fishinwrench

Dude! You realize who you're talkin' to here, right?

That's another plus to being a shallow water fishermen that I never realized. I have fallen out twice and both times I was able to just stand up and walk back to the boat. Kinda hard for me to believe but I don't think I have ever kicked or dropped a rod overboard. I have fumbled 2 phones and PLENTY of tools though. The worst ever was a flywheel off a Merc 175 Had to hire a diver for that one.

When I think about the ways some people piss their money away, fishing rods don't even pop into my mind. If you ever need the money back, a true quality rod will sell for 1/2 to 3/4 of what you paid for it. A Berkley Cherrywood might bring 1.50 in a garage sale. The blanks are ok (about what was considered top of the line in 1982) but guide spacing is horrible and the reel seat isn't all that awesome. If you bought one and rebuilt it you could have a pretty decent crankbait rod.....but if you value your time any at all, in my opinion, you're better off just spending 100.00 or thereabouts for a decent rod with a decent warranty.

I can vouch for that.

Why do I even come here? Y'all don't even understand how hard it is to stay here and work on boats when everyone else is out there fishing and telling stories like this.

A breech wouldn't be too big of a deal, but if that sucker ever failed and dumped....oh buddy, what a mess that would be! Can you even imagine the size of the raft of busted docks, boats, and houses that would pile up against Bagnell. Holy Crap! Talk about a FEMA project and a GoFundMe page !

Since you are collecting via Gill net instead of shocking.....if they aren't totally exhausted when you handle them you'll likely notice than when you grab them across the gills they will do this weird quivering (vibrating) thing, almost like a seizure. That's usually my first clue since I always land them by quickly grabbing them across the gills covers. Guys that lip them won't notice that. Honestly trying to lip them with a hook in their mouth is risky, keep doing it and you're gonna get stuck. Pure whites do not do that quivering weirdness. Also in the Fall when they are full of shad their bellies extend back further than a pure white. You can see that, to a degree, in the pic I posted last night. Belly extends often way beyond the pelvic fins. I'll try a rib count on them this Spring to see if they have more ribs. There has to be a bona-fide way of IDing them, I just know when I have one in my hands, simply from experience.....but everyone (besides myself) demands absolute science, done only by a person with a degree on the wall, to confirm anything. They are easiest for me to identify when they are over 15". The largest I have caught so far was 21". I have a pic somewhere but can't seem to find it. May have gotten lost in my last phone upgrade.

I appreciate your post, mojorig. Thanks. I actually didn't need the smoking gun. As I said.....I don't just come on here and make crap up. Never have/never will.

Well at least one person smiled. The effort wasn't wasted

Double post

Yeah and it isn't all me. My daughter put about 75 through it, and assorted customers have overstayed their welcome and put alot of dents in my dinosaurs. I bet I have infected 2 dozen guys and a handful of gals with this disease. It's spreading fast. They'd better buy their own stuff soon or I'm gonna start charging for pellets and dinosaurs.

All of which probably were mistakenly brought here from North Korea.

I can't get very worked up about plants. If they get in the way I cut them down. No chasing them around and wondering if I got them all, and it takes a good while for them to grow back. There's no season on them and I don't have to immediately dispose of their dead bodies. Just throw them in a pile and toss a match on them when they dry out. Way less of a problem than the termites brought over from Ethiopia and Australia. Isn't it amazing that everything that is undesirable is claimed to have been brought here from some far away place? As if nothing but perky boobs, yummy fruit, and happy thoughts can come from America.

Ok I'm done. Anyway...... Bradford Pears..... yeah that's somethin'. Terrible things and they definitely need to go.

Use some solvent and clean the barrel real good, but try not to get solvent on the breech seal....or wipe it off right away if you do. (I don't know if solvent will hurt the seal.... but some guys say that it might). Shoot it 25-30 times and then clean the barrel again. After that you can go ahead and mount a scope and sight it in. If it gets shot as much as mine does then you'll want to keep an eye on your groups and clean the barrel with dry patches if you notice accuracy falling off. Once it quits puking out grease then you can probably quit cleaning it forever. Since mine blew up and got overhauled I have put about 650 pellets through it and haven't had to clean the barrel anymore. I pulled one dry patch through it yesterday, just to see, and it came out clean as a whistle. The cool thing about my Prowler is that I haven't found a pellet that doesn't shoot good in it. JSB EXACT 15.9gr. is what I'm sighted in with, but the gun shoots anything I feed it well enough to kill squirrels (and dinosaurs) out to 55 yards.

Y'all did good! A buddy that lives up that way told me the banks are littered with dead short ones. No surprise, it's that way every year about this time. Releasing snagged fish just seems so stupid to me. Why won't they just let folks keep them?

