Haris122

They're saying there's a 1 degree difference between St. Louis today, and Phoenix, Arizona (they're at 109, we're at 108). I'd hate to think how bad it would feel with the humidity. Of course the dryness in the air, isn't helping the brushfire situations.

You guys ever had any luck at any of the Conservation Areas, up to an hour away from stl, or do you guys keep to your or someone's private property?

And your dog liked to eat, just the skins?

I think I remember the MDC website mentioning that Lake 33 has and will have some dam maintenance or something going on for a couple months, so the water is supposed to be real shallow there. Might want to avoid that one.

Cool, thanks for the encouragement and tips guys.

As much as I like going out a little further away, and seeing what it's like at accesses and spots I haven't been to and enjoying the scenery, at the moment for the regular trips I'm restricted to what is close to me. But right now, I'm not that worried whether I hook exclusively Smallmouth or not. As long as there's some variety in what kind of fish I catch, the fight is good, and as long as I hook them fair and square, I'm happy.

They sure do give a good account of themselves when being reeled in, don't they.

I'm pretty sure I saw some common ones a few days prior to this report, just a couple hundred yards further downstream, past the southward bend toward the I-44 bridge. And I also saw a dead one (definitely looked like a common carp) somebody had caught and just tossed on the bank to die (again just past that southerly bend on the river). So I'm pretty sure there are some, but definitely not in the quantities of the bigheads. Those guys looked like they had gathered for a convention or something. If you don't have any luck on the river there, maybe just give the lake in Unger Park a shot. I've only had a little luck on it catching anything, myself. But I saw some guy catch a couple common carp in the lake, last time I spent a good chunk of time on it. I went to the actual lake two hours late this afternoon (only person there), and there was definitely plenty of activity going on. Put on some catblood stinkbait under a bobber, and had plenty of nibbling going on, but unfortunately I ended up setting a hook on a turtle that committed to it, instead of a fish. I could tell it hurt, while I tried to get the hook out of it's nose, but it seemed to be all right afterwards.

Cool, thanks Al. I'll put those tips to use. I've been a bit scarce on using the soft plastics cause I haven't had much luck in the past with them, but part of that was also my presentation. But I will start it up again.

I figured I try the report thing since I went out friday late afternoon/early evening. So I went out on the Meramec by Unger Park, walked to the north facing portion of the meramec, kind of across the river from the Greentree Park Access a few hundred yards before the river takes that 90 degree turn south just to check out what that portion is like. I got there with plenty of sun still left, and a large chunk of that section of the river, near that bank was pretty shallow (river had probably been receding for days now around there) but I decided to still give it a shot. Despite some activity all over the place, I got nothing to bite. I saw plenty of Bighead carp schooling up again, and more activity near the opposite bank, but aside from the carp I was not able to make out any other species that might've been acting up. The water on the opposite bank in general seemed plenty deeper but the actual bank was essentially non-existent on large chunks off that side (just a 8-10 foot steep drop off into the river). Anyhow, I wound up little by little making my way further west down the bank with that cheap Conquer white/blue 2" shad crankbait, without any luck. Eventually I camped out near a tree in the river just opposite from the boat ramp on the Greentree Access, as the water there was getting more rapidly deeper and i figured the structure might help a bit. Anyways, I put some corn on one of my rods, to see if I can catch anything with it just sitting out there while I throw around the other rod with that crankbait. Eventually I sloppily managed to put the chunk of cornear on the hook somehow without it falling off on impact with the water and then focused on tossing the other one around. After a while of no action I decided to try out one of the value bin cotton cordel deep running crankbaits (I think it was called "pearl shad") to better get the attention of something that might be camping out near the bottom by those trees but no luck with it either. I kept moved down the bank a little further west, near some rock pile, and tried casting around there, but still no luck. Managed to make out a foot or foot and half long gar, kind of checking things out before it saw me and bailed out, but aside from that, didn't make out anything else. Finally I came back to my other rod, and reeled it in (no luck either). It was getting dark, so I figured I cast a few more times, before I head out, and bam, one of my last planned casts I hook something a bit downstream of the tree I was near, and boy it gave me a heck of a fight. I was afraid it was going to get loose, but thankfully it didn't. I felt like for a change it wasn't a gar, cause though they fight good, they tend to jump around trying to shake the lure off, and this one wasn't doing that. Anyways, a couple of minutes later, and what do we have, a nice tough 14-15" Drum (first time I caught one). I know drum (or gar for that matter), aren't too thrilling catches for most of you guys, but I'm a rookie and honestly, getting a fight like that to salvage 3-4 hours of not even a single other bite, was such a rewarding feeling. And the fish was a pretty good sized one too for me personally. Anyways, I let that baby swim off after it recovered, and even though it was just one fish, it's a successful day by my standards. Only got a blurry pic of it, as it was pretty dark, and I didn't feel like stunning it with the flash or maybe messing it's eyes up somehow, with such brightness but it is what it is.

