Gavin

Its not night fishing if your not floating, LOL.

Dunno...I'd almost bet that you could set up a check point exiting a church fish fry and find a similar number of minor drug violations. It makes a good headline, but drugs are everywhere.

Makes perfect sense to me...Dont block navigation channel, and dont get upset if someone has to use it while your fishing it....... The same rule applies to wading anglers on float streams...I'll float behind them quietly if I can, but sometimes you have to go down the channel were they are fishing. It just happens.. Cheers.

Yep, MDC has a lot of money on hand..Interest earned on cash reserves doesnt have anything to do with amount of your permit fees though. MDC has a big budget and they need a lot of cash in the bank to make payroll and pay bills. Their annual budget is around $160M a year, so I'd imagine that they would have at least $20-50M in the bank at all times. And FWIW,,,Hunting and Fishing permits only provide $28M of their $160M budget...Their cash cow is the 1/8cent sales tax that provides them with 100M per year. If their primary support was from permit and user fees, we'd be paying a lot more. Cheers.

If your looking to float it, I'd rent a canoe. Baptist Camp to Parker is your shortest float (5.5 miles) but youll have to do your own shuttle. Jadwin Canoe will rent and shuttle you between Baptist and Cedargrove, or Akers Ferry Canoe rental can shuttle you for a float between Cedargrove and Akers. Both are nice 7 mile day floats (or overnight with lots of fishing) but the Baptist to Cedargrove area usually fishes better. If your in good shape you can always hike between Baptist and Parker at low water, bring a water purifier and some food cuz it will take awhile. Cheers.

My favs have always been White with silver blade, brown with gold blade, black with gold blade, black with silver blade, and fire tiger with painted chart blade for stained water. Cheers.

Havent fished the Roubi it in a long time. How's it fishing these days? Used to do pretty well for smallies down near the G. Nade.

I've had mixed opinions on Lefty endorsed products...Frankly, he's almost as bad as Roland Martin.. Take a look at the product specs on the SA website. The "Lefty" line it appears to be a fairly standard WF line without the super slick AST coating found on the more expensive Mastery Series lines. I'd probably go with SA's GPX line or a Rio Grand. Cheers.

Were you can operate also depends on who controls the waterway. If you plan to operate on federal lands, you need to check with the appropriate federal agency. I'm not sure what the Forest Service requires, but guides who operate in the National Parks need to register as concessionaires with the park service, report their number of trips, and pay a percentage of revenues in addition to insurance and other requirements. Cheers.

Pond catfish love hot dogs..but you can fly cast with them..Slim Jims work great. Cheers.

Its possible...a park ranger friend says they have several sightings a year in the ONSR they have been spotted near St. Louis before, last one I heard of was a bit south of Fredericktown..FWIW, most of the bears that wander through Missouri are young male bears from Arkansas. Looking for love in vain I guess.

The most likely source is from a few cattle operation that dont fence there cattle back from the creek. Wish they would require cattle farms to keep there cows out of the creek but the dont. Thank the Farm Bureau.

That there boat is a cajun pirogue, not a canoe. Looks like a fun project though.

I do cobblers occasionally, but most of the time I do pineapple upside down cake..nothing to it. Mix Yellow cake mix per box, but use the juice from your can of pineapple rings instead of water. Melt a stick of butter on the bottom of your Dutch Oven Add a cup of Brown Sugar and disolve in butter Add Pineapple Rings Add Baking Cherries Cover with cake mix Shovel some coals out of the fire and cover the D.O.. Go light on the coals on the bottom, lots of coals on top. Rotate lid every 10-15 minutes, check it its done around 40-45min.. When done..crack lid and let it cool for 10 min.. Remove lid...Run a metal spatula round the edges, cover top of D.O. with parchment paper or foil..Add lid. Put on welders gloves and flip the cake. Eat Cake with some Bushmills on the rocks, or Bushmills & Coffee before bed.. Check out Byron's Dutch Oven Page for some good recipes. Cheers.

Not a big fan of spotted bass, because they have invaded and displaced the smallmouth bass on some of the streams I fish. I listed the Largemouth bass as non-native because I'm not really sure where they came from..I'm sure they are native to some places, and not to others. Common species like LMB have been stocked all over the place, so who knows where some of them came from? How bought a new category.. Dubious origins but still desirable... LMB, Walleye, Born-Again Pole dancer's, etc..

Try Noblett Lake near Willow Springs or McCormack Lake near the Hwy 19 bridge over the 11pt. Bring a canoe or pontoon boat. Fish a big inline spinner, spinnerbait, or bluegill crank around the weed beds. I'd imagine that they would really hammer live minnows or small sunfish. Makes for a fun side trip if your headed down for float on the NFoW or 11pt. P.S. Bring some long nose pliers.

