Al Agnew

Great looking table! Ever since I mostly retired from painting, I've made furniture now and then for ourselves. I love working with old barn wood, and made a wall of cabinetry/entertainment center for our home in Montana, along with bookshelves and end tables. I also like working with live edge walnut slabs. Last year I made a walnut coffee table for our Missouri house, and right now I'm working on another walnut table that will go between Mary's and my recliners, big enough for lamp, charging station, and drinks for both of us and shaped to fit perfectly between the recliners.

I've paid well over half that much for a day of guided fishing, without any guarantees that I'd catch anything. But I happily paid it because it was the best way to get on some great fishing water that I was unprepared to do it myself. To me, it was the fishing on that gorgeous water that made it worth it, not the catching. So these guys are spending that to fish private water where they presumably have a better chance of catching a double digit bass than in public lakes. It's always cool to fish private water, but only you can decide whether it's worth $1000. Also, only you can determine how important it is to you to catch a ten plus pound bass. If it WAS guaranteed, it wouldn't be worth it to me. It's not the 10 pound plus bass that I care about, it's being able to figure out how to catch enough big bass that one of them is likely to be a double digit fish. To me, fishing is like a lot of things, it's the striving that's most important. I'd love to catch a 6 pound plus Ozark river smallmouth. But if by some chance there was a private stretch of river that I was guaranteed to catch a six pounder, I wouldn't care to do it. I want the fun of trying, and the satisfaction I'd have if I ever caught one on the same water that every other good fisherman can fish.

You're right, but Arkansas shot 37 free throws to Mizzou's 17. Partly because Mizzou missed the front end of a few one and ones, and partly because Arkansas was fouled going to the rim a lot more while Mizzou was fouled when it wasn't in the act of shooting.

I can't blame Grill for continuing to shoot. They needed the baskets, and he has shown he can hit guarded threes and deep threes. Sometimes the shots don't fall, and when they don't and you're depended upon to provide offense, your team is probably going to lose. It was a couple of shots late that were open ones that he missed that spelled their doom. I'd still want him shooting those shots.

Mizzou lost because they didn't have Gray to be a rim protector and rebounder, Grill went ice cold, they couldn't hit enough free throws, they didn't get to the line enough, and they couldn't stop Arkansas guards driving to the rim without fouling. I also think AR got some home cooking...37 fouls for Mizzou, 17 for AR, and it sure seemed like Mizzou couldn't buy a foul when they took it to the rim while AR got the call just about every time. Road games in the SEC are tough. This loss didn't drop Mizzou much, one spot in the KenPom ranking. But they now have to beat Vandy, Oklahoma, and South Carolina on the road or their resume will put them down in the 6th or 7th seed area in the tournament.

It's driving me nuts. One big reason we still have a place in the Ozarks is so that I can spend much of the winter here and do a lot of winter fishing. But I don't like to fish if the temps are below freezing and water temps in the mid-30s. With Mary getting a knee replacement in mid-January and all this cold weather, I've only fished 3 or 4 times all winter. Long range forecast is for temps in the 50s after this coming week, so maybe I'll finally get in some fishing.

The definitive book to find if you're interested in all the strains of trout in North America is "Trout and Salmon of North America", by Robert J. Behnke. It has range maps and excellent illustrations by Joe Tomelleri, who is almost as good as I am at depicting fish accurately😁. If interested in an entertaining book about one man's quest to catch all the native cutthroat strains by seeking out tiny creeks above major waterfalls where non-native rainbows presumably couldn't reach, find "Native Trout of North America" by Robert H. Smith. He caught just about all of them and took photos, but alas, a lot of his photos are pretty poor.

I think that the cutthroat stocked in Arkansas come from the state fish hatchery at Mammoth Spring. Like you, I can find nothing about what strain they originally were. Looking at photos, they don't particularly look like any of the distinct strains from various parts of the West. I suspect that these fish are mongrels, coming from brood stock from several different original sources and bred in the hatchery until they are like hatchery rainbows...not any particular strain. It's interesting and perhaps telling that Arkansas Game and Fish doesn't seem to make a big deal out of which strain they came from. I've fished a lot of the West, and have caught several different strains, including coastal, westslope, Snake River fine-spotted, Yellowstone, and Colorado cutthroats. Interestingly, the cutthroat strain that made me a bunch of money and some notoriety, the Lahontan cutthroat, is one I've never caught. I entered and won Nevada's first trout stamp contest with a Lahontan cutthroat, but my reference was some good photos that a friend of mine in MDC procured from somebody he knew in Nevada Fish and Game department.

