Rebel Critter Two Step

While stream fishing in the Ouachita Mountains last week, Bruce Stanton and I mostly used two-pronged lure presentations, making the most of the functionality of Rebel Crawfish and Crickhoppers. Both lures float naturally and dive a couple of feet and wobble when you pull them through the water.

Most of the smallmouths, spots and assorted panfish in Mountain Fork and the Ouachita River were close to shoreline cover and looking up, so we would cast toward the bank, let the bait settle for just a moment and then twitch it and pause it a few times to make it dance on top. Often a fish would blast the lure on the top. If it didn't, we'd then move to step two, which involved reeling the lure back to engage it's subsurface swim.

On that particular trip, if we had only used the lures as crankbaits, by casting and immediately reeling them back, we'd have probably missed out on 80 percent of the fish we caught. Other days, the opposite would be the case. Often, strikes occur about evenly with both approaches. Experiment, and the fish will let you know.

The cool thing is that you don't have to choose. Just as we mostly did, you can incorporate topwater fishing and cranking into every cast.

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!