Fishing Report on Lake Taneycomo in Branson 2/15/09

Rain, rain, rain... have we had enough of the wet stuff for a while? After last year's record floods here in the Ozarks, each rain event now has us all sitting alittle uneasy. By the looks of things, the Corp isn't going to let our lakes get much higher than power pool levels. All four White River Lakes jumped over power pool-

Beaver - 1121.8 ~ 1.4 feet over

Table Rock - 916.5 ~ 1.5 feet over

Bull Shoals - 567.6 ~ 3.6 feet over

Norfork - 555.7 ~ 3.7 feet over

It appears the plan is to get them down as quickly as possible thus lots of generation for the tailwaters. Beaver isn't running too much, Table Rock is generating all 4 units, Bull Shoals is running 7 units and Norfork 2 units during the day. We should expect the same till lake levels draw close to power pool.

For Taneycomo, that means heavy generation for at least 4 or 5 days. By next weekend, we should see a repreive to at least portions of the day seeing less than full tilt to no generation during the middle of the day. That's been the pattern at least. Just don't hold me to it. You never know with the Corp. In their behalf, they have a very hard job guessing what mother nature is going to throw at us.

I've been getting out pretty much everyday, boating to the dam and fishing the high water using, of course, white jigs. This isn't the only technique that's catching fish at the dam. Drifting a variety of flies is working too as well as small crank baits and spoons. Scuds, which is a freshwater shrimp pattern. When the water is down, we use smaller sizes but with this volumn of water, the size is bumped up. Scuds in #14's to #10's -- gray, olive and tan. San Juan worm in red, brown and tan. Egg flies in peach, yellow, white and fl. orange. Anything you use here has to be on the bottom - that's where the fish are holding. Sometimes they will come up for a floating shad but for the most part, they're on the bottom holding out of the current.

I believe there was a run of thread fin shad that flowed through the turbines at Table Rock dam late last week, a tasty meal for our trout below the dam. I don't think it was a big run but big enough to trigger a feeding frenzy, hitting anything white we threw at them. For the first part of this week, fishing was great. Lots of nice rainbows and a few browns all caught on white jigs. Now that they're running all 4 units, it's gotten alittle tougher simply because it's harder to get a jig down to the bottom and harder to feel the bite. Add cold wind and it really gets tough.

The frequency shad come through the dam is unknown. There's not a pattern or circumstance that we can watch and guess when this may happen. But there's a good chance we may see spirts of shad flow through for the next month or we may not see any more shad. We'll see.

Below Fall Creek, boaters are still doing well drifting Gulp eggs, night crawlers and minnows. But the best fishing seems to be down lake from Monkey Island down through the bridges. One good reason is the volumn of water we're seeing. That and this is the area where most of the rainbows are stocked. Bill Babler fished with a client the other day. They tried up below the dam for a couple of hours and did fair. It was when the wind was blowing uplake, making it hard for the client to feel the bites. So they boated down to the Landing and caught some real nice rainbows using a jig and float, setting the jig 5-6 feet deep. Bill likes using pink jigs... because the do work.

Rainbows are still running good size. We're still catching quite a few male rainbows. Not seeing many browns, even at the dam.