New Water

Bruce Stanton of Rebel Lures has spent quite a bit of time fishing Oklahoma's Mountain Fork River and much more time fishing Arkansas' Ouachita River. Nevertheless, Stanton and I spent all day fishing those two rivers yesterday without hitting any water he had ever seen before.

Instead of going to the known spots, we took a pioneering approach, looking for access as we paralleled sections of both river and getting in to fish where we could.

The upper Mountain Fork runs through a lot of private land where we were, but we were able to gain access at an RV park/canoe outpost along the river and were able to launch our own boats to fish both upstream and downstream of the resort. The Ouachita runs extensively through National Forest Service land, so we simply watched for the brown signs, followed arrows to public access points, and started wading wherever we could get to the river.

While we didn't find the smallmouths we hope to catch, we did find some willing spotted bass, and we loaded up on various kinds of panfish, and the simple approach of finding a public place to get in and seeing what we would find was simply fun. Plus we both know a little more than we did about both rivers!