Sam

Just a comment about upper Taneycomo when shad are coming through the turbines. I'm sure not a trout fisherman, but this is a thought I've had for years that might help someone, maybe. Years ago, before the new regulations, a friend and I were fishing just below the dam. Bait fishing was still OK then, and between Powerbait and throwing some small streamer flies and spinners we'd caught just a couple of trout. But there was a guy out there wading who was catching and releasing trout with every cast and he kept it up for a couple of hours. We must have seen him catch 100 trout - one every cast! When he waded back to the bank I went to talk to him - I wanted to know what the heck he was fishing with. Turns out, he was using live minnows but he wasn't trying to keep them alive. He was worming them on a gold minnow hook, running the whole length of the minnow on the hook so the now-dead minnow was in a "J" shape like the hook. He had a small split shot sinker about a foot up from the hook and he was casting upstream into the current, keeping a tight line, and letting the minnow tumble down the current like a dead shad that had washed through the dam. We went to the store and got some minnows, and limited out real quick catching one trout per cast. Wow. That's illegal now, of course - but I bet you could tear 'em up with some kind of legal lure in a "J" shape that tumbles down the current like a small dead shad. Just sayin'.

That's easy. I don't think trout really compete with anything else - not enough to reduce the numbers of other species. So, without trout the other fish in Taneycomo would be the same as they are now - a few bass, crappie, perch, catfish, etc. But the most numerous fish would be the ones the lake produces now, naturally, without help, and in quantity - and I enjoy the heck out of them at grabbing time. Suckers.

Yeah, I've thought about using christmas trees but decided not to. I've fished around the christmas tree brushpiles COE used to put out on Bull Shoals, and I can't fish within 10 feet of one without getting hung up, bad. They seem to grab hooks even worse than the natural brush that's in the lake, though they are kind of springy and sometimes you can get loose. I expect to get stuck a lot when crappie fishing, but I hate getting hung up on EVERY cast. PVC bushes would be great about that - you could fish right through them without getting hung. I think bamboo might be kind of the same way, with at least the main canes being so hard that a hook would bounce off rather than getting stuck. I've been trying to think of some other material that would work the same way.

Here's what Jerry Blake, a guide on Lake Greeson in Arkansas, is doing with "Bamboo Crappie Condos". Bamboo Crappie Condos I don't know that we've got enough bamboo growing around here for that, but it seems like some variation of his method would be a cheap and easy way to make some crappie cover.

For all the reasons mentioned - silt, cold water, weeds, no rocks, no crawdads - I think Taneycomo is being put to the best use possible to maximize fishing entertainment and revenue in the area. It's a put-and-take trout hole supported by a hatchery - not exactly natural, but the best that can be done with trout around here. And just like the way farm ponds can produce bigger panfish than our lakes, trout can grow real big in Taneycomo, though they can't reproduce. If conditions were prime for bass there, then bass would soon dominate the food chain and keep the small stocker trout eaten up. That's not happening, so conditions aren't right for them. If Taneycomo were left alone, I think the main fish species would be the one the lake produces naturally and in quantity - suckers.

I associate smallmouths with a rocky gravel bottom, not a mud bottom - and Taneycomo is mostly mud. It seems like Taneycomo would make a great fishery for walleyes, though. Cold running water, not very deep, mud bottom, weeds - that's everything walleyes like in Northern waters where they really thrive. Plus, in Taneycomo big walleyes would have all those hatchery trout to eat! OK, trout fishermen, never mind. Have your fun, we''ve already got Bull Shoals for walleyes.

Hey, fellers. I was following this conversation a couple months back about scanning 35mm slides onto the computer because that's what I needed to do also. My Dad left a whole bunch of 35mm slides he took from about 1957 to 1981, irreplaceable family photos. Trouble is, we haven't had a working slide projector for years and have no way to look at them. I ended up buying a slide scanner from Kim Komando - she's the gal who has a nationwide computer show on talk radio. This outfit works real well and real quick, and I'm satisfied with it. Here's the link: http://store.komando.com/p-385-slide-neg-scanner-to-pc.aspx I've probably scanned about 1000 slides now, with maybe 2000 left to go. I'm making a wintertime project out of scanning the slides, doing it in my spare time when I feel like it - so it'll probably be about two more months before I'm done. Once I finish I'll have no further use for the slide scanner. I paid $119.95 for the slide scanner, plus shipping. I'll sell it for half price - $60. plus postage, when I'm done with it. I've got the original box, instructions, CD program, and all attachments, of course. It scans negatives too. Let me know if you need it.

