Al Agnew

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.

Not every wintering hole is straightforward as to where the fish in it are located at any given time. Sure, some of the holes I fish, the whole pool isn't very big and the fish-holding spots are few and small, or else one little stretch of bank is good and everything else is too shallow to hold fish in normal clear winter water. But there are plenty of them that are a half mile long, deep from bank to bank and from head to tail. These are pools that I might spend a half day just trying to find the fish when you have to fish slowly and carefully in the winter, because they won't be everywhere. It is in these pools, seems to me, that FFS would speed the process up considerably; just cruise it looking for fish, make some casts when you find some to see if they are bass and interested. Successful fishing, whether tournament or not, is all about efficiency. The less time you spend making casts to places where there aren't any fish, the more efficient you are at catching fish. Are these winter river tournaments impacting the populations of bigger fish? Who knows? But seems to me that it's a bit of an arms race. As anglers get more efficient with better equipment and knowledge, they catch a greater PERCENTAGE of the bigger fish. So it could very well be that there are just as many fish being caught now as there were 20 years ago, but those numbers are a greater percentage of a smaller total number of big fish. And as efficiency continues to increase, at some point the numbers of big ones caught will start declining because the available pool of big ones from which to catch them gets too small.

I could certainly see it having an impact on winter fishing on the larger Ozark rivers. Other than that, I don't think it could have much impact on warm weather fishing where the fish are more scattered and easier to find. I'm especially concerned when it comes to the winter tournaments that have cropped up on streams like the Current, Meramec, and Gasconade, where the anglers carry their fish to a weigh in point and release them all there. Moving more and bigger bass out of their wintering habitat and releasing them in a spot where they are going to have to disperse to get back to wintering habitat seems to me to be a recipe for disaster...it's happening already, and FFS will probably make it a lot worse. I really wish that these tournaments would be required to go to a format where the fish are photographed, measured, and released immediately.

Not too bad here in Franklin County. Had about 3-4 inches of snow over an inch of mostly sleet with a little freezing rain. Not enough freezing rain to form icicles on the tree limbs, just enough to put a bit of a coating on the twigs. So no broken down trees and the power was fine. I got out this morning on the tractor and cleared our quarter mile long lane to the highway. Took several hours, because that icy sleet underneath didn't want to be removed. We have to get to St. Louis tomorrow morning, so I had to get it done; our lane is VERY steep in places. Got the steep parts down to bare gravel, so should be good.

Jim Owen was somewhat of a huckster. When the dam was first beginning to be constructed, he cried crocodile tears about the loss of the river to the dam in advertisements to get more people to float with his company, and created the myth of the guy who loved the river and was so saddened by its loss. But as that letter showed, he was really seeing the dam as another way to make some money, and was perfectly willing to sacrifice the White and James to do so. Can't blame him for that; it was inevitable that the dam would go in. But from the letter he helped make sure it went in.

Looking forward to reading the book. I've done a lot of research over the years about the history of float fishing. I watched the PBS interview with the authors, and they didn't say anything in it that I didn't already know. Table Rock and Bull Shoals put an end to the classic Ozark float trips, from Galena to Taneycomo and from Taneycomo to Cotter. I've seen old photos of the White River that was buried by those dams, and it never fails to sadden me that I was born too late to experience the White when it was the quintessential Ozark smallmouth river. Geez, it was beautiful. I'm not sure the fishing was all that great, though. Some of the stringers of fish being proudly held up in those old photos were not as impressive as the fish that any good Ozark river angler could amass today. Too many people subsistence fishing, too many things messing up the rivers, like the big log and tie rafts, burning the hillsides every spring, etc. In many of those old photos the trees in the background were sparse and scraggly, because all the good timber had been logged off and the second growth was just beginning to grow. One of my favorite books for reading about the way things were back then is actually just a book about bass fishing in general..."Freshwater Bass", by Ray Bergman, who was the long time fishing editor for Outdoor Life magazine back in the 40s and 50s. The White River was one of his favorite places to fish, even though he lived in New York, and parts of several chapters describe trips on the White. But one whole chapter was dedicated to Ozark float fishing. It started out with he and his wife coming to Branson, and finding the White blown out from heavy rains. Jim Owen, who he always used for his floats, called around all over the area to try to find fishable water (probably an adventure itself considering the phone service in those days), and finally found that the Buffalo River was low and clear. None of Jim's guides had ever floated the Buffalo, but they loaded up the boats and headed south. Bergman didn't say the stretch they floated, but it included the section below Woolum. Because, he describes coming upon a stretch of several miles where the river was nearly dry, and the stretch from just below Woolum to Margaret White Spring does dry up in dry summers; it's a losing reach. So they got to that stretch, which he described as not having enough water to "float an axe chip", and there they were with fully loaded 20 foot wooden johnboats. But they luckily found a farmer there that had a team of mules, and the mules dragged those boats down that four mile reach! He described the river as being extremely clear, and the fish very spooky. He finally started catching them on his fly rod with extremely light leader (not monofilament in those days), until he hooked and broke off a four pounder. He also described the river as the most beautiful he'd ever seen--one of many people to say that.

Love all the weird saltwater fish, even though I have no interest whatsoever in saltwater fish! Let's see...I fished two new stretches of river in the Ozarks this past year. Both on four day trips. I'd fished parts of both stretches in the distant past, but so long ago they were almost new water, and other parts WERE new water. Don't remember catching any new lifer species. Probably fewer days fishing in 2024 than in 2023. Probably about an average year of catching. Started off the new year right today...fished with a buddy and we ran some skinny water to get to a good winter hole that's nearly two miles long. Only found smallmouth in two spots on it and only caught two, though I hooked a couple more. But largemouth were scattered along the banks and we caught around 10, all over 16 inches, but the biggest was about 18 inches. Oddly, no spotted bass even though this stretch is usually loaded with them.