Sam

I went by the K Dock ramp two days ago, and it's in fine shape. Water level is what I consider normal (three steps showing above water on the old concrete steps) and the lower road has been bladed off. There were three boat trailers parked, so some folks are out fishing. I just hope we don't get as much rain next spring, and that the lake will stay at a fishable level. Forsythian, et al - I don't think that report was real specific. Naming the three biggest creek arms below K Dock and saying to fish the chunk rock points is pretty basic stuff. In the holiday spirit, I'll give away one of my crappie holes here (I've got 50+ in upper Bull Shoals). Now, this is what over-specific information to post would be like (and I ain't giving any of my other spots away this easy): Just above (upstream from) Snapp Holler a big power line crosses the lake. On the west side the bank is steep and where they cleared the trees under the power line a couple of trees toppled into the lake making a brush pile near the bank in about 12' of water. It's brushy as all get out and you'll hang up a lot, but when conditions are right I've taken limits of keeper crappie right out of those trees. Smaller crappie tend to hang around the outside branches, but the bigger ones are right in the middle of that mess. ENJOY - and I hope you take a kid with you.

My partner and I went out of Buttermilk Springs on Tablerock yesterday, the second such trip in the last few days. We're perch fishing - and I've got a "big fish story". About mid-morning, throwing a small white crappie jig up near the rocks with an ultralight rig, I hooked a big fish. The next 30 minutes were spent trying to keep my rod from breaking, gaining a couple feet at a time, then losing 20 feet back on a run, chasing the fish out into deep water with the trolling motor, and uttering some words I learned in the Navy. You guessed it - I finally exhausted the fish, got it to the top, and it wasn't the big catfish I'd been hoping for. It was the biggest carp I've ever seen. I mean it - the biggest one I've ever seen. We both figured it was a few inches over 4 feet long and maybe 30 pounds. It was so fought-down it laid on its side by the boat while I unhooked my crappie jig from the corner of its mouth with pliers and turned it loose. I was just about as tired as the fish was. Now, I think carp are useless junk fish and I wish they weren't in the lakes - but I've gotta admit they put up a fight. That was some experience - that fish was both fast and strong. Goes to show what you can handle with a light 6' crappie pole, an ultralight spinning reel, 10 lb. PowerPro line, and open water to play in. That's the biggest fish I've ever caught outside of salt water. As far as the perch fishing - if you've got kids now's the time to take them. We're catching Black Perch (green sunfish) on small white crappie jigs along chunk-rock bluffs near deep water. The bigger ones are concentrated in deep shady places near sunken logs and big rocks. The perch are just full of little crawdads - they're stocking up for winter, and I imagine they're biting that way all over the lake. We're keeping anything over 8" and turning maybe 9 out of 10 back for being shorter than that. We brought 50 home the other day and almost as many yesterday, and we're catching and releasing a lot of short bass up to 14" as well - plus that big carp. Constant action like that on light tackle sure makes for fun fishing trips - plus some tasty little perch filets.

rps - Thanks, that helps. Do the tables in the trolling book take speed into account? I don't know what speeds I troll at, but I'll take a GPS along on this trip to find out. If I use the main motor, my 50 hp four-stroke will troll as slow as 900 rpm. Trolling a Bandit 200 on Bull Shoals for walleyes in past years, I usually keep it on 1100 rpm to drive the plug deeper. At 1100 rpm with about 140 feet of FireLine out, I get the Bandit 200 down to 20 feet. I've found my depthfinder to be real accurate - and if I troll over a gravel point where it reads 20 ft. the Bandit will barely bump. In 19 feet it bumps hard, and it won't hit bottom at all if the depthfinder read 21 feet. I think I'll be able to go a little deeper, as your book shows, with the Wiggle Wart and Power Pro line. I'll be interested to see what speeds my motor rpm's translate into.