Hey Bill - I'm running a 12-year-old Humminbird on my console, and I sure want to replace it before spring. I'm real interested in your recommendation as I think the depthfinder you're talking about may be within my price range. You mean the 520C Lowrance, right? That's a 5" screen color rig that includes GPS, per my Google search. I couldn't find the letters LCG associated with those, but I expect that just means "liquid crystal graph" or something similar? Some of the depthfinders I found have different numbers and letters besides 520C in their listing. Could you tell me just which model it is you like so well? That'd be a big help. Thanks.

I've thought all along that looks like just part of the report. The three graphs are numbered, but there's no heading or page numbers and no explanation of what CPUE is (obviously, number of fish per - something). I'd say there's more to the report (maybe including walleyes and other species), and we're just looking at part of it.

I've always wanted to make some of those PVC crappie trees - good luck with it. On Bull Shoals, I'd be puzzled about where to put 'em out. Would you figure the lake will return to normal level and sink them in 45' now, which is 'way too deep for crappie? Or would you put them in 16'-20', which is good for now but you may be looking at them up on the bank later on? Or maybe just put 'em on the bank now, thinking the lake may come up another 15 feet as it has in the past? That's hard to figure. I guess I'd put them where they'd be 16'-20' deep when the water's at about 658. That would put them on the bare lake bottom where crappie cover is needed. When the water is over 20' high, like now, the fish are up in the land bushes and wouldn't have any reason to bunch up around artificial cover.

Yeah, mine's an Eagle 480 too, and as I said it does the same thing occasionally. The other strange thing it does sometimes is to exactly double the depth - if I'm in 28 feet of water it'll read 56 feet, etc. The sound waves must do a double bounce somehow, who knows? Anytime it gets stupid, the cure is to turn it off and back on again and then it's OK.

I run an Eagle on my trolling motor and a Humminbird with the transducer at the back of the boat on my dash. They both do that and always have, a couple of times every trip. I just turn off the power, turn it back on, and they read right again. It happens to my depthfinders when they get "confused". The main one shows all kinds of crazy depths (400+ feet) when I run the boat at top speed, and once in awhile it doesn't go back to normal when I slow down. The one on the trolling motor sometimes gets mixed up when I pull the motor up to move, and then put it back in the water. Sometimes the transducer on that one gets bumped too, and if it isn't at a 90 degree angle to the trolling motor shaft that'll throw the readings off. If the false readings only happen a couple of times per fishing trip like with my depthfinders, and if it reads right again after being turned off and back on, I'd consider that normal. If it happens often enough to be a problem, then something's not right. When my depthfinders get confused like that it's after the receiving of a return echo was interrupted, one because the boat was moving too fast and the other because the transducer was out of the water. That might be a clue if you have to track your problem down.

Naw, I don't even like to handle a shad. If I do I smell that oily thing on my hands all day - and as you say, they're about impossible to keep alive as bait. Though I'm a crappie fisherman I seldom use live bait. If I were going to, I'd just buy a couple dozen minnows - that's the same thing and a whole lot easier.

I look for those too - areas of floating scales and shad parts, and sometimes a trail of bubbles. In my experience that's usually the aftermath of a white bass feeding frenzy, but black bass are often down below it too, picking up the pieces and dead minnows. Either way, a spoon's the ticket.

I haven't been to Bull Shoals since the water came up so high. The pattern all this year was to find crappie on isolated brush in 16-20 feet of water. Now, the land bushes are in that depth, the whole shoreline - and I figure the crappie have so much brush to hide in it'd be impossible. There oughta be another great hatch in the spring, though, if the water stays high.

Put in at Bridgeport, where Hwy. 76 crosses the James River arm. Going west on 76, turn left into the driveway just before you cross the bridge. It's a free ramp, and from there Flat Creek is just around the first bend upstream. You're going to have to wait until springtime to do any good with a trotline, from about April on.

I'm with you on that, but do I gotta respect the Los Angeles-class heavy cruisers and PWC's (lake lice) too? That's asking a lot.

Yeah, I see that junk all the time too - usually right where I want to make a cast. I guess the regs about tagging trotlines and watching juglines are at least an effort to help that problem. There's some guys doing it right, though. I had several good crappie and white bass trips this spring downstream from Cape Fair, and that's where a lot of catfishing was going on. I saw several active trotlines set out, with nametags attached. Crappie fishing along one bank, another boat came by with two guys catching little black perch on jigs to bait their trotline. I got to talking with them and they said they'd been running a trotline for a couple of days, doing good and having a ball with it, and bass fishing in between. It took both of them to hold up a BIG flathead from the bottom of their boat to show me. I could stand some of that.

