trouty mouth

I kayaked upstream from Cedar Grove 3.5 miles (and back down) earlier in the summer. Cedar grove was a mad house. It was so dang busy with people it made the huzzah look tame & it was a Friday. I expect there are still some people getting out and floating, but expect that section to be popping with people & the fish might be hidden away (more than usual) if you're fishing in the crowds. Upstream from Cedar grove we saw fewer floaters/kayakers, but still we passed probably 15 to 20 groups upstream from Cedar Grove. I was surprised to see how busy it was with floaters coming down from Baptist. The water was at 1.39ft on the USGS water gauge above Akers that day. We had to walk 80% of the riffles in some fashion. The water is more skinny up near Baptist camp, too, so you'd definitely be scraping runs and maybe walking more than you'd think. The fishing wasn't the best and we spooked more fish than we could catch. Most of the pools were cleared out before we got a look/cast into them. The fish we could see were usually because they were zooming out of their pools to get away from us. The boats scraping in the gravel give the fish a huge heads up, so focus on stealthy paddling and rest the runs you're planning on fishing as much as you can. There are fish there, but they get pestered all day everyday and your kayak isn't going to do you any favors in being quiet. If I had your choice to float either, I would hit Cedar Grove first and make my choice depending on how many rental boats are stacked up/being put in. Cedar Grove is a white ribbon section, too, so maybe it got stocked up recently? Good luck I hope I helped out some

I'm just guessing (based on all the electric things I have used) that you're 100% going to need to sync your new remote to your motor. Try popping your model number for your trolling motor into google + ".pdf user guide" and hopefully you'll be able to find out how to do it. If it turns out that a remote straight out of the box works on any motor it encounters, that would make a cool $80 prank at your buddies boat ramp.

Me and the boys knocked out the float this past weekend. It was an awesome day with great weather and good water. We did use the upper access at Round Spring. The foot bridge over the river was really cool to walk up and check out. If I did it again, I would use the middle or lower. The upper Access has partial concrete ramp and is shady and easy to get in and out of, but it was a mad house with all the people using Carr's canoe rentals. The parking lots were overflowed and we had to park in some grass (not my favorite play) at the suggestion from a Carr's employee directing traffic. We passed the middle access on the river and there were a couple cars parked and a family hanging out. It seemed like a good spot to launch. We stopped at the lower access to check out the spring outlet. It had a couple cars on it and a dumpster. There was a good amount of shade you could tuck your truck/car into for the day too. There were some toilets about 200 yards up the road in the campground. This also looked like a great spot to launch from. On the river we passed only 3 or 4 other paddling groups. We finished 12 miles to Jerktail in about 7 hours. Fishing: The smallies were active and I had good action all the way down. The hot bait for me was a beetle spin with a curly grub, but any baitfish pattern was getting hit good. All of my fish came out of fast runs and I couldn't hook up with any of the fish out of the deep holes -- I saw them and would move them, but they didn't want to take anything from me. All fish caught were between 8 and 11 inches and I didn't see but maybe one or two fish that would have been keepers all day. 8 or 9 miles downriver we ran into our first of many jetboats. I am a kayaker experienced with sharing the river with jet boats, but it was a jet zoo after that point and a couple of our guys were getting buzzed pretty darn close. I picked up from talking to some other people that the Jacks Fork was blown out from Friday's rain and everything below Two Rivers was crap. I think that may have pushed everybody upstream. We had one of our guys roll his kayak in a run after yielding to 4 jets coming down stream. He was trying his best to drag his water filled boat out of the run and we had another line of boats coming at us. I hopped up out of my boat and tried to flag the jets down to get them to chill for a minute so we could get out of the way and it mostly worked. They were so darn impatient that they gave us hardly enough time to get out of their way before another 4 of them ran through -- chopping up all the water and further swamping and wrecking my poor guys kayak. This happened about 1/3 mile up from Jerktail. -- if someone was out there and remember me flagging you down and you are reading this: you're an asshole and need to rethink your relationship to the river, the outdoors, and your fellow river people. --

Thanks everybody. I'll be sure to report back

Round spring is locked for our put in. I'm not worried about crowds, really. I wasn't familiar with this specific access and thought someone would have words of wisdom about the situation. We'll be taking out at Jerktail. This image from the NPS website got me thinking about the three different accesses. Although, Google Maps makes me think that there's only two access points. . .

I'm putting together a float and we're going to put in at Round Spring. I see there's an upper, middle, and lower access. Does anyone want to give me any advice on which one to use? Or anybody have any preference for one access over another? I was going to use the upper, because it looks like that one has a good parking lot/avoids the campground traffic -- that's about all I'm going on right now.

Add a jack plate to the back and see how far up you can get the motor to sit? Or maybe see if you can get the angle to change at the motor so it lifts the stern a bit? Trade it for a 16 foot john boat with a jet? Mud motors on the Current sounds like you could get into a sketchy situation pretty quick. But idk just guessing.

The trout parks in MO aren't able to stock as much as they have in the past. It feels like the stockers get caught in the morning and taken out pretty quickly. Montauk's a good park with a healthy population of holdover fish, but those fish are smarter and more stingy than the stockers so @Person01 saying the parks loaded but they can't catch them makes sense to me. The resident fish can make you go crazy trying to get bit. I like the idea of fishing a marabou jig under a cork and just waiting for a fish to mess up.

It won't help out on the water, but the best barb masher I've got is my fly vice. It smashes the barbs down and leaves the most clean/flat mash over my pliers/hemostats while out on the water.

Love that. The smart fish don't get caught and swim off to have babies. it's easy to forget that sonar isn't just invisible magic. Think about the military sonar and how loud & destructive that can be to wildlife (or secret attacking divers) at certain levels.

I guess you could double over your line, thread it through the weight, create a loop with that doubled line and loop it back over the weight + pull everything tight. This would put your weight on the line and sort of in line with your rig. I guess you would be able to slide it up and down with some force. That being said; it's a bad idea in my opinion. Looping something on your line like that creates a big weak point in your line and you'd likely break off after fishing it for a while/when you get a good fish or snag. "repeat how he was doing it" Maybe don't repeat how your cousin is doing things and do them the right way. Just pretend you're an old stubborn man and you'll catch way more fish.

It's interesting you had a chase from a big cat, Daryk. I've been catching quite a few short catfish out of there. Like, maybe <9" I'd say, but then again I didn't get the measuring tape out. I know that MDC stocks it regularly, but I don't think they'd stock anything as small as that. What's the chances that the big old catfish in there are having some babies of their own? That lake might be the healthiest concrete pond we've got. Most of the stockers I catch have their fins beat up pretty bad and this recent batch of little guys looked much more healthy.

Thanks for posting! The success of this program can't be understated. This is some of the most badass science coming out of St. Louis. This is the only hellbender breeding program I know of (makes me way proud of our Zoo) and to have a released animal be sexually successful is a moon-shot achieved.

I hit Bennet over the weekend and the fish weren't anywhere near as nice as your fish in the pic. Even after fishing all day I was lucky to have one or two above 14". And even the long fish were so skinny it was hardly worth cutting them up. Good job with that stringer 👍