I had a bunch of points built up on my Bass Pro Rewards Card, so I did a little "tackle enhancement" yesterday - with this thread in mind. I replaced my Daiwa 1500 spinning reel that finally blew up after 18 years of hard use. That's been my favorite reel, and I wouldn't want to be without one. While I was at it, I picked up an Ugly Stik rod, 6 foot, medium action - gotta have something new to hang the new reel on. Then I bought 300 yards of green Power Pro 10-lb. line. Boy, that stuff's thin - I've been using FireLine but this is thinner. Got a couple of original Wiggle Warts as described, too, plus I already had a bunch of Bandit II's that I usually deep-troll with. I'm gonna try some trolling at Tablerock this week. I took that rig with a Wiggle Wart tied on out in the yard and made a couple of casts. It throws 86' without even trying hard. Sitting down in a boat trolling I figure it'll probably cast about 80'. I measured that one full crank on the Daiwa reel takes up 20" of line, so if I cast out with the boat moving and then back-reel 25 times I oughta have about 125' of line out. One thing I like about trolling is that you never know what you might catch. Bass, white bass, and walleyes of course - but sometimes crappie, and I caught a 17-lb. flathead cat out of Bull Shoals that way a couple of years ago. That was on 6 lb. monofilament and a light spinning outfit, and it was a 45 minute fight. If I hadn't been able to chase him around the lake with the trolling motor on high speed I never would have caught that fish. I'll give a report here on how the trolling goes.

Take the canoe and one of the kids back to Ozark Park. Go up just above the park on the side near the bluff and away from the upper park - the main river, not the slough. Use pieces of nightcrawlers on gold minnow hooks, no bobbers or sinkers, and flip the nightcrawlers under the shade of the overhanging trees along that island. Just watch the line on top of the water as the worm sinks, and when the line twitches and takes off set the hook. That's a great way for kids to learn to fish. You'll be surprised at what you catch there - big bluegills and sun perch, goggleyes, small bass and catfish. I don't think I'd eat fish out of the Finley any more, too many septic tanks - but the kids will sure have fun there.

Whack'em - I'm glad to know your tourney has figured out how to keep bass alive, and that it's working. I know from swimming in the lake that the real hot temps are only on top, it's a lot cooler just a few feet down. Those bass we caught were plenty lively, even though it was hot at the surface. I wasn't doing anything extra for those bluegills that died so quick, just pumping 91 degree water through the livewell. It's good to know you can keep fish alive OK, and that the effort is being made to do it.

Well, he probably was fishing a tourney then. Best of luck to him. I'm glad we weren't in a tournament. We C/R all our bass, including a 4.5 pounder. I don't think there was any way you could have kept fish alive in a livewell. Surface water temp was 91 when we got there at 6 p.m. and 88 when we left around 1 a.m. I caught some big bluegills for eating just before dark. They all died within an hour, so I took them out of the hot water in the livewell and put them in the icebox with our pop. I sure don't see how these summer night tournaments work without killing a bunch of bass.

Does anybody know if there are Friday night tournaments out of Cow Creek? Fishing Long Creek last Friday between Gage's Marina and the AR line we came across a feller who said he was fishing a tournament out of Cow Creek. Maybe so, but he'd made a pretty long run if he was. I always fish banks left-to-right at night because the blacklight is on the left side of my boat. His boat was in the middle of a 1/4 mile long bank that we were fishing. He was there first, but we started out a good 200 yards from him. I kept watching to see which way he was going down the bank - didn't want to crowd him. He seemed to be staying in the same spot, so I couldn't tell. When we got close enough he could hear me, I hollered and asked which way he was going. He said "toward you", so I kicked the trolling motor on high to make a real big circle around him and come back in. He said "you're not gonna cut me off, are you?". I said I was just trying to get around him as he was going the other way, and he said no, he was going back and forth along the bank. Well, that was OK and he was friendly enough. I just thought it was a little much to take a whole 1/4 mile of shoreline and not want anybody else to fish any of it. No big deal, we went to another spot. He said he had three keepers and we caught eight off other banks, so I guess we should'a been in the tournament. I kind of doubt he was fishing a tournament anyway, but maybe.

How about K Dock? I haven't been there this year, but in previous high-water years I've launched at that little dip in the road where the high and low roads to the launch ramp split. The water's still a lot higher this year, so I imagine that's all underwater. Can you launch and find parking where the road goes into the water - maybe around the entrance of the old campground that's been closed for several years?