I volunteered to help with the fish sample on the Current last year I posed the brown trout reproduction question to the biologists. They said there might be some but its not enough to be signifgant. They said the water doesnt get cold enough at the right time of year. And my own observations seem to support that conclusion. In two days of sampling on the Current we handled over 800 brown trout, most in the 10-14" range, maybe 20-25% were 15" or better, around 1 in 20 was 18" or better, the two biggest measured 24.2 and 23.9 , but I think they missed at least one bigger due to the size of their net. Out of the baskets of fish that I helped measure, I dont recall seeing any brown trout smaller than 6", but I saw 3-4 tiny rainbows with parr marks. Other game fish..Maybe ten smalmouth best around 14", 0 pickeral, 2-3 confused largemouth, and a couple sunfish. I measured fish with both Jon & A.J, and they said that the dont get anywhere near those kind of numbers when they sample on the NFoW and 11pt. As for food on the Current, you would be amazed if you watched the shock boat move through a good run. That river is absolutely packed with sculpins and minnows. The electrodes kill a bunch of minnows, but it doesnt seem to affect the sculpins much. The biologists said its because the sculpins have small scales. Big Scaled fish (Red Horse, Hog Mollies, and Minnows) take a beating from the shock boat and float straight to the top..Small scaled fish like trout & sculpin just get stunned, for a couple seconds and hardly ever float.

It just depends on the body of water...For example, my own personal bias leads me to the following conclusions. Non-Native and Undesirable Asian Carp Spotted Bass in most Ozark Streams Didymo Zebra Mussells Non-native and desirable Brown Trout Rainbow Trout Brook Trout Largemouth Bass Striped Bass Sp. Non-native and indifferent species Common Carp Native and Desirable Smallmouth bass Rock Bass Most Sunfish Species (except Green Sunfish) Catfish I'm probably way off base with some of the classifications, but its just my personal opinion. Cheers.

Scrabled Eggs, crawfish tails, and fried taters makes a great gravel bar breakfast. If I did em for dinner, I'd boil em with some Andoulle sausage, corn on the cob, red taters, & pearl onions..Beer pairing would be an ice cold Pilsner.

They dont publish the data on a website anywhere but I saw the 11pt population per mile number in a recent issue of the River Hills Traveler, and I got the Current R. data from Dave Mayers. Give em a call or shoot em an email with your questions. It might take em a couple days to get back with you, but they are pretty good at answering questions.. FWIW, Jon Ackerson is the 11pt biologist, Dave Mayers is the Current River biologist, and A.J. Pratt is the biologist for the NFOW & Bull Shoals.

A standard wire minnow trap will work pretty well, but you might want to enlarge the opening a little bit. Cat food, dog food, canned tuna in oil, or fish heads & entrails from your previous days catch will attract them. Before you go to bed..Bait & weight down your trap and toss in some slack water near a rocky bottom shoal. Youll usually have a bunch of them in the AM..Boil em with some Zatarains liquid shrimp and crawfish boil and some Old Bay..serve with eggs and taters.. Cheers.

From my conversations with the biologists...Food isnt the limiting factor in the blue ribbon stretch of the 11pt. There are plenty of minnows and crayfish, but not a many of trout. Last data I saw published was around 130 trout per mile..For comparison, the Current holds around 450 fish per mile and its much smaller water. For some reason the 11pt just doesnt seem to be living up to its potential as a trout fishery. Thats why I'd like to see brown trout down there. Brown trout thrive in the Current, so I'd imagine that they would do REALLY well in the 11pt. Not sure about the chain pickeral at Montauk...There might be a bunch of them up in the Catch & Release Spring (it looks like good pickeral habitat) but I rarely see pickeral, and I've only caught one on the river between Montauk and Cedar Grove. Not so on the 11pt..Its pretty rare when I dont catch a couple pickeral down there. If you want to target them...try the stairstep hole below Greer, the slough by Hurricane Creek, or the back eddy at Stinking Pond. McCormack like has a bunch of them, as does Noblett Lake. You rarely catch them on flies, but they are suckers for a bluegill colored crankbaits and large in-line spinners. wee-craws work too. Cheers.

I used to care about things like this, but I dont get to flustered about it anymore. I like to fish for native wild fish if I can, wild non-natives as long as I consider them to be a desireable gamefish, but I wont turn up my nose at stocked non-natives either. I dont turn up my nose at fishing for non-native invasives either..someone needs to kill em. Cheers.

Let your daughter be your guide. Its different with every child. Some of my little nieces and nephews will fish all day w/o complaint or sign of boredom. Some will fish for 30 minutes then want to go swimming, splash in the water, collect minnows & crayfish. I encourage them to fish, but dont make it mandatory. I dont fish myself so I can devote my attention to them, and if they want to do something else, I listen up and let them. Keep it fun and let them direct the day. FWIW, inline spinners, beetle spins are fun, so are jigs..Maybe even get her some little polarized glasses so she can see fish chase her bait..Cheers.

How would you feel if your kid cut their foot or leg open on a chunk of sharp glass while swimming? You dont toss glass containers in your swimming pool do you? Plastic is a problem, but most plastic containers wont shatter and create debris that will cut someone. It just makes sense not to bring glass with you on the river. Hank, I think the state law bans glass in tippy boats, requires that your cooler lid to be latched down, and specifies that your cooler should be secured to your boat. If your floating a river thats controlled by the National Park Service (Current, Jacks, Buffalo, etc) its no glass period, no exception based upon the type of watercraft.. FWIW, the water patrol could probably write a ticket for glass in a jet boat, they arent as tippy as canoes, I've seen jet boats get swamped too..Cheers.