Sam

I haven't been to look at it this year, but you might try that new launch ramp at the end of Hwy. MM. Highway MM is about 2 miles north of Highway K where you normally turn east to K Dock - there's a big convenience store on the corner of MM and the highway. I watched that ramp being built two years ago, and it looks like it's made for high water. The ramp and the road to it come down a straight hill to the lake, and it seems like the launch angle would stay about the same no matter how high the water gets. At a normal lake level of 653 feet there's only 2 or 3 feet of water in front of the new ramp, so it's built for higher water. I guess, but I don't know, that it's meant as a replacement for the K Dock ramp as I've heard they plan to raise the permanent normal lake level to 660 or so. That would put the K Dock parking lot underwater - though not as far underwater as it is now.

We're going to have to watch extra careful for floating debris for a long time after this, and sometimes it's things I wouldn't think of. A few years back, about a week after a big rain, I was going full speed down the main lake channel in deep water. There was a little ripple on the water, but I went right by a circle in the water that had no ripple. It looked strange - a circle about 6' in diameter where the water was smooth. I got curious and circled back to look at it. It was a big round hay bale floating on its side about an inch below the surface, not visible at all. I hate to think what would have happened if I'd hit that thing, and I went right beside it flat-out. Let's all be careful when we get back out there!

Phil, you remember about 3 years ago when you reported here that the crappie were going so good in the Long Creek arm, and we all had some great crappie trips based on your report? On one of those trips I learned to never, NEVER think my lure is too big for a crappie. We were casting and slow-trolling swimming minnows in the flooded trees up Long Creek, and we caught limits of big slabs. The best one was a 16" white crappie female that came out of the middle of a dense brushpile. In fact I got hung up on the brush, pointed my rod at the jig and pulled it loose - then that big crappie bit. Cleaning fish, I noticed that one's stomach was real full. I opened up the stomach and pulled out a fresh shad that was rolled up in a cylinder like a roll of toilet paper. Straightened out, the shad was 6 1/2" long! And, that big mama crappie was still hungry enough to bite my swimming minnow. The last couple of years I've mostly been using big swimming minnows. I seldom use the little 1 1/2" ones any more, even when the fish I'm catching are small. I think crappie will bite on lures as big as a bass of the same size would go for, and small lures and minnows often just catch the small crappie out of a bunch.

And thanks for the morels that we're having with supper tonight! Not only did I enjoy your company, but that was a good trade for me. I've got crappie filets in the freezer, but we haven't had any 'shrooms! Back to fishing - those were all white crappie we found in the Long Creek arm, but a couple of days ago in that cove Lilley fished below Bridgeport it was an equal mix of white crappie and black crappie. We were fishing in about 25 feet of water that day, outside the stump line, and when we cleaned the fish we found that the white crappie were all females with the eggs not ready yet, and the black crappie were all males. I think the white crappie, like usual, are about a week ahead of the black crappie in the spawn. Male white crappie are coming up to the banks while the females are out a little deeper - and the females are generally bigger than the males. Both male and female black crappie are still deep. That can change real quick now with crappie coming in to the banks and making nests. In the James River arm, a lot of the black crappie we caught were "Arkansas blacknose" - my favorite.

My information is a couple of years old, but here's what I know about the Kimberling City ramps. It used to be free right by "What's Up Dock" - not so much a ramp as a wide paved area between docks with parking just a few feet in front of where you launched and even an outdoor restroom right by the parking. That was nice. I used to put in there a lot, and more often than not I'd stop by the store on the dock and spend some money. Then they put a new launch ramp on the north side of the same point and installed an automatic gate and a machine that takes credit cards. At the same time they CHAINED OFF the old launch spot so you'd have to pay $5 to launch at the new ramp. Since then I've crossed the bridge and launched at Mill Creek instead. They haven't made a nickel off me since they did that. To be fair about it, a lady who runs that place posted here about how putting in the new ramp was expensive and they created lots more parking and made it a place to run big tournaments out of. I know that's right, and where I'd always put the boat in wouldn't have worked for any of that. Still, they CHAINED OFF that small launch spot that wasn't costing them anything and wasn't hurting anything, so the fishermen who'd been using it for years would have to start paying them. I don't think that was very friendly, so when I go to fish that area I get my gas, sodas, and snacks in Ozark then launch at Mill Creek.