That's right about old trotlines and juglines being dangerous. I got one wrapped up in my prop once in the middle of the night, and it was an awful mess that took a lot of work with cutting pliers and a flashlight to straighten out. That was a bad experience with big rusty hooks all through the tangle - someone could have got hurt real easy. I'd like to try setting a trotline again, and I'll probably do it next season. There were a couple of weeks last spring when I accidentally caught a few good-size catfish on crappie jigs and Roostertails while fishing for crappie and white bass on the James arm - and I hooked a couple of cats that were too big to get in on light tackle. I know catfishing would have been real good then if I'd targeted them. Before doing it, I'm going to read the regulations carefully. I know a trotline has to be labeled with the fisherman's name, address, and maybe phone number. I believe they passed new regs in the last few years about how often a trotline has to be checked, and I think something that says a fisherman has to stay within sight of his jug lines. I remember thinking at the time that the new rules were a good idea, but I'm fuzzy on the details. I'll study up on the current regs before I set a line out.

See, I've already learned something. I've only set a trotline twice, and never had anybody to show me how it's done. Both times I set 'em stretched between snags but with the hooks only a few feet underwater. All I caught was some gar, which had invariably drowned themselves (I wonder if they have to keep swimming to breathe, like sharks?). Now I know what I did wrong - I should have weighted the middle of the line clear down to the bottom. There's all kinds of good information on here, about a variety of subjects. Thanks.

I'm glad to hear they go to such lengths to keep those bass alive and healthy when they're released. I think the bass fishery would go downhill in a hurry if tournaments and regular bass fishermen didn't do that. I know most all the bass I've caught on Tablerock have been caught before, you can count the hook-holes in their lips. The tournaments I fish are crappie tournaments (yes, there are some), and we're careful to keep the slabs alive and healthy because there's a weight penalty for weighing in a dead fish, and culling is allowed. That is, we fish until we're just short of the limit then start releasing a smaller crappie every time a bigger one is caught. Minnows aren't allowed and crappie lures have small single hooks, so the fish don't get hooked bad. I've fished tourneys in Mississippi, Alabama, and eastern Tennessee where you can catch big slabs all day long - it's a ball on light tackle. But the big difference is that a crappie tourney's weigh-in is followed by the main event - the Fish Fry. You couldn't, and wouldn't want to, do that in a bass tourney. Bass don't eat that good, and the fishery wouldn't support it. But there aren't that many crappie tourneys and they're only a few dozen boats instead of hundreds on lakes where the locals are limiting out anyway. It's all good, and the filets go right next to the hush puppies!

That explains it, thanks. I've got some big bluegills in a small pond at home, and they're pretty much tame - I don't want to kill them. I let our grandkids fish there, but only with barbless hooks. I don't use pliers, I file the barbs off completely. Very, very seldom do we lose a fish that way, and the 'gills are probably sick of the whole deal, they've been caught so often.

I'm not a trout fisherman, but I'm glad you guys have a good place at Taneycomo to fish for 'em as you obviously enjoy it a lot. Different strokes, different folks - and that's a good thing. You've got me curious, trying to figure why barbless hooks would be banned on the White in Arkansas. With a barbless hook, I'd think you could C/R trout or any other fish until the cows come home and Conservation would be happy about it because you're not damaging the fish. Why in the world wouldn't barbless hooks be allowed? Explain, please.

Naw, I didn't think so - not at all. There's no apology called for. My favorite thing is crappie fishing. Sometimes I leave the house thinking about a particular brushpile I've limited out on a couple of days before - and the purpose of the whole trip is pretty much to fish that one brushpile. I'll drive 30-some miles to the lake, run a couple of miles with the boat, and then maybe find another crappie fisherman sitting right on it! That's disappointing. For a bass fisherman in a big tourney, that's gotta be even more disappointing. Then if the guy sitting on a good spot is a weekend fisherman not in the tournament, or someone like me who's not even fishing for bass, that's gotta be even more frustrating. I've got no problem with giving the guys in big tournaments plenty of room - or better yet, just giving 'em the lake for a couple days. Their business right then is a lot more serious than mine, and I've got lots of other places to fish. So far as the guys in smaller local bass tournaments, they don't put that many boats on the lake and we can all be courteous and share the lake just fine. It's all good.

Fair enough, I'm glad to give 'em the room. The last thing those guys need is to motor to some particular spot only to find me and my aluminum Tracker sitting on it - trying to catch a crappie, a white bass, or even a goggleye. I'm just trying to stay out of their way, and it doesn't much matter to me where I'm fishing. I think the best way to do that when a big tournament is there is to just let 'em have the lake and go somewhere else. No problem. But boy, I can't believe the March 3-6 date they set for their Tablerock tourney. Why didn't they go to Alabama then and hit Tablerock later in the season? They're liable to be fishing in a blizzard or an ice storm in early March, and even if they get lucky with the weather it'll probably be real cold.