We arrived at Taney in an ice storm and were suprised to still find over 20 people fishing below the dam. There were zero units generating and it didn't appear that the water had been on for a while. Rob headed down river below the rebar hole and I decided to head up near the first outlet to get away from the crowds. There were rainbows everywhere and I soon picked out the largest fish in the pod. I had trouble getting my flies down to it as the smaller fish would pick them up before I could get them in front of the larger fish. I finally got it to take a sow bug and after a short fight I landed the fish. It was a brightly colored male rainbow close to 19 inches. I continued to catch fish every couple of casts. I decided to head down river to see how Rob was doing. He said he had landed close to 15 fish swinging soft hackles and had switched over to an indicator and a couple of scuds. We continued fishing the pool below the rebar hole, catching fish of almost every cast. At one point I looked down and would guess there were over 30 fish at my feet. I don't ever rember seeing this many fish in the river. It was almost like we were fishing in a hatchery. We decided to head back up to the first outlet, as I had spotted some nice browns in the 18-20 inch range. We didn't manage to hook into any of the browns, but again caught rainbows on just about every cast. We started trying different flies and techniques, but it didn't seem to matter. You could cast your fly into the pod, let it sit on the bottom, and eventually the fish would root it out of the rocks. It was crazy fishing. We must have landed close to 25 fish each in the 2 hours we fished.

The flies didn't seem to matter, but grey or tan sow bugs produced the best, as well as trout crack, red/brown San Juan worms, soft hackles, and various egg patterns. We had heard there was a 30 inch brown roaming around, but after walking the length of the upper section of the river, we never managed to spot it.