Greasy B

I don’t know much about catching Google Eye but I have learned how to not catch them by up sizing my baits and especially hooks. So I guess the inverse would be true, down size your baits and hooks. Probably a 4” grub on a hook no bigger than # 2 would be as good as anything. Fish tree roots both standing and the root wads of downed trees. Older downed trees are always better than newer ones that have a lot of twigs. Throw into shaded areas.

Good fish, i came across a similar fish the first time i fished River King, neat place. Lately i have been fishing the older strip pits, they seem to have much better shallow water habitat. Did you see any Bluegill of size?

Whenever a fishing partner answers their phone when we're on the water I give them a look of contemptuous disdain and tell them it's no different than answering the phone in church.

"What were the streams like then?" I think there is very little documentation on what the streams were like prior to settlement. Few early explorers and settlers were educated enough. I recall comments by one explorer named schoolcraft describing bedding down along rivers in pine beds under huge trees for lack of anywhere open enough to set up camp. Examples of what they looked like are the middle 11pt and the gasconade between nebo and hazelgreen, a stable substrate and very few gravel bars. An example of what they have become would be the Black around Lesterville where the river flows through huge beds of loose gravel.

Ouch, are you talking about the occasional gulp of air that causes a momentary red line. Or did this happen from something more constant?

That was cool! Good sounds too.

yep, it the same principle that applies when selecting leaders and tippet when fly fishing.

I guess that axiom begs for an answer to, how many people are too many? How many jet boats are too many? On some very special water I get all upset if I see I single person in a day. On other waters I can put up with one jet boat an hour or one group of noisy floaters an hour, any more than that I question why did come to this godforsaken place. Being limited to nothing but weekends on the water the quest for peace and quiet is a challenge.

I think the pump water displaced is less apparent because it's path is to the rear. When a hull is plowing it does push more water to the side.

So is more water displaced by the pump than the hull?

A River Pro or River Pro type boat on a stream the size of Big River is just the kind absurd mismatch that's hard to put up with. Barring some horrible accident or a string of horrible accidents this type of activity won't get the attention of enough folk to make change possible.

“We have met the enemy and he is us”. I own a jet boat and have cringed at times when I needed to be on plane and found myself in proximity to other river users. When the rivers are peopled I try to park the big boat and float creeks.

Al Agnew said "I would have gone for a ban on all gas engines on the Meramec in a heartbeat back in the 1980s when jets first came into popularity. Now, unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle. Way too many people who own jetboats, including me. It's just a symptom of the fact that we are using these rivers to death, whether it be jetboats or rental canoes, kayaks, and rafts. But I still wish that somebody would have been proactive back when the first jetboats were appearing on these streams and done something THEN to control their use. It could have been done then, before many people owned them. And the rivers would have been a lot better for it” Al has made this point several times. If you substitute White River for Meramec this statement reflects the current situation on the Arkansas tailwater. The 1980’s is the same as pre-minimum flow on the White. Since the dam has been in place the use of high powered boats has been self regulated by the unpredictable and reoccurring low water. Once minimum flow is in place the river may only drop below 800 cfs during drought. 800 cfs is enough water to run a high powered boat through all but a few shoals. Once people invest in high power, high speed boats and the dealers are in place you will never get this “genie back in the bottle”. Now is the time for the people of Arkansas to be proactive, don’t let White River become what the Meramec and Gasconade are. Gone will the idyllic days of quaint traditional boats puttering around. The boats will be replaced by water craft that travel at such speeds they nearly fly and have a roar more akin to an airplane than a boat. Al, Sorry for stealing your quote from a different thread. I’m not sure of the protocol but it makes the point better than I could have.

Turn off your television, open your eyes to the world that surrounds you. Live your life in your world not the pretend world that hucksters are trying to sell us. The last TV I owned was thrown in the garbage about 1992, I have never missed it.

I seen some folks tube floating that one day. The water was low enough that they needed to walk the shallows, all they had for footwear was flip flops. The rocks were brutal, like greased bowling balls. Needless to say they were miserable. Wear wading boots at least.

Mitch, Did you see beds? So if the fish are spawning early I wonder if they will go into their summer pattern early. Heck I might need to go trout fishing the next few weeks.

Thanks moguy, At one time you could drive right up to the gravel bar there, the road was rutted pretty bad. Not sure how it is now. It's a neat place with the river and the mini rail road.

Excellent arrangment AJ, I concede to the wisdom of wrench and Doty. I used a custom rack like AJ's for the life span of my Chevy, it was a short bed and the cross members were only 6' apart. So much of the canoe projected in front of the rack that it tended to shimmy whenever I got behind a tractor trailer, it eventually loosened up the bed. About the time bed was so loose it was a problem I got rear ended and got a new bed put on, extended the life a little longer.

No good way IMO without a rack.

Thank for the video link. It made me recall the morning 30 years ago when I was sitting on a gravel bar on West Fork Black River, I decided places like this is where I want spend my life. While I haven't quite pulled off the life part of it I have spent most every bit of leasure time I have on rivers and never had a regret.

A fleeing duckling, if you have ever seen a bass pursuing one it’s pretty obvious. On another occasion I saw a Kingfisher chick floundering in the water. The Jitterbug association was equally obvious. Of course like all bass lures it’s the general action that is the trigger not an exact imitation.

During the summer when I do most of my Smallmouth fishing I can get by with just four, a dog walker, a 4” pearl white Senko, a buzz bait, usually black or white and a weighted Baby Brush Hog. I'm trying to expand my arsenal a bit this season but I’d rather focus on fishing a few baits well rather than accumulating more stuff that I may never use.

Anybody want to go fishin this weekend?

For what it's worth, West Fork Black. Quantifying accurate stream clarity would surely be a complicated and ardious task. What I find intriguing is the way a streams clarity can vary as it's influenced by inflows, algae blooms and other events. I guess lack of clarity is a reflection the quantity/type of suspended solids and algae. An interesting example of an event is the clear rise, several times each season I'll be on a stream that has recently experienced a sizable rain, instead of the stream muddying up it will rise and get clearer. I can postulate that the rain absorbed into the uplands, flowed down through the strata pushing ground water that contains less suspended solids and algae through the stream bed.

In the dead low water of late summer, early fall much of this water could probably be waded or bank fished. It would take some effort and bush whacking. (Thread true and straight). For much the same reasons it probably would fish best from a boat in low water. (Thread tangent). Now did that really hurt that bad?