PM sent Carey... www.beaversbendgetaways.com Cabin name is Mountain Fork Lodge...

Denny 972-841-3278 Text or cell

Thanks.

The Near Deer in action. This was taken in Lost Creek. When fishing this small creek, keep a low profile. They get hammered all day by other people and when you look like a bear standing 3 ft from them, they won't bite very well. -but again, it's the LMF and they can't resist a Near Deer as shown.








Zone III action with video tips. I pulled 147 trout out of this hole one day in 4 hours. Time before that, BaffinBay pulled out 109 trout and a 19 inch walleye standing in one spot. Never lost his Near Deer he was using that day. Trout tore it to shreds with just the chenille left dangling. Winter fishing at its best.

I don't always use the ND. If the air pressure is wacky or the are is highly pressured with people, you might have to drop down to smaller flies.

Great Vids!

Hi my friend, where have you been? Topwater action was sooooo good last month. We caught lots big mammas.

Report: Summer pattern is still going strong. Saturdays are crazy busy still. Sunday after 12 pm, the river empty's out as people have to check out of their cabins and hotels by 11 am. 95% of the vacationers go home at that point. The fish seem to know when its a Saturday, and they get hammered all day long. Sunday afternoons till dark--> Friday's are best times to hit the river. Some days we have the whole river to ourselves and can roam freely and hit any hole we want. Fishing deep in the pools is the main key to catching the bigger fish. The baby trout are hugging most of the banks and in shallow runs avoiding the bigger fish from being eaten by them. They can get a bit annoying, by striking your fly all the time and when you go to set the hook, a 3-5 inch trout will go wizzing by your ear. ( Fingerlings with par marks are not the reason I drove 2 hours to the river. The first one is cool to see I guess, but I am after the 20+ inchers.) We saw on one drift, 15-20 babies strike at our fly. Irritating, cause when your on a drift and you cant see in the water, your indicator twitches 5-10 times from them pecking at it. In the Evening Hole we had a 20 plus inch Brown Trout grab one of the small babies off our line and ate it. Didn't even feel it grab it off the line.

Grass Hoppers are starting to show up pretty good. So, the Woolly Bugger bite is very good mornings and evenings. You can still coax out a few during the day, but most of the fish shut down a bit as the sun is at its highest. I have the most fun in the Evening Hole stripping woolly buggers cause you can see them chase it down and eat the fly. Throw that bugger in every crevasse and behind any structure you see and also hit the bank almost all over the Evening Hole. The Browns are very active at night an for the first 30 mins of daylight.

Walleye bite in the river is off the chain. Every time we hit them we have been limiting on 19-22 inchers. 20 mins before dark and 2-3 hours into it is the best bite. A buddy went down there with the spinning rod and small cranks and as well limited out. We are throwing white/chart clousers 3 inches long. They hammer the flies. Not a long fight, but very very tasty. I took a buddy up there and he didn't know anything about them. He landed a fat 23 incher and if I had known, I would have told him not to lip them. That fish made a nice head shake the second he lipped it. The result was a punctured bloody thumb. That fish plopped back in the river 2 seconds later.

Back to the trout. Spillway Creek is fishing best early in the morning. Most of the fish come from the sides of the river bank in the AM, which I think they are feeding on the fingerlings. We are drifting an Olive Near Deer 90% of the time and that seems to be the ticket at the moment for the larger fish. When there is a hatch and I see the bigger fish sipping the surface, they are liking a #22 Grey RS2's.



I can fish this fly as a dry or even a wet. I use a bunch of flash fibers for the wings and green hackle for the tail. The fibers sit on the surface and hold it up. Or, Ill give it a twitch and it will sink down about an inch under the surface. And last, Ill put a small split shot on it and sink it.

A lot of the times when bigger flies are not working well, Ill drag an egg and drop one of the RS2's behind it. Deadly in the winter. But right now the fingerlings get annoying with this rig. We were actually getting a few doubles. 2 baby rainbows on one cast.