Hehe. I mentioned catching crappie and Marty's nostrils flared like a Hottentot smelling water from 100 miles away! I've answered his email and we'll get together for a crappie trip.

rps - I've fired myself as a guide so many times I can't count. It doesn't do any good, you'll be going out with the same guy again soon. For the next week or two you might consider giving those big green fish a rest. We've got fresh Tablerock crappie filets for supper tonight, big time, and a few of them are from fish longer than the bass you caught this morning!

taxidermist - I think there are a lot more large crappie near deep water in B.S. than you believe. In my experience, they're not so much associated with brushpiles. Post-spawn and through the summer, they're more likely to be suspended in 15-25 feet of water along bluff banks, sometimes near flooded trees, sometimes not. That steep bank across from Bear Creek with about a half mile of stick-ups is a prime example - it's 60 feet deep just a long cast from the bank. We don't fish that by sitting in one spot drowning minnows. We go parallel to the bank in 15-25 feet of water and slow-troll it with swimming minnows on 1/8 oz. jigheads. We've caught slab crappie from one end to the other of that - and that's just one spot. We seldom catch one that's less than 10", but a lot are 11"-13" with bigger ones once in awhile. I don't think stripers would eat crappie of that size, but I often see crappie just 2"-3" long hanging around the tops of stick-ups in deep water. Baby crappie are slow, fat little guys - and they look like prime striper food to me. That's why I'm a little concerned about what an increased number of stripers in Bull Shoals might do to our crappie fishing.

Those "koi" might be from people using goldfish for bait, and they escaped and grew. In most reservoirs in southern California, using live bait (other than nightcrawlers) is a violation and a big ticket if you get caught. Fish & Game tries to keep "trash fish" out of the lakes, and some live bait always gets away and grows up. There aren't any minnows for sale around there since using them is illegal, and there aren't any streams where you can trap or seine minnows. People who want to risk a ticket and cheat fish with goldfish from WalMart or somewhere - so the lakes always get carp in them anyway. Big orange ones.

Relevant to not much of anything - one of my best lure colors for crappie, at times, is orange. An orange swimming minnow with maybe a little bit of red on it. I never thought much about why, just knew that color often works on crappie real well. Then I read on a crappie fishing board that baby carp are a favorite food of crappie. Since carp, goldfish, and koi are about the same thing - a lot of carp are colored orange when they're minnows. That makes sense, and I learned something.

Hey, fellers - who's to say what's more "rewarding" in how we enjoy the outdoors? If a guy's favorite sport is skunk hunting with a knife that's fine with me - he's just not riding in my truck afterwards! I don't doubt that fly-fishing for big carp has been figured out by some - after all, that 52-incher I was talking about bit on my tiny gitzit tube. I found the other idea of drilling hard kernels of corn to keep them on a treble hook real interesting, too. I learned something from that post, and while I've never fished for carp on purpose I might try that some day. We've all got our own favorite ways of enjoying the lakes, and we oughta all support each other's favorite ways to the fullest so we can all have a good time. I think we even oughta put up with the bass guys.

As you say, it's deep water down that way. My trips below Bear Creek are always for bass, white bass, or walleyes - that's not crappie country for me. But I'm nearly always somewhere between Bear Creek and Beaver, and I've took a lot of crappie limits out of there over the years. Not saying that I can always catch them or that many of them are real big - but there's a fair chance of a limit of keepers from that area of the lake.