Make that 3 at Wilmore park (Hampton near Gravois, right?). Seems to be one of those naturally tough places to catch anything, cause it's just so small, and dirty (especially the smaller, "northern lake" (man that's stretching even the definition of a pond)). Ever see anyone catch anything there?

Valid point Jeb. When it takes enough corn to produce one gallon of ethanol as it does to feed a person for a couple months with same amount of corn, the whole thing just doesn't fly well. And neither do many cases of biodiesel or sugar cane waste derived ethanol, when they cause the destruction of tropical forest/mangroves/all that other good stuff that would probably help the situation more by remaining as it is, than any ill thought out biofuel strategy. The thing about things like switchgrass that seems more promising (if the big obstacle of breaking down the shoots or whatever efficiently, to extract ethanol can be overcome) seems to be that people took more time, to think out the possible consequences better, rather than just sell it as if it's the best thing in environmentally friendly fuel production ever. It can grow on land not suitable for most food crops, and there's more hope to grow it in a way that doesn't mean the thoughtless destruction of diverse habitat. Some livestock can even be fed with it. Problem does remain, is marginal land ever really set up, to allow for economical harvest of large enough quantities? Biofuels as they are right now, probably won't be one of the main ways to deal with this. But, the more time there is to tinker with alternatives, the more well though out the solutions are going to be, so might as well put some money into it. After all, oil is getting subsidies too, and as far as I'm aware, they haven't been coming up with any more efficient gasoline, or more economical infrastructure (as soon as a refinery goes down for whatever reason, the price shoots up by a couple tens of cents each time, which begs the question, if the price surges up quickly, yet when the refinery is fixed it goes back down at a snail's pace, what have they done with that subsidy money, other than add it to the profit pile when they should've been fixing/maintaining things with it)?

Wouldn't happen to have been at Emmenegger Nature Park would it? I got a warning there for the same reason, now I tend to stay more on the Unger side, as the County Parks department people seem to give you that extra time around nightfall, before they show up to close the gates. Actually even though I had them looking for me a couple times before they close the gates, I never had any problems with them. Always been nice and not in a rush. Even the Kirkwood people weren't too bad, but definitely in more hurry to get out and close the park. That being said, to date in the 4 years of sporadic hunting/fishing I haven't encountered any actual MDC people checking licenses or that you're adhering to regulations.

I remember reading of the brook trout being stocked strategically upstream of some other sections of the spring, to filter out some kind of parasite that Rainbow, and maybe even Brown (not sure) trout are susceptible to, in case this parasite is or becomes present in the hatchery somehow. Apparently it's a limited amount of them, and they're not supposed to be stocked for any real fishing purposes.

if you go under "more reply options" it's pretty straightforward. Just go where it says attach files, find the pictures on your computer, and attach them to your reply and send the reply.

Thumbs up to that one and Tim's posts too. At some point it just grows old with this, "quit insulting us, we're trying to have a discussion here" followed by "besides, you're just some guy on a fishing forum posting google articles of which you know nothing about." If I remember reading things correctly, there was at least one other time when greenhouse gas levels slightly exceeded the predictions for the upcoming couple hundred years. Of course that's not much consolation when it happened to be during what appears to be the single largest mass extinction on earth.