We fished around Long Creek last night with Texas-rigged 11" worms from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. We caught 8 good largemouths from 17" to 20 1/2" and only one short fish, a 14-incher. That doesn't mean the bite wasn't slow - it seemed real slow with maybe one bite per hour between the two of us. The size of the fish made up for it, though. All bites were in about 17 to 20 feet of water around flooded trees and bluff ends. Surface water temp was 91 when we got there and 88 when we left, so I was surprised they were biting at all that shallow.

In general, that "twilight bite" is good for me. As long as there's a little bit of light, I think fishing is often good. The problem I've always had is with the first couple of hours of full darkness - I usually can't get anything going again until about 11 or 11:30 p.m. Then it often picks up again and I've caught a lot of good fish around midnight. I read somewhere that it takes a bass' eyes about two hours to adjust to the dark and during that time they don't feed much. Maybe - because that matches my experience. If there's good moonlight they'll sometimes keep biting during that first couple of hours of darkness. Same with artificial light, so I've learned to fish around where there's some dock lights at that time.

I fished two tournaments at Watts Bar Lake in eastern Tennessee. That lake was built in 1941 and they cleared the whole valley before it flooded and everything else has had time to rot out in 65+ years. There's no standing timber, no brushpiles, no cover at all. They build houses right on the shoreline there, and most of the fishing is around the docks - which are on pilings, not floaters. I didn't hardly know how to fish it, and I didn't like it much. I imagine our lakes will get that way in time, except we'll have brushpiles to fish as long as they keep adding them.

I agree. Several times in summer when coming back late at night to a ramp that's had a weigh-in I've scooped up a limit of belly-up barely-twitching bass to take home. This is after catching and releasing my own bass all evening. I figure my family and I, instead of the turtles, might as well eat some of them. A suggestion. Couldn't summertime tournaments each year be required to have several weigh-in stations going continuously throughout the tournament? Have one at the launch point, one a couple of miles upstream, and one a couple of miles downstream. The branch stations wouldn't even have to be on the bank - just a tied-up boat with a distinctive colored light or something. Two guys at each station would record all fish with accurate scales and a digital camera and log the weights and times. Then the fish would be released immediately. The penalty for a boat bringing in just ONE dead fish would be disqualification. Obviously, fishermen would throw dead or dying fish away rather than bring them in and be disqualified - but that would change behavior patterns. If you kill it, you can't count it. At the end of the tournament everybody would get together and prizes would be awarded based on the records and pictures from all weigh-in stations. I know doing this would change tournament fishing strategies like how far to run. Rushing a fish to a weigh station would take away from fishing time and force fishermen to sometimes have to leave a hot spot and come back - but everybody would be fishing under the same limitations. It's a lot better than killing a bunch of big bass - a practice that HAS to stop.

How 'bout when fishing a Texas-rigged worm toward the bank and your line goes slacK? You try to reel up carefully to feel the fish before it feels you, but that's hard to do because the bass has picked up the worm and sinker and headed for deep water by swimming right under your boat. I often miss the fish on those deals, but when I don't - it's usually a big one that does that.

I was at K Dock (Bull Shoals) a couple of years ago, and there was a feller putting in ahead of me by himself. His technique was to back down the ramp about 10 mph, slam the brakes on, and have his boat shoot out onto the lake. He had a long rope tied from the front of the boat to the front of his trailer, and I guess he intended to pull his boat in with the rope and beach it. Well, I watched this exercise with some amusement - he slammed on the brakes, and his boat shot out in the water and kept going. The rope had come untied from his trailer. I got him to park his rig, then showed him how I launch by myself. I leave the boat hooked to the trailer at the front, back up until it's floating, then climb over the truck bed, unhook the boat, then get in the boat, back it off the trailer, and beach it. I gave him a ride out to his boat, which was about 100 yards offshore by that time. It was a good thing for him I came along - we were the only two people there.

I went up Bull Creek yesterday and caught a few short bass and a bunch of bluegills. Water temp in the creek is 60. I kept some of the bigger bluegills for supper, and they were all males. They're staging getting ready to spawn, and that probably means the crappie spawn is over there.