There are some huge carp in Tablerock. My partner and I like to make at least one "perch" trip in the fall - so last October we went out of Buttermilk Springs throwing little gitzit tubes on 1/16 oz. jigheads up to steep chunk-rock banks. In the fall we can load up on good-size black perch (green sunfish) that way. It's fun, and those little filets are tasty. Doing that, I got a bite on my ultralight rig - and it was like being hooked to the bumper of a moving pickup truck. I figured I had a big, big catfish - and I chased it into deep water and around a lot of that part of the lake with the trolling motor. The fight (and chase) went on for 45 minutes, and when I finally got it up to the surface it was of course a big carp. It was completely wore down (on PowerPro 10-lb. test line), laying on its side beside the boat. Thing is, we'd never seen a carp that big. I had a tape measure and we measured the fish as best we could without bringing it into the boat. It was 52" long, and I know we weren't off more than an inch or so! We turned it loose and I wish it had been a catfish - but if you're looking for big carp, they're in there.

I haven't either, taxidermist. My guess is that bluegills run small in these lakes because they feed primarily on worms and insects. Lakes built on poor soil and without water weeds don't provide the bugs to grow many 1 lb. bluegills. I disagree that our lakes aren't good for "panfish" production, though. Crappie feed mostly on minnows, and my best-ever crappie out of Bull Shoals is (so far) 18 3/4". I think a lake that produces crappie of that size compares real, real well with any crappie water, anywhere.

Thanks, I remembered wrong. I'm still hoping to hear from somebody who knows how much they reproduce naturally in B.S., and whether the walleye there are almost all hatchery fish.

That's a real nice fish. I'm wondering - do walleyes reproduce successfully, much, in Bull Shoals? I've read that they're a native fish that the old timers used to call "trout", so I guess there were a few of them in the streams before the lakes were built. I never caught one until they started to be stocked in the lakes, though. With all the tagged ones I've caught out of B.S., I was under the impression that it's a put-and-take fishery of almost all hatchery fish. Do enough of them reproduce naturally here for it to make any difference whether females with eggs are kept or not?

Bear and Bull Creeks run together right below where you're talking about, then combined as Bull Creek they run into Taneycomo. They're both pretty shallow up around those bridges, and hard to access because of private property. There's a rough dirt road (Blansit?) running upstream along Bull Creek above the bridge, but it's real shallow water up there. I've found the best way to fish Bull Creek is to launch a boat at Rockaway Beach and go up it as far as possible. I've caught some of most everything up there, but it gets too shallow for a boat long before you get to the bridges.

"Start fishing in March, start catching in April" - it's the same every year. Not that whites can't be caught in March with water temps in the low 50's. They can, but it's generally hit-or-miss then with a lot of trips missing. We're getting real close, though. Get those water temps closer to 60 and it'll be on!

That's my concern too. I think any body of water always supports all the life it can. That is, a cubic acre of upper Bull Shoals water is capable of supporting a certain number of pounds of living things - whether they're gamefish, trash fish, mud turtles, shad, crayfish, whatever. How much life a lake can support depends on a lot of factors including temperature, oxygen levels, and fertility. Bull Shoals and our other Ozarks lakes are low in fertility and they have a cold season, and that's why they're nowhere near as productive, per acre, as lakes on better soil and in warmer climates. Still, they always support all the life they're capable of supporting because if one species declines another one expands to take its place. If stripers are introduced, something else will have to decline in the same amount to stay within the life-supporting capacity of the lake. I wish stripers could replace the garfish with all other species being left alone, but it won't work that way.

You'd have to convince me stripers would make any difference about that. Like everybody, I've caught some nice bass and catfish from under surfacing white bass on Bull Shoals. A school of white bass tears up the shad, and other species come to get into the feeding frenzy and help pick up the wounded and the pieces. There are millions of white bass already feeding on shad in B.S. Why would you think there are some bass that don't follow white bass schools around but would follow stripers?