I really hate to get into this myself, seeing how I don't feel like arguing for months on end, but.... Different things have triggered climate change in the past. At one point it was the extensive colonization and spread of terrestrial plants that use CO2 for photosynthesis, so why would it seem difficult to extrapolate that maybe, the couple hundred million cars we have on the road today in just the U.S., could over their lifetime of use actually have a bigger effect on the makeup of a gas or gasses in the atmosphere that contribute to global warming, than some natural causes going on at the moment, when prior to 100-150 years ago, there was barely anything man-made that expelled this gas into the atmosphere? No doubt there are other causes that could have a more severe effect, but maybe this time it really is something as simple as humans that help this trend along quite nicely. As for someone discrediting some non-profit non-believer and all, this happens the other way around too, and yet folks fail to "buy into the propaganda" and rarely ever dwell on things when it turns out some guy was getting paid to claim that climate change has nothing to do with humans. As for propaganda, I also find it somewhat fishy when someone tells me that everything is just peachy and is all just a predetermined cycle regardless of the fact that things that may have an effect on climate, have been rather dynamically increasing even in the last couple decades.

Yeah the Gar have so far always been cool to catch. They tend to put up decent fights. This one almost took off with my rod while I set it down just long enough to find the scissors I needed to cut and unwrap the line it tangled around its snout when it went for the lure. Up until last week I had never caught one, but the last couple days I've been catching nothing but them (at my usual slow pace). I tend to go to Lower Meramec Park in South St. Louis county a lot, due to the short overall drive, and down there I kept hooking into some shortnose ones (now there's a stretch of the Meramec that's somewhat less than scenic thanks to the accumulation of trash left near the shore there, but I'm still fond of the area, even if the mud can be a real pain in the rear for c&r fishing), and then yesterday I decided I should go on a trip, see some new places, and I end up with a nice longnose one to complement the shortnose ones from down there. I have to say I'm really not fond of the people that just toss the gar they catch somewhere on the shore. Not only is it totally uncalled for to do that to one of them, but on top of that, there's probably no other fish that can more resembles a snake when you're out hiking around the brush trying to avoid the muddy shore to get to a good fishing spot. Once the head has been eaten away/decomposed, the scales and the elongated body just make it look like you carelessly wound up stepping within a foot or two of a good size snake. Thanks for the tips on the Valley Park access. I'll make sure to try it out one of these days.

I went out there (Pacific Palisades CA) today for the first time, and fished from the bank. It's a scenic area. Too bad it's ~ 25 miles away from me. And on the way back towards St. Louis there was a huge traffic jam due to some road work (and that was even at 9 p.m.). Luckily I didn't have any issues with anyone breaking into my car. I wound up only catching one fish, a gar, I think a Longnose one. But that's within the average success rate for me for 4-5 hours of fishing effort at this time. I didn't see anyone else fishing from the bank, catch anything else, so maybe it was just that kind of day. Now to the funny/sad part. For those of you who didn't think or know the Asian Carp have come this far up the Meramec at this time, I think I have some bad news. One of the oddly funny things I noticed was a school of about 15-20 surface feeding fish between 1-2 feet in length, a few yards away from me. And though I can't say with 100% certainty they were Bighead Carp, I do think I saw them close (as close as from 4 yards away) enough to identify them as Bighead carp. They didn't jump out of the water when some of the people started their boat motors at the access but, I'm still pretty sure that's what they were.

Are these normally white or silvery like in the picture. Cause I've seen a lot of pictures of the silvery ones, but every time I thought I caught a White Bass, it was just that, pretty white like the on in this pic down here. And the eyes didn't seem like on the ones on your guys.

Just been wondering if anyone can tell me how gender is determined in Black Bass. Is it one of those temperature dependent type deals, or is it a regular chromosome type deal. Also if you have any online links to reading materials on it, it would be appreciated. Thanks for any help.

Cool, thanks for the info. I think I will try that out soon then. Even if I don't catch anything, I'd find ways keeping myself entertained trying to figure out how not to paddle in circles all day.

Do you have to have some kind of boat/watercraft license or something along those lines to be able to rent them? And are the basic ones paddle operated or? Also how many people can fit in one of these boats? Sorry, been getting the urge to go out again, now that school is out, so that stuff sounds like a fun thing to do, if I can.

Congratulations

Sweet, time to get me one of those fake topwater rubber seals. And some giant hooks.