Favorite Fishing Destinations Countdown: No. 9 - Lake Ouachita, Arkansas

Largemouths, spotted bass, stripers, walleyes, crappie, bluegill... Lake Ouachita serves up excellent opportunities for catching a bunch of different kinds of fish, and over the past 20-plus years, I've gotten to enjoy many of Ouachita's bounties. Beyond offering excellent fishing, Ouachita is a beautiful lake, bounded by the Ouachita mountains and with clear water and mostly undeveloped, forested shores.

I've spent dozens of days on Ouachita and had fun doing everything from walking Spooks for largemouths, spots and stripers to jig-fishing for mixed catches of big bluegills and crappie. Arguably my single favorite day on Ouachita, though, was with Gary Roach of Minnesota, better known as Mr. Walleye, and Chris Gulstad. We were officially targeting walleyes, using light spinning tackle and jigs tipped with minnows, but instead found crazily good action from stripers up to about 15 pounds. More than once that day, we were tripled up with 8- or 10-pound stripers on our light tackle. Somehow we landed most fish that day. By day's we were happily exhausted.

Similar to what I mentioned about the Tennessee River, Lake Ouachita has been the site for quite a few media events over the years, which explains why I've spent far more time on a lake that's a dozen hours from home than on lakes Hartwell and Lanier combined (each about a half hour from me at the nearest point.) I've established many friendships on this lake and have spent countless enjoyable hours on the water, around a dinner table and in cabins with friends at Ouachita events.



And while it's not technically part of the lake, a bonus to Lake Ouachita is its convenience to the Ouachita River just upstream of the lake. The river, which is ideally suited for floating in a canoe or kayak or to wade-fishing, offers outstanding opportunities for smallmouths and mixed panfish, so I sometimes slip up to the river for some bonus moving water fun when I visit Lake Ouachita.

Good lodging options for Lake Ouachita include Shangri-La Resort and Mountain Harbor Resort & Spa. For guided fishing, contact Jason Lenderman, Hugh Albright or Ty Whisenhunt (870-490-1399)

Ouachita Variety

Last week's travel to the Ouachita Mountains delivered wonderful variety, not only in species caught but in the types of fishing experiences I got to enjoy in short order.

The species variety would be hard to argue. I added green sunfish, spotted bass, smallmouths, walleyes, pumpkinseeds and both black and white crappie to this year's catch list in three days of fishing. Experience-wise, I got to spend an afternoon and a morning on Lake Ouachita bass fishing, an afternoon wading the Ouachita River for stream bass, and a full day on the lake fishing Lindy's new Livebait Jig with crawlers and minnows for walleyes, crappie, bluegills and whatever else bit.

The bass fishing was made extra fun by the fact that I got to spend time in the boat with Alton Jones. That always equates to a lot of learning and great opportunities for gathering photos and story material. Far beyond that, I simply enjoy spending time with Alton and he invariably encourages me in many ways.

The jig/bait fishing was similarly fun because I got to spend a day with longtime Minnesota guide Jeff Sundin. I've spent several days fishing with Jeff, but mostly on the ice. He taught me a new approach, and based on all the fish we caught, you'd sure never know that he'd never been to Lake Ouachita before last week. I look forward to experimenting more with the Lindy Livebait Jig.

The highlight of the river outing had to be standing in a single spot and catching three species of bass (largemouth, smallmouth, spot) on the same Rebel Crawfish. None were big, but all were big fun!

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!