Oros indicators, which we bought to try out.   It turns out that they work really well, they are much more visible than any of the other colors — who would have thought?    Since they are rare, we stopped on the way home to buy more.    I (Glenn) will be using these going forward.

The flies of the week were, a prince nymph (they’re back), a little white thing, eggs (yellow, or green and pink), a pig sticker, orange perdigon, mohair egg sucking leach, cerise worm, and a black crystal flash wooly bugger.

Overall, it was a great trip, the weather is here, so it’s time to get out and do some fishing!    If you haven’t tried floating our beautiful rivers, I encourage you to give it a try before the canoe hatches come out.