When my lure bumps bottom and comes up coated with a big gob of green stuff, I'm not sure I care what kind of goo it is. All that matters is that it messes up the lake and the fishing. "Other places have something even worse that we haven't found in Missouri yet" doesn't address our problem - it's typical bureaucratic quibbling. Plants don't grow much without fertilizer, and I think loads of fertilizer in the forms of phosphorous soap and septic and sewer effluent are going down the James River. I understated what I saw last week below Springfield dam by just calling it "soapsuds". I'm talking about rafts of soapsuds the width of houses and a foot tall, jammed against the banks as far as you can see down the river. Next time I go by there and the conditions are the same, I'll take a picture to post here.

Don't zebra mussels have to attach to rocks or something solid? Since so much of upper Bull Shoals has a mud bottom, maybe zebra mussels won't be able to colonize much of it? I don't know. When seining minnows for walleyes out of the Finley, I've caught some gar minnows. They look exactly like a full-size gar, but 3" long and they're still soft. At that size their armor-scales haven't developed yet. Maybe stripers would feed on small garfish along with shad, and that would be a good thing.

I'm not a purist, I'll gladly fish for any gamefish I can catch. There's no use limiting my chances by saying there's one or another species I won't fish for. I doubt that increasing the number of stripers in B.S. would do me much good, because I'm generally fishing with tackle that's too light to hold one. It seems to me that you'd have to be fishing specifically for striped bass, with the right kind of gear, before you could catch some. At the low numbers they're in the lake now, that's not very practical - but if there get to be enough of 'em, I'll be glad to go after them. You're right about yellow perch being good. I seldom catch them, but I cleaned a 12-incher out of B.S. last year, and they're as good as walleye filets. I wish the lake was full of them. It seems to me that the number of garfish in Upper B.S. has been increasing for awhile now. I don't know what can be done about that and I don't know what causes it (low oxygen levels, maybe? pollution?). Whatever it is, it seems to me that the panfish are declining and the gar increasing. I wish we could be rid of the things somehow - I'm getting tired of pulling up to a crappie hole and seeing gar rolling all around it. Might as well move when that's going on.

That's it. There are a ton of variables when it comes to the white bass run, and it's always possible the whole thing will get flooded out if we get big spring rains. Generally though, there are white bass in the rivers from about now through the end of April, and sometimes a little bit into May. It's important to know that they don't all come up at once. There are different classes and bunches coming up at different times, and sometimes going back down and staging again if the weather turns cold or if we get a cold rain. I think the height of it is when the dogwood and redbuds bloom, and we're still on the early side of that.

I've got a friend who lived in Henderson, NV for years, about 15 miles away from Lake Mead. He had a big boat and he was a dedicated striper fisherman, and I went on one trip with him and a friend of his. The trip was successful - we each caught two stripers (six total), and they were all around 20 lbs. But if they're fished for here the way they are there, I wouldn't want to do it. It was just too boring. The way he did it was to position his boat over deep water in the mouth of a cove. We all had ocean-size spinning outfits, two rods each, and they were rigged with about a 1 oz. sinker at the bottom and two drop-hooks above. The hooks were baited with big live minnows - I don't remember what kind but they were about 5" long. The lines were lowered straight down, about halfway to the bottom, and all the rods went in rod holders on the boat rail. Ed kept the boat in position with the trolling motor. Then we waited and waited - and WAITED. About 2 hours between bites, average. When a school of stripers came tearing into or out of the cove, two or three rods would get big strikes - BAM! The thing is, don't try to set the hook on that first strike - but that gives you a chance to pick up the rod and get ready. Stripers kill a baitfish by hitting it, then they circle around and take it. On the second strike - set the hook, and the fight is on! It's a heckuva fight, I'll say that. Just like a big white bass, but a 20-pounder. I know they couldn't be fished for just like that in the shallow waters of Upper Bull Shoals, but I bet it would be some version of the same thing. Unless you're into reading, sleeping, or drinking beer - that's just not my kind of fishing. I work at my fishing, and not touching a pole for 2 or 3 hours while waiting for a bite isn't something I'd enjoy. But that's just me.