I don't have my copy in front of me, but I believe that the 200 MSA book didn't cover the Niangua or Elk systems. Chuck was from the St. Louis area, and he just didn't get that far away. Note also that quite a few of the obscure accesses he mentioned in the book are no longer viable, partly BECAUSE of his book--he brought too many people to these access points and the landowners got fed up and shut them off. I agree with Gavin that OnX Hunt is fairly useful. But I use Google Earth Pro and a DeLorme Atlas. Find creeks and bridge crossings on them with the Atlas, then look at the bridge crossings and creeks on Google Earth Pro. I use the Pro version because of its history feature, that shows previous imagery. A lot of times, the most recent imagery might be when the creek is high or when the trees are leafed out and obscuring much of the creek and the area around the bridge crossing, but if you go back through previous imagery you can often find a winter time view with the water low and clear, and you'll see a lot more detail. What I'm looking for is an obvious place near the bridge where people have been parking. A lot of bridges these days are fairly new, without places to park along the road shoulder, and so you can eliminate them. But if you see a bridge with an obvious pull off, then chances are people have been using it with no problems from landowners. However, you won't know for sure until you check it out. If, when you get there, there is purple paint everywhere and no trespassing signs on every tree, try somewhere else. PLEASE...if you find a nice creek with a good access, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT ABOUT IT, and don't take anybody to it that you don't trust completely to keep quiet about it. We use these accesses because the landowners don't mind. Bringing more people to them is not going to make the landowner happy. And it should go without saying to treat the use of the creek as a privilege, so keep a low profile and don't do ANYTHING that might tick off a landowner. I also think it's a good idea to not wear out your welcome. I NEVER fish a single stretch of wading size creek more than three times a year, and most of them no more than once a year; the only ones I might fish up to three times are the ones closest to home, when I can get there in 20 minutes or less and fish for a couple hours.

They not only change colors during the course of a day, they change "colors" in minutes. The reason I put it in quotation marks is because you have to differentiate between pattern or lack of it, shade--dark to light, and overall color cast. Smallmouth and Neoshos do all three. The pattern of dark vertical bars and splotches is actually a sign of stress or excitement; smallies just hanging out in the river are usually almost unmarked. But when you hook one, by the time you get it in those dark bars are beginning to show. Put it on a stringer and they become VERY prominent. (Note that "excitement" includes sexual excitement--spawning fish are usually very heavily marked.) Smallmouth and Neoshos can also change their overall shade from very light to almost totally very dark. This is sometimes a response to light levels in their surroundings, or the darkness or lightness of the bottom. Smallmouth caught in the summer over a bottom covered in dark algae are usually fairly dark overall, while smallmouth caught over a clean gravel bottom (like you see in the winter when the algae dies off) in bright sunlight will usually be very light brassy in shade and color to blend in with the clean, well lit gravel bottom. And finally, they can change color cast overall from very brownish and coppery brass to more olive. They can even fade out these colors and turn almost olive gray. This is always in response to the predominant color of the bottom, and usually takes a little longer to make the change. I've got more than a thousand photos of smallmouth I've caught in various places, which I use in my paintings. The variety of patterns, colors, and shades is amazing.

March is just about the worst month other than the depths of winter to try to wade fish Ozark streams. Typically even the normal water flow in March is as high as it will get, which means strong current and a lot of water that's just too deep for safe wading. Couple that with the fact that March is a transition month where the fish are moving from winter holes to spawning banks. If you find them, they are easy to catch, but finding them is hit or miss. You'd be much better off to wait until May for good wade fishing. If the weather has been warmer than normal, a lot of fish will have moved up into tributary streams by late March, and some of those will be more wadeable. However, the thing you have to keep in mind is that streams in MO that are too small to float in a canoe or kayak are basically private. All of us who creek fish know places where we can get on the water because the landowner doesn't care. But you won't find many people sharing those spots, nor should they, because the more people that go to them, the more likely some pinheads will tick off the landowner and ruin it for everybody. The safest wading is on the upper reaches of the streams you'll find in the Paddler's Guide that TJM talked about. Find the highest possible put-in and go check it out...it might be wadeable.

Yup, definitely true that sometimes the fish just aren't going to bite. I relearned this a few years ago while winter fishing one of those spring holes where it's usually like shooting fish in a barrel. The water was low and very clear, but I'd caught fish there before in low, clear, winter water. But this time I fished this one stretch of bank where they should have been for a good hour without a bite, trying several different lures that always work. Finally I gave up, thinking the fish had moved. There was a high mud bank along that little stretch, and I crossed the river and climbed up on that bank to see if there were any fish to be seen. Welp, there were probably 200 smallmouth of all sizes hanging out right where I'd been doing all that fishing. Very few of them were even moving.

The future is going to be interesting. Seems like a whole lot of things are gradually building up that, combined, could result in a lot of changes for the worse in our fisheries. Everything from more and more technology to more and more anglers using that technology to environmental problems affecting the habitat to climate change affecting water temperatures and flood regimes. And while we all like catch and release and think it's good for fish populations, it has always seemed to me that, no matter how much anglers profess to catch and release, the more pressure the harder the fishing gets. I could see how FFS could have a significant effect on crappie. Kinda reminds me of a couple weeks ago, while fishing for winter bass. I found a lone downed tree just off the bank in deep water that had a school of crappie in it. Pretty nice ones, and I love eating crappie. Using jerkbaits, I was catching one on almost every cast, so I started tossing them into the livewell. By the tenth one, I was wondering how long I could keep this up, but then I got to thinking that this was probably the only school of crappie in several miles of river, and I was pretty sure, since it was a well known winter fishing hole, that others had found those crappie before me. Now I have no idea how many there were in that tree, but I decided that ten was enough for a heck of a meal, and it was just being greedy to take any more than that out of that tree. And I really hope that I didn't take some of the last of the school after others had already decimated it. I've always been a little mystified why people who are after fish that are supposedly great eating think that they have to fill their limits every time they go.

Looks like about 4 inches here. Tomorrow I get to have fun on the tractor blading it off our quarter mile super steep lane.

Of those I fish with, a couple are seeing the problems and backing off fishing the tournaments somewhat, while a couple others are adamantly unconvinced. Heck, I might be smart, but not everybody thinks I'm a genius😁...they don't listen to me. Besides, I'm getting too old to fight more battles.