Colby Lysne

ozark23

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:55:56 -0400

A few stars wink overhead, and for the first time in a week I think about the fish and the fishing behind me, instead of plotting and planning and fretting about the fish and the fishing ahead. I lie on the gravel bar, deep in the Ozarks, listening to the water that has taken all I had to give.

ozark22

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:54:32 -0400

I lean my rod against the canoe and sprawl out on the ground, firelight flickering on Ozark stones, gnats pelting my face like a hard rain. A symphony of crickets trills in a chorus almost as loud as the sizzling fish, which is almost as loud as Lysne’s cackle as he stands in the dark water, two-handing a trout. It’s almost dark, and I can barely make him out in the fog, like some figure in a photograph that’s faded in the sun.

ozark21

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:52:11 -0400

Just downstream of our 2-acre gravel bar, a hard current seam cleaves the river. Tendrils of fog swirl off the water like cigar smoke. Lysne cinches down his belt and waves a fly rod. “This is the sword,” he declares, “with which I will rule my kingdom.”

I wave him off with a spatula.

For the next half hour I trade rainbow trout and smallmouth bass nearly cast for cast, running back and forth between the river and a frying pan. Cast, strip, run, flip. Then suddenly, as if turning off a switch, it’s over for me. I’m done. Fished out, plain and simple, after seven hard days on the water.

ozark20

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:49:49 -0400

On the Seventh Day: I’m not sure I could devise a more perfect ending to a week in the Ozarks. It’s our last night on the Eleven Point, the tents are up, and as the light falls, black-crowned night herons wing overhead to roost. My arms are sore from paddling, loading and unloading canoes, hauling bags over gravel bars, and casting tube jigs, Czech nymph rigs, and even a shrimp-colored spoon fly I offered to the Eleven Point when the storms came and the bite went flat after yesterday’s breakfast.

ozark19

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:47:52 -0400

It couldn’t have happened on a better stream. The Eleven Point River changes personalities every few miles, going from a trophy smallmouth stream to blue-ribbon trout water as frigid springs dump cooling flows. Paddle a few more miles, and it’s back to smallies again. We leave the pig trough with three dozen fish landed and precious little time to find a camp. We pinball back and forth between 100-foot rock bluffs and wooded ridges rounded like the coils of a verdant snake. Stroke by stroke, fish by fish, Lysne and I inch across the Ozarks.

ozark18

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:45:56 -0400

“What a pig trough!” Lysne shouts from upstream. “These are Canada-size smallmouths! What are they doing here?”

“Living the good life!” I say. “Until now!”

Alone—finally—in the Ozark wilds, Lysne and I keep score by laughing and screeching each time we hook a fish. Suddenly, I hear a shriek. Lysne’s spinning rod has snapped—simply split in two at the third rod guide. He storms to the canoe, shaking his head, and mounts an ultralight spinning reel to a 6-weight fly rod. The catching never stops. For an hour and a half we swap smallies, the smallest one larger than any other fish we’ve hooked in a week of Ozark madness.

ozark17

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:43:44 -0400

We’ve been on the Eleven Point River for all of half a day when we paddle into a left-hand bend where a pair of springs empties into the river. Recent floods have tumbled trees into the water against a steep 12-foot-high bank. We divvy up the structure and send tube jigs bouncing over the boughs.

We’re into smallies like nobody’s business. Every other cast brings a strike, and we snatch smallmouths out of a heap of limbs and trunks and sodden leaves. Within a half hour we lose a dozen jigs, then wade shoulder-deep into the treetops to untangle our precious remaining lures.

ozark16

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:41:23 -0400

The Ozarks’ True Wild Side: The first big pig spits up a dead crayfish as I reach for his lip. He’s a 4-pound chunk of wet bronze that hit a tube jig plunked like a depth charge into a tangle of sycamore limbs. As I wrestle him out of the branches, a half dozen other smallmouths swarm the bass, striking at the jig dangling from his mouth.

Lysne grabs a rod and runs for the head of the pool.

ozark15

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:37:30 -0400

A chorus of rebel yells and “Hell yeahs” puts Nelly’s music to shame. I outline a square with river rocks. “Step in the box,” I shout, “and tell me about your childhood!” Within seconds, we have a line of willing models. A few can actually stand up.

About an hour later Lysne and I pull away, howling with laughter. Lysne shakes his head and says, “So that’s what it’s like after they tighten the rules?”

ozark14

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:28:59 -0400

I try to chat up a few paddlers, but it’s pretty apparent that I’m the only nerd at a frat-house rush party. Instead I buttonhole Marcus Maggard, who’s shouting orders to a couple of guys throwing 80-pound canoes on their shoulders as if they were empty bags. In 1945, he tells me, his grandfather, Buck Maggard, bought five canoes from the Sears, Roebuck catalog and started Akers Ferry Canoe Rental. These days, Akers is permitted to put 418 canoes on the Current River each day, and it’s just one outfitter among many.

“What would your granddaddy think of this scene?” I ask Maggard, who shakes his head.

“Not in his wildest dreams,” he says.

My chances for scoring introspective interviews about the value of wild waters in modern society are exactly zero, but Lysne smells blood. “Hey, y’all!” he hollers. “We’re from Field & Stream, and we wanna take your picture.”