I have seen a couple copper heads on the trails and one in the rock garden at Cold Hole. I also saw a snake I have yet to see or ID for that matter, but I think it was a Black Racer. Thick as most peoples finger but 5-6 ft long and very fast. Lost sight of it after 10 seconds, after spotting it.

Down from Cardiac Hill, the Otters have been helping themselves to the trout stuck in the smaller pools. Watched one of the adults eat 3 trout in 10 mins. The babies ate the scraps mom was dropping. Another group of otters live in the pool above the Bluff Pool. They have a nice hole in the mountain. Ever notice scattered crawfish carcasses on some of the boulders? Especially in Zone III. The otter prop themselves on a boulder and eat em! Amazing the size of some of these Crawfish.

Not a lot of pics cause we are wet wading and I only take what will fit in my shirt pocket. The morning is a bit chilly in the water till about 9 am. Then it feels great. Wear OFF w/ DEET, ticks are out. Lost Creek has a lot of them hanging on the brush ready to eat you.

super nice.

Thanks for the great report! Enjoyed it. I won't be making it to the LMF, probably, for a month or two. Gonna try the "Narrows" on the Lil' Mo' over here in my neck. Try "French Nymphing" technique on long slow shallow pools just a little below dam. Those fish are hard to entice during the dead heat of summer, lemme tell you. A definite challenge. Anyway, I'm gonna try sneaking up on them with a 15' "French" leader while tightlining nymphs. Something to try.

My last two trips have been suicide missions.... get up at 3am, river by 6:30, fish all day, then drive back to DFW. I don't stick around for the evening hatches unfortunately.

The otters i have seen were in the middle of Evening Hole. Lots of raccoons, whitetail deer, night herons, blue herons, and baby rainbows. The baby rainbows are beautiful, annoying, growing, frustrating, and welcome all at the same time. You can't drift in Spillway Creek without a dozen attacking small flies. The Browns have grown to about 7-10" in Spillway, and getting their colors. Topwater action on them is superb with caddis and stimulators. Drop a beadhead anything off of that and you have a winning ticket.

Crowds have been lighter than usual this summer, except, as Carey said, for Saturdays. fridays and sundays are fishable. Still a fair amount of illegal activity (Barbs, swimming at the bluffs, Browns on stringers) and the worst is people scooping up the baby rainbows in nets. Trash has not been bad this year. Snakes not too bad either, although a little copperhead got me in the finger last week. A quick tourniquet solved that issue. Got a little headache from it. The foliage around spillway and evening hole is thick. Lots of ticks and mosquitoes. Take DEET as Carey said.

Can't wait for fall on the LMF. Time to head to the mountains for a few weeks (Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming). I will try to post pics and stories from each.

Please give more details on the Copperhead bite. How did it happen? Why didn't you go to a hospital?

I would say it was one of those "hold my beer and watch this moments" but since Jeff doesn't really drink I would like to hear this story also.

IF the story is true, (witnesses?, photos?) it will certify Jeff's bonafides as a true fisherman. Put a tourniquet on and kept fishing!

All I have left to show for it is two small black dots on my fingertip. Copperheads just don't affect me anymore. I did have to take a 15 minute break to chug some benadryl and tie some 0x line around the finger. There was a witness, but he probably just thought I had embedded myself on a hook. No big deal. A rattler would have been a TOTALLY different story. Immediate drive to emergency room....

Just below cold hole, in the weeds/rocks next to that little area of stagnant water. Little baby 16" still had his yellow tail. Not a whole lot bigger than some of the night crawlers I see being fished in cold hole.

And TD is correct - I don't drink and I am not a daredevil. Just isn't in my CPA DNA I entered his territory and he bit me. My stupid fault, not his. He is back under the rocks he came from.

I'm glad I am not the only one that had to walk back there and get my fly loose.

The only copperhead my buddy Dan and I saw at Beavers Bend was very early one morning after we'd crossed Spillway Creek (where the south footbridge use to be) and headed up the Nature Trail to fish the holes there. Slithering across the trail, heading to the creek was the biggest copperhead we've seen up there. Wish I'd of tried to photograph it. We stopped our trek briefly to yield to the snake................