My brother and I were discussing this when I was home on R&R back in December .
He and I headed out to flyfish the White River that was located a few miles from where my family and I were staying . R&R for all of us , you could say . Lots of trees , babbling water and a great overlook of Beaver Lake ; which incidentally really needs the rain . Bad. I saw sandbars and timber stands that you'd usually never see except for maybe the top tips of them.
Fishing was 'ok' at first until it dawned on me that I was actually seeing rises and those tiny wet nymphs that are standard for winter rainbows and browns weren't the ticket after all. So once we switched over to dries, it was game on . No pictures , but then the fishing isn't the point of this post .
Drew , my little brother , reminded me of how when we were younger we used to dive similar rivers in the Missouri Ozarks in early spring and pole spear the 'suckers' that would make their migrations from the lakes in order to spawn . In between , waiting on schools to move through, we'd gather crawdads .
Now, when gathering the mud bugs we'd simply move underwater from rock to rock and grab 'em . For the fish, we'd sit on a high point and wait until we saw a school move in and then get into the water and intercept . Usually you didn't have to get very deep , as the schools we'd see were only in four feet of water . But the larger of the school , would hug the deeper outside edge of the bend . This was the place to go . In order to beat the current and not spook 'em , we would go just a tad up river and then by the time we'd hit the deeper channel we could drift down where we really wanted to be ; anchor onto a rock by holding on and then hit 'em with pole spears as they came past . The key requirements were a 5mil wet suit , a lot of weight, and a bonfire going on the rocky bank. It's a cold ,cold activity diving spring fed rivers in late March and early April . No fins needed .
We're going to start doing this again when I get home. The sheer amount of fish and filets produced doing this was incredible. Both of us miss doing it.
Long post to try to paint you guys a mental picture - that out of the way. What he and I remembered , while trying to figure out what the hell the trout were hitting, was how incredibly long our static breath hold seemed to be . Maye it's was a perceptional thing . But it seemed like we were down forever either grabbing crawdads or spearing suckers. Even when we were actively spearing and stuffing fish into our net bags , it seemed like an infinite amount of time we could stay down. Was it a combination of being mostly relaxed and not moving coupled with really cold water ? I'll get some pics to help illustrate.