fishinwrench

I even did some ballooning of whites and followed them around to try and track them until someone told me they thought it was illegal...so I quit. But in doing so I learned that they don't necessarily stay together in a school, but also that they tend to avoid swimming over shallow mud bottom areas preferring to move over rocky/gravel/solid bottom areas. They also detect a quiet drifting boat way farther away than you might think and will keep a good distance away from it. The outboard running doesn't spook them any more than the trolling motor does. Matter of fact there was more than one instance where I was able to catch the balloon using the outboard but couldn't when using the TM. Just thought y'all might find that interesting. I sure did.

Good job !

Once I learned what an excellent fly rod target they were I went full bore trying to figure out their habits and trying to learn how to find and pattern them year round. I think I've learned about as much as I possibly can without actually going down there and living with them for awhile. In lakes/rivers with plentiful forage they are not opportunistic feeders like LM/SM/Crappie/Catfish. Their feeding binges (when they happen) always last 2-4 hours and I've learned that if you throw at them a bunch when they aren't ready to feed then when they do begin to chow down they will largely ignore your lures/flys. Even if I know exactly where they are I won't hammer them with casts if they are slow to bite. I'll just briefly test them every 15-20 minutes or so and if one doesn't bite right away then I'll set down and wait awhile longer, or go do something else for awhile. If you show them your stuff when they aren't ready to feed then a bunch of them will not eat as freely when they go on their next feeding spree. I have watched that happen a bunch of times in clear water, and just changing baits isn't good enough so it must be the line or something that clues them. So you can do one of two things, you can run all over the lake and pick up one here and one there.....or you can just sit it out on one spot where you know they frequent and catch just as many (or more) when they go on one of their binge's. There's almost always a binge feed that ends 30 minutes or so before dark, but even during times when the water/sky/wind/ect. conditions are identical for days that binge may start at 3pm or it might not start until 5:00 so I have no idea why some binges only last half as long as others, it is probably related to how many fish are in the school. The coolest thing I ever saw on the big flats where I chase them in the Fall was 4-5 years ago, the water on the flat was high but very clear. About 3:30 I started noticing these separate 4-6 fish packs of whites swimming slowly around all over, I kept throwing at them but they wouldn't even chase my offerings. An hour or so later the tempo picked up substantially and instead of swimming around lazily the same little packs were zipping around alot faster and in more of a zig-zag path (frantic). Right at 5:45 all hell broke loose at the mouth of a shallow slough and HUNDREDS of big fat whites turned that clear 2' deep area of clear water into a football field size zone of muddy froth. I caught a limit in probably 20 casts and then continued to c&r for another 15-20 minutes afterwards. Then just as suddenly as it started it just quit and everything went completely silent. The very next day about the same time it happened again, then the 2 days after that the flats were just dead, nothing, couldn't buy a bite and no visible fish at all. Then it rained for 2-3 days and muddied things up and it all started over again, the only difference was that then I couldn't see them anymore and instead of the blitz happening at the slough it happened at the mouth of the creek. It was like the school would break up into multiple smaller packs and they ran all over the mile wide flat herding the shad into that shallow slough, then when they had them all cornered they just gorged like crazy. My boat was covered in poop and puke and my arms were sore from casting and stripping streamers as fast as I could. That stuff is addicting !

To each their own, but they are a delicious eating fish and the healthiest of all freshwater fish to eat. They only live 4-6 years and spend most of their time in open water, and they are plentiful. The only special instruction is to trim out the dark red lateral line from the fillets and feed those to your dog/cat. You don't have to trim out all of the red, just the dark center strip that extends down into the meat. Fried in your favorite batter, or baked in lemon pepper and butter/served on a bed of rice, some steamed veggies on the side. If you don't enjoy that meal then you simply do not like fish, that's all there is to it.

A better gig would be to organize a 90% payback tournament trail from those locations. They apply for regatta and get their fish for free, and you still make money. Overhead is minimal. You can do 2 per week, 3 during the Summer.

Yeah I always get a kick out of these articles and vids composed by local "pros" when they say "the key is finding the shad". Um dude, shad are EVERYWHERE. No really....find me a bank where there are no shad ! 24/7/365 there's never a problem finding a school of shad.

Yep, and that attempt failed miserably. So they changed the genetics of native Whites FOREVER.....for nothing. I'd like to kick their asses up between their shoulder blades.