I gave them $5 to launch at the new ramp ONCE, last spring. I was already there pulling a boat, and I found that they had cabled off the free ramp by the docks that I'd been using for years. After that happened, I emailed the people who run the Marina there at Kimberling City - and I got a reply from a lady explaining that they'd made quite an investment in the new ramp to make things better for fishermen and tournaments, etc. I'm sure that's true, but the fact remains that they put up a cable to close the old, free ramp so you'd have to pay $5 to launch at the new one! Now I just drive across the bridge and launch at Mill Creek instead. Back when K.C. had the free ramp, I used to buy snacks, gas, lures, and sometimes minnows at their Marina. I haven't been there or spent a penny with them since they started charging $5 to launch, and I won't either.

I'm not much of a bass fisherman, I'd rather go after crappie, walleyes, or white bass. But I like to fish for bass post-spawn and usually devote a few trips to that in late May. I do pretty good on big ones at that time, when they still have worn-down tails and fins from sweeping the nest. I'm not taking them off the nests, because I find them suspended in flooded timber along bluffs in 25' or so water. I C/R big bass anyway, but if one gets hooked deep at that time and has to go in the live well I don't feel too bad about it AFTER they're done breeding.

I just watched the KY3 weather report. There's some chance of rain predicted for the next six days straight, with big storms Wed. night and Thurs. dumping another 2 to 4 inches of rain all along the White River. That's not good.

I used to be on the Chamber of Commerce board here, about 15 years ago. The subject of most meetings was "how can we get more people to move to Ozark?". They were spending thousands of dollars on bulk mailings to Illinois and Texas, trying to get people to move here. All those business owners thought they were going to get rich by bringing more customers in. I used to tell them that as soon as the population got big enough, big-box chain stores and franchises would come in and run the locals out of business. And that's what happened, mostly. But you've gotta figure that's what all these towns were doing, and the Ozarks are a nice place to live. We've had enormous population growth in this whole area and it's been going on for years now. That impacts the fishing as well as most other things like traffic, pollution, water tables - everything. There's just a whole lot more people than there used to be sharing the same limited local resources, including fishing. I liked it better before.

I fish upper B.S. a lot too, but not so far this year. The water's, I think, 41 feet above normal. To put that in perspective, in normal times I don't fish much in 41-foot water - too deep. Now it's that far down to where the boat usually sits! The last high-water spring, in 2002 I think, I tried fishing with the lake about 33 feet above normal. I caught one or two short bass and couldn't find a crappie. I guess they were up in the trees and brush where I couldn't throw without getting snagged. I remember looking straight down under the boat at a good-size sycamore tree with green leaves on it. In June of that year, though, walleye fishing was good on the "new" flats in 20 feet of water. Maybe that'll happen this year too. And as you say, this ought to make a good crappie hatch that we'll be enjoying 3 or 4 years from now. In the meantime, I'm going to lakes where the water's high - but not that high.

I checked out Gage's Marina on the Long Creek arm a few days ago. At that time it would have been launchable except for all the logs, limbs, and trash in the parking lot above the ramp. You couldn't even drive into the parking lot for all the debris. That's a deal that could be cleaned up by a front-end loader in a couple of hours. Since the campground there just opened, hopefully they'll get around to clearing the ramp access soon.

Does anybody know if it's possible to launch a boat at Rockaway now? In the pictures posted here last week, it didn't look like you could launch. How about going up Bull Creek? Can that be done? I'm thinking about bass fishing and sucker-grabbing up in there, if the water's cleared up.

Some questions. Is it OK to put in at the Walnut Springs ramp (well, at the end of the road now)? I always thought that ramp was private for the homeowners in that neighborhood. I hope I'm wrong about that. Is it safe now in a boat around the Asher Cane area? I put in at Galena last week and I wished I hadn't - the current knocked my boat and trailer sideways on the ramp. Even with the high water, I think I could find a crappie up in the side creeks and coves off James now, if I could get to them.

I agree - and even if we miss fishing the spawn the crappie fishing may be good later. One of the best crappie fishing years I've had on Tablerock and Bull Shoals was after the spawn in May and June 2002 when the water was still high after a spring like this. Crappie spawn in real shallow water when the water is muddy like now. If the little ones can get hatched out and hide in the land weeds and brush, a lot more of them will survive and crappie fishing should be great in 3-4 years. Tha danger is that if they drop the lakes even 3 or 4 feet by the end of April, a lot of crappie nests will be destroyed.