Tamed by the Taylor

  The Bengal Tiger in the wild is one of the most ferocious, and majestic, head of the food chain animals alive. It prowls and feeds on anything and everything and walks around with its chest sticking out as if to say “yep, I am the king of the world”. When you see them at the zoo or even hanging out with Jake Jabbs on the AFW commercials they just don’t look the same, as if some of their majesty has been stolen from them. Trying not to sound to cocky but it is kind of the way I feel going from the Ark and going to the Taylor.  Fishing the Arkansas here in P-town has become almost second nature, I know most drifts, rocks, eddies, shelf’s, riffles and when fishing it my chest sticks out a little and , well you know….

  The Taylor on the other hand makes me at times feel like that zoo Tiger at the back of the cage that after losing its will to be the king of the world, it sleeps while the zoo is open and the only thing you ever get to see is the one paw sticking up in the air behind a rock at the back of the cage. Yeah, Cat and I are still usually head of the food chain while fishing the Taylor but we often feel like we are getting whipped not by the trainer but by the fish themselves. Every time we fish there we feel like we get trained a little more and hopefully some day we can fish it like it is our own jungle.

  This year the Taylor fish didn’t ever seem to fall into any feeding patterns. You could see a great Mayfly hatch come off and the fish would ignore it and not move into feeding lanes and just continue to lay on the bottom. Then, out of the blue they would move over and grab a few bugs then back to nothing. Cat and I finally started just walking up and down the bank and waited to see fish feed and cast. Sometimes bingo and others times squat. Frustrated one sec and I’m the man next. The FOD was the best fly of the week followed by the RS2 with the glass bead.  This year’s trip includes Cat and myself, Winston, my youngest son Brandon and my brother in law from Omaha, Jim. We fished the Taylor four days and went down and fished the Roaring Judy area one day. Brandon and I had a blast on the East, I had not thrown dries in a while and had forgotten how fun it was to watch the browns shoot off the bottom and destroy your fly. I still think this is my favorite trip of the year just because of the great company, beautiful scenery and awesome cool weather. When I see those AFW commercials I always worry that someday we will  hear about how Jakes prize Tiger had decided to return to its majestic and ferocious self, I hope someday on the Taylor I will do the same………

   The video is part of our constant pursuit of perfection for our Fly Fishing videos, Cat is getting very good at editing and hopefully we will continue to improve in bringing our readers quality material. Now if I can learn to write a little better. As always, thanks for reading and enjoy the video…