Bill B.

I saw something floating far out on the lake, but I couldn't tell if it was a bouy or a gull. Have the same trouble in Columbia sometimes.

2015??? H*ll, the Mayan calendar runs out in December. : )

Good point. I'll try to remember that.

Do you have any small white buzzbaits or spinnerbaits with you? If you do, then I vote for Rocky Fork (the north side) or Tri-City Lake between Sturgeon and Centralia.

Check out this story about an unexpected find in a trout's gut: http://www.weather.c...-trout-20120927 Bill B.

Romney signed a bill that diverted license money into the general revenue fund. It took a threat from the federal government to get the legislature and the governor to rescind the bill. Here's a line from a 2003 story: "The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) notified the Romney administration that failure to restore funds diverted from the Inland Fish and Game Fund would result in the loss of federal wildlife dollars." This is a situation where the strings attached to federal money produced good results for people who like to hunt and fish.

Thanks. I've definitely added the upper Mississippi to my short list of places to visit in the next year or two.

That's a highly poisonous White River fish adder. You'll encounter them sometimes during the day, but they especially like to feed at night. Their fangs are even longer than the fangs of water moccasins, and they can bite right through a pair of chest waders. They are most common in the fall, about the time the browns move up to the hatchery. If you accidentally step on one in the dark, you're probably toast. For safety's sake, you should confine your fall fishing to the middle of the day.

Excellent. Could you fish that stretch from a kayak?

Check this out: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MO_FISHERMAN_GRENADE_SNAGGED_MOOL-?SITE=MOCOD&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

They must mean the whistle bridge below Tunnel Dam. There aren't any other possibilities that I know of. Five hundred-plus yards below the whistle bridge.

Most of the MDC areas allow night fishing. The rules will read something like this (for the Columbia Bottom CA at the mouth of the MIssouri): Area Hours Columbia Bottom Conservation Area is closed from one half hour after sunset until one half hour before sunrise daily except for authorized hunting and fishing activities and launching and landing boats.

Sometime during the early '80s, the MDC first tried stocking browns in the Niangua River. They are tolerant of somewhat warmer water than are rainbows, and I remember catching a couple of them below Tunnel Dam. Maybe that's where the browns in the spring hole came from.

I also got to fish Beaver Lake shortly after it filled. As Wayne said, it started tough and never changed, unlike Bull Shoals and Table Rock.

Ditto. There are plenty of places to fish from a canoe, kayak or belly boat within an hour's drive of Columbia. Where to go depends on what you want to catch.

I keep getting an "account suspended" message when I try to access Crappie.com. It would be a pity if we lost that forum.

Freeze it at 5:48. The anal fin and tail also say it's a blue. Nice fish, well landed!

Missouri has all or part of only three of them. I thought TR would rate higher than it did: http://www.bassmaster.com/news/100-best-bass-lakes

The Zambezi River, I think. I'd like to see a few schools of those tiger fish in Lake of the Ozarks. He told the same story about a dam on the Zambezi that he told last week about Bagnell Dam: A diver went down to clean the generator grates, got scared by the giant catfish and refused to go back. That has to be the oldest fish story in existence, but, both weeks, Jeremy told the story as if he'd never heard it before.

In 1967/68, the MDC released 200+ muskies into the Niangua arm of Lake of the Ozarks. In 1981, LOZ produced the current Missouri state record muskie. It came from the Niangua arm. Might be interesting to try that again. Arkansas tried lake trout in Bull Shoals back in the '80s. Didn't work out very well.

Got down there yesterday (Tuesday) at 6:45 a.m. Fished until 10 a.m. on the generator side. Took a break, then fished from noon until 2:30. Not many people fishing, really, not for Truman Dam. Many more fishing over in the slack water. The docks were pretty much full in the morning, not so much in the afternoon. Maybe 30-40 boats clustered there at noon. Couldn't see how the people in the boats were doing, but the folks on the docks were catching a lot of crappie, mostly small. I didn't see an honest 10-inch fish on the dock that I visited. On the generator side, the crappie bite was light but consistent. If you know where the concrete slide down to the water is, I fished downstream from that. There were maybe half a dozen other people there in the morning, scattered along 50 yards or more of bank. Most crappie were 6-8 inches long, but every third or fourth fish broke the 9-inch barrier. Some were bigger than that. I quit with 15 fish, none under 10 inches, and several that went 12-13 inches. By afternoon, the generator-side bank was nearly empty. I caught more and bigger fish in the afternoon. If you let your jig hit the rocks within 10 feet of the bank, you'd usually catch a short white crappie. Farther out, on the bottom, you'd pick up bigger fish. The biggest were all black crappie, and my biggest came off the bottom at least 50 feet out from the bank. Their bite was super light. I didn't catch a single white bass. Caught one hybrid that might have weighed two pounds. Where are the white bass? Lots of spoonbill out in the current.

I looked at the same thing this morning and took tomorrow off work.

D*mn! Foiled again.

Just kidding. But I bet they'd work as well for crappie as they do for anything else. Here's another one that I'm just kidding about, but I like the image: Did you hear about the guy who won a bass tournament on Table Rock with just one cast? He graphed a school of big fish holding off a point. When he chucked an A-rig to them, he got a solid thump on the first cast. Instead of cranking the fish straight in, he let it fight for a couple of minutes. Every few seconds, the weight at the end of the line got heavier as other fish grabbed the remaining free sassy shads. By the time he finally landed his fish, he had five of them hooked, none under three pounds.

Spring is pretty much over, anyway. Up here in central MO, the crappie have pretty much spawned out and are moving into their summer patterns. At Truman, we're catching our best crappie trolling A-rigs 35 feet deep over treetops in 100+ feet of water.