When my hound starts griping (barking/whining) and won't shut up, I put a band-aid across the bridge of his nose. Shuts him right up, lasts longer, and is less cruel than zipping his mouth shut with a tie strap.

Just to clarify.....The reason they say that Hybrids can't reproduce isn't because they are technically sterile. It is because the female eggs lack the adhesive properties and density of a white bass egg, so the hybrid eggs usually end up drifting into an eddy and suffocating. There is nothing sterile about male hybrid striper sperm (and as far as I know nobody has ever claimed that). So the mutt genetics are most definitely being passed on. Good thing or bad thing? Who knows? But it is happening.

The hybrids seem to eat the same size shad as the Whites do, regardless of their larger size. I don't believe they make a dent in the mature gizzards at all. There are a half dozen places where you can either stand on a high bank or a bridge and watch the whites spawn, and the hybrids will shadow a female right along with the male whites. When you catch one he'll blow jizz all over you so it's pretty obvious that they mean business and aren't just there to offer support. The mutts are hard to ID unless you are catching a mix of both pure whites AND mutts. The lines near the tail are different, and they do this quivering thing when you're handling them that pure whites never do. The tongue patch thing is all over the place, some have single patches and others have two, some have 3. The guys that run with me will confirm that I started talking about "something different about the fish I was catching" several years before I realized what it was. I got totally consumed with fly-fishing for whites, and practically did nothing else for about 7 years..... otherwise I probably wouldn't have picked up on the changes. It just so happened that I was deep into it at the time and started noticing something about the fish I was catching had changed. It took me 3 years to figure out that they were two different types of White bass, and since I have stood there for hours and hours watching them go through their spawning ordeal and witnessed the obvious hybrids (not the really big ones, but ones just big enough to know they aren't Whites) nudging the female whites to the surface over and over again, it didn't take anymore brain wizardry to realize where the odd acting/different "White bass" were coming from. Far as I'm concerned it doesn't need to get anymore scientific than that. There are a couple of other behavioral differences that I'm not gonna get into now because I'm tired of typing but I'll tell you now that the "white bass" that Old Plug and many others get into during the Fall on the lower lake are not pure whites. Y'all are catching the mutts. Whites blow up on the surface in the evenings alot, so do hybrids, but the mutts (for a behavioral example) never do I don't think, not even when they are up on the super shallow flats. If they are blitzing on the surface then they are either pure whites or pure hybrid stripers. And for some reason the Niangua's don't have near as many mutts as the Gravois/lower lake and the upper Osage does. I still catch mostly pure whites when I fish the upper Niangua and Little Niangua. Pure White Striper White/Hybrid mutt

By the time they discover that it's a problem it will be too late. If they quit stocking hybrids TODAY there might be a chance to eliminate the possibility of completely altering the genes of native fish for good. But they aren't gonna stop because they think they are so smart, and that they have already learned all there is to know. This is why I am so bitter towards biologists.

I ain't mad. And I liked catching hybrids too, until I started recognizing what was going on. The whole thing might just be a non-issue, but if by chance it evolves into a real issue there's no turning back, no fixing it. And IMO it won't have been worth it. Hybrids are fun, but they have genes that are detrimental to survival, and I don't think we need to be mixing those genes with native white bass who have done quite well on their own since the beginning of time. Things like that shouldn't be phucked with, regardless of how smart you think you are, and especially by the same folks that gave us kids all those pear trees to plant. That's my only point.

And I can show you places where the White/Hybrid mutts have taken over. Obvious pure strain White bass are not common anymore. They comprise of less than 1/4 of what I catch in the Fall, and maybe 1/2 of what I caught in the Spring last year. This year.... we'll see.

That's right ! It is out there, not in a labratory or on a spreadsheet.

I don't have the capability or the desire to prove that male hybrids are fertilizing White Bass eggs, I just know that it is happening. I don't know whether the result of that is a bad thing or a good thing either.....I just think it's safer to not do it. Where's the proof that hybrid stripers are beneficial to an ecosystem ? Where's the proof that Bradford Pear trees, or mustard greens, are actually harming anything ? The only thing I can prove right now is that you automatically trust the word of any biologist, and automatically discredit the word of someone who spends A LOT more time in the field, during a single year, than any biologist has in their entire career. I believe me. Whether you do or not is entirely up to you and doesn't effect me, the whites, the shad, or anything else.

We thanked MDC and gave them lots of credit for providing all those saplings for our scout troop, and giving lessons on how to plant them. They were very generous. Just goes to show how intelligence evolves, and why it's not a good idea to tamper with native species, introduce experiments, and force cross breeding just because some biologist needs something to allocate funds for.