I'm afraid you're mistaken. Stripers and whites do not spawn together naturally, it is done by people extruding the eggs and mixing in the jizz. The result is what we know as Hybrid Stripers. They are then reared and stocked, again by people. 2 Hybrid Stripers (supposedly) can't successfully reproduce, but the resultant Hybrids can, and do, reproduce with White bass. True (pure) White bass are becoming more rare each year because of this.

True that, he only lost control of it once....and got lucky 😁

You've been doing this too long, you're way calmer than you have any business being.

Rivers are pretty easy to fish. Sure there's gonna be days where you don't do so good but when several good fishermen get blanked on a certain stretch of river that's a pretty clear indication that there aren't many fish there to be had. I haven't heard a success story come from that area of the Meramec in over a decade.

You can't rule out a gig just because there's only one wound. Might have been a near miss.

They seem to think that anything over 18" is a hybrid. That may have been true before the hybrids started fertilizing white bass eggs (or maybe it's the male whites fertilizing hybrid eggs.... whichever), but not anymore. Now we have all these Frankenstein's screwing up the native gene pool thanks to the bright ideas of our brilliant fisheries biologists. Sure they are fun to catch, but decisions like that might turn out to be detrimental someday, and it is forever irreversible. Don't go screwing with mother nature. Alleged Christians that think they can do better work than the deity they worship. That's a real mind blower for me.

There was 1 Smallie and 2 LM (that we saw), but mostly 12" rainbows. They had just stocked the week prior. My guess is that they stuck everything that came into the light. If it was a sucker it went in the boat, and anything else got shook off. That was pretty obvious. I reported it but I have my doubts that anyone even bothered to go confirm and investigate it.

I assume that there is a pressure regulator built into the air chamber? And can it be adjusted? I'd like to learn more about how the system works (the hot-rodding possibilities could be fun). For instance:. Does cocking it fast vs. slow make a difference ? Can you still reach the max pressure by cocking very slowly? What about the air exit port? Can bigger be better? I'm geeking out here.

I have took comfort my whole life here in Mo. knowing that the apex predator in these woods is ME. And now that I'm a little older, slower, and can't fight as hard..... I'd prefer that it stayed that way.

Right, but I don't believe you will boost pressure much, and like you say....it is just adding crap to the barrel and rifling. The key to accuracy is consistency, so adding varying amounts of BS (alleged propellant) into the system just has to be more detrimental than helpful. If the chrono results showed more than 30-40fps gain at the muzzle I'd be surprised.

Ok, but at the end of the day how many fish have you relocated ? You aren't going to take the fish you release back to where it was caught. My only beef with tournaments these days is that they are removing all the keeper fish out of all the upper end areas, and shuffling the fish from everywhere else around. You're not fishing for fish that have predictable habits anymore, you're basically fishing behind a stocking truck for fish that have no idea where they are at.

After witnessing what that Gamo Swarm was capable of I don't see why anyone would want/need anything better. I think the ones designed to look like "tactical" assault rifles are stupid. What's the point of that? I was looking over an airgun forum last night and there was quite a bit of talk about "dieseling". I have news for those guys.....the POP might sound cool, but that isn't going to increase velocity any. You can get way more energy from compressed air than you can get from a little smear of petroleum jelly. Pretty sure that all that is doing is making some noise.

So with no official count it would be pretty easy for someone to make some easy, near impossible to trace, tax free money, hu? Saweeet 😎

There are obviously several in the Little Niangua watershed, I see tracks pretty regularly between Green Ford and Fiery fork. Not surprised at all that one got hit near Mack's cr.

Saw a Gamo Swarm .22 do some pretty impressive paper punching at 50 yards, and it seemed (sounded like) it had enough balls to take down something a little bigger than a squirrel/rabbit. What's the effective killing range with that bad boy ? I kinda want one.

There were 50-70 laying dead on the bottom of the Niangua river a few weeks ago with holes in them. Sure wish the ones that did that could have gotten busted. At least those boys had packaged them, kept them iced and prepared for eating.

They might not be lying......It's possible that they are just ignorant, lazy, and don't care enough about it. Or maybe they think that giggers pay a greater percentage of their wages than smallmouth anglers do.

All of the reinforcing is (was) going on BELOW the dam. No work being done on the lake side I don't think.