top_dollar

Fishing on the lower meremac is good right now around valley park, castlewood, and emmennegar (sp?) Park under 44.. I like when its so low cuz i can scurry around the banks and catch them with some luck. Ive been catching black bass, white bass, and drum using jerkbaits, swimmin minnows and jig worms.

Holy cow, nice eye.

Wow those are some sweet looking little lures.

Ive done alright with grey squirrel tail. It has a nice baitfish color to it, never as consistent success as a plastic swimmin minnow though. Fox squirrel tails are great crawfish mimics as well with bands of orange and black Couldnt tell ya how the sink rate compares to polar bear hair, that is some serious specifics.

Its also a bit concerning that folks advocate violence at the thought of keeping a bass to eat lol.

How did missouri streams used to be like? I am pretty sure that missouri streams have NEVER been free of giggers. Even before Europeans colonized them, the native americans gigged before they angled. Republicans are a WAY bigger threat to Missouri streams than giggers.

Get over it.

Humminbird has suction cup transducer mounts which work well for me. Get a battery and a suction cup transducer and whatever unit you want. Works really well for me.

It's organism. Not organisum. No u.

I think you may hit on an important point when you said "conventional wisdom says go further from the access". Most experienced bass anglers follow that rule. Generally you will often see kids, or non bass fishermen hammering the access, but most serious bass guys find "better" water. My thoughts are that popular access points really dont get fished as hard as one might think. St louis county park ponds are the way imo...both get pouned by bait guys sitting on buckets, but thats about it.

I snuck down to river yesterday about 530 til dark. Its extremely low. My favorite spot to wade is a little stretch maybe 200 yeards long. It has 3 little riffles that now are little more than ankle deep. Each has a nice little scoured out pool maybe 4-8feet deep with debris and good current. I always sneak to the most downstream pool and quietly wade upstream against the current. I have found that i catch 2-3x more fish wading upstream. As i move to the last riffle it quickly gets too deep to wade. Fortunately i am able to scurry up the bank and walk along the bluffs. Fishing this way is quite a bit like hunting. The quieter i am the better i do. One technique i use is to move to the spot where i want to be and stand without moving or casting for as long as i can stand it. Normally after a few minutes all the little river minnows are swimming around your legs like nothing happened. It feels like hunting to me cuz when you walk through the woods everything hides, but if you sit down and shut up for 20 minutes the woods comes alive. This evening i stuck with the jig worm and a jerkbait. My first cast with the worm into a swampy looking pocket produced a lm less than 10 inches. Then another 30 minutes without a fish. Switched over to the jerkbait. First cast, crushed...another largemouth. This one bigger maybe 13 or 14 inches. I was worried though as the worm got me a first cast bite then nothing. That was not the case here though as the jerkbait caught me 8 bass before dark and of course 1 overzealous longear. 1 smallie was about 17inches, but skinny. The rest were 8-13 inchers.

Lets do some math..... stockton lake has about 300 miles of shoreline. Missouri has about 15000 otters. Lets go ahead and assume this year they all decided to go to stockton. That leaves 50 otters per mile of stockton shoreline. That doesn't seem like very many. How many otters does it take to ruin a 25000 acre lake? How deep to otters dive? Do they eat walleye off the bottom in 40feet? Or suspended crappie? Or are they confined the the fish that venture into the shallows? There are alot of assumptions one must make to blame their lack of fishing success at stockton in the otters.

Thats a total bummer.

They taste quite similar to crappie and walleye. Excellent to eat. Especially smaller ones. I cant say that they (or any fish) tastes better in the winter, but i do believe that proper handling and storage of meat is alot easier in the winter, leading to more folks thinking it taste better. When it is hot outside, it is of utmost importance to keep the fish on ice. You simply cannot have dead fish, or fillets, not on ice during the summer months for any amount of time. I cringe all too often when i see people with a bucket of fish at a filleting table in the summer and no ice in sight, by the time those fish are filleted, washed, and frozen that mean has been out in the heat for hours. Its ruined. My summer fish go in a cooler of ice immediately after I catch them. I store them packed in ice for several hours up to a day. Not ice water, but ice. If the fish are kept in a cooler with ice it needs to be drained and re-iced often so the fish are not just sitting in ice water. The fish should be thoroughly cold when you fillet it. That way, the meat is already cold when it comes out of the fish. The fillets get tossed on ice, and when all the fish are cleaned are rinsed in clean ice water. Keeping fish fresh is super easy in the winter time....the fish is cold when its caught, the fish metabolism is so low that they stay alive for hours or days out of water. It is typically cold outside when they are being filleted, so there is just so little chance for the meat to spoil in the winter leading most people to believe that fish taste better in the winter, when in reality they just eat spoiled fish all summer. All that said....posting this topic on this thread is going to start a 20 page female doggy fest about eating bass. It is probably better to post it anywhere else.