Autumn is time for the 'Taneycomo Shuffle'
With COVID keeping extreme crowds at bay, November might be your time to try out this river dance
“You’ll have trout swimming around your feet.”
That’s what my friend Scott Hood told me on the way to Lake Taneycomo as we left the interstate and hit the smaller highways in the rolling hills near Branson, Mo.
I laughed as he lifted his hand like he was holding a fly rod and told me I would see people with their rods pointed straight up, lines straight down to the water trying to catch the trout at their feet.
“They call it the Taneycomo shuffle,” he said.
He wasn’t kidding and I got a kick out of watching those danged trout all three days we fished the tail waters of impounded river that is a lake at Branson, Mo. Some of those danged trout—big ones, mind you—swam right between my feet and even pecked at the backs of my legs as I walked.
Just about anywhere I stood, if I stared at my feet long enough, sooner or later I’d see two or three or more good-sized trout right at my feet. The ones that were almost twice as long as my boot were easy to measure with the naked eye.
It was a good show because plenty of fat 18-plus inch trout inhabit the tailwater below Table Rock Dam due to the artificial bait only (no soft plastics or scented/flavored baits) and 12- to 20-inch slot limit on rainbow trout.
I did indeed see people with their fly rods pointed straight up, lines straight down in the water, looking at their feet. After awhile I stopped laughing because I fully understood their frustration.
In three outings in 2½ days I caught three rainbows—four if you count the one I noodled. Mid-October through mid-November is a great time to hit Taneycomo because the big brown trout move up to spawn, but the rainbows are spawning as well and the big boys are a little more interested in smacking each other and chasing the girls than they are eating a fly.
Even experienced anglers on the river said fishing was slow, but if I watched up and down the river, there almost always seemed to be one or two that were hooked up.
During particularly slow fishing periods, or as I paused to tie on new flies, I tried to talk some of those trout at my feet into going out to retrieve a fly like my Labrador. It didn’t work. Trout apparently don’t take commands but the “shuffle” shows that they can learn.
At one point Hood rolled over a moss-covered rock for my camera and the reason for the Taneycomo shuffle became clear. The bottom of it seethed with scuds and sow bugs.
Anglers wade and move their feet, the scuds (some call them freshwater shrimp) and sow bugs are dislodged into the current, the fish feed and “the shuffle” ensues.
Taneycomo trout ain’t stupid.
That crustacean-coated rock and the fish around our feet illustrated why scud and sowbug flies, on light line sometimes rule the day at Taneycomo. Midges and sculpins and peach egg patterns can come in handy as well.
Some creativity in flies can pay off. Local life-long Taneycomo angler Wendell Beard showed us another fly he had developed, an olive-green woolly bugger with peacock feather added to create pincers to mimic a small crawdad. His good friend from Mississippi was hooking fish after fish at the time.
If Oklahoma trout anglers are puzzled by the idea of plentiful fish that are visible to the naked eye but hard to catch, consider that these fish aren’t stocked weekly through the winter like the ones in our seasonal streams.
Missouri Department of Conservation notes that it stocks about 550,000 Shepherd of the Hills Hatchery rainbow trout and 10,000 brown trout annually into the lower lake. The fish are stocked miles below the Table Rock Dam at average size of 11.5 inches. So, if you’re looking at a bunch of 15- to 20-inch rainbows at your feet in crystal-clear water, you’re looking at the school’s best and brightest.
But it also tells you that there are plenty of fish in the river and that when you hit on the right pattern and presentation you’ll be in for a great day of fishing.
On one of the first few casts of the trip our host Phil Curtis, Tulsa angler and Trout Unlimited Chapter 420 board member, landed a big male rainbow sporting its best spawning season colors.
It was among others tussling in shallow shoreline water but Curtis’s angry dude shot out of the crowd to hit a sculpin pattern Curtis had on his line from fishing for browns the night before.
The early hook-up and the fish around my feet as a first introduction to Taneycomo made me think we’d be catching fish after fish after fish. Boy was I wrong.
Curtis caught three or four more that afternoon. Hood caught five, three of which hit in the last 20 minutes on something he called “the nothing fly” basically about a #16 or #18 hook with a little hackle and little else on it.
I caught one I dubbed Surface Slurper. I saw the fish rise slowly to mouth the surface several times and decided to put a #20 Griffth’s gnat on 4-pound-test tippet in front of its face. It was a fly that had not been out of my fly box since I last used it about 12 years ago to catch grayling on the Chena River in Fairbanks, Alaska.
That rise to the take in the slow-flowing portion of the clear stream brought back some nice memories. Probably a small soft-hackle fished slightly sub-surface might have produced the same result.
Only one trout hit my line like a Taneycomo trout should. It hit the one #16 size hare’s ear nymph I had in my box that had no brass or gold bead head and no gold ribs—rusty hook and all.
After figuring out the right drift, with help of a Whitlock’s TelStrike Indicator, the trout hit on the last swing of the last cast just before I was about to pick it up.
That evening we returned to look for big browns, which are more active at night. I hooked my best rainbow of the trip, one that Hood dubbed the Blue Light Special.
Curtis loaned one of his dark olive and squirrel hare sculplin streamers to me for the evening and that rainbow nailed it.
The Blue Light Special name came from a I ridiculous trucker’s hat setup that has a heavy, but powerful, commercial U/V light attached. I used it while fishing brushy bass ponds this summer. It has an effective 40-foot range and really helps cut down on snags when fishing around shoreline brush and weeds but, honestly, it looks ridiculous and it’s uncomfortable.
Blue Light Special, indeed.
Still, I was curious to see how the skittish trout of the clear water stream might react to it, or not, and if it might give me a little advantage. At least one wasn’t spooked by it.
It also helped me spot a trout below one of the three outlets that flow into the river from the hatchery. I saw it splashing and turned on my white-light headlamp to see the 20-incher was stranded with its back out of the water in a pool about the size of a coffee table as the river level dropped.
I wet my hands, scooped it up and probably cheated some poor raccoon out of a quality visit to that all-you-can-eat buffet.
The fishing god’s rewarded me by seeing to it I didn’t get a single bite the rest of the trip.
What’s on my mind after that first sampling though, is a less-crowded Branson because of COVID-19, colder weather pushing more anglers off the river, and returning again real soon to enjoy some more that Taneycomo Shuffle dance.
A great article Kelly. Let me know when you are coming back to Taneycomo and we can get you into some Streamer Fish.
Great writing by my buddy Kelly Bostian. I hope you'll subscribe as I have.