Al Agnew

Well, my place in Missouri has now officially gotten more snow than my place in Montana. We've had about five or six snowfalls out here, none of them much more than an inch. I got about 8 inches at the place in MO. We finally got a couple nights of below zero temperatures last week (barely), but this week the highs are going to be in the 40s, maybe close to 50 next Saturday. I think I'm going to fish one of the spring creeks one day this week. The river has ice flowing down it by the house, and shelf ice coming off the banks. We drove up the valley today and there is an ice dam forming just below Mallard's Rest. This happens a lot in the winter; one winter the dam backed water up over the parking lot there. Our part of the river never has an ice dam because the spring creeks come in just above Livingston, plus some small warm water discharges in Livingston and a small warm spring above town all keep the river from being completely frozen over. Our pair of eagles are starting to inspect their nest; they will begin adding some sticks to it in a week or two. Our section of river staying open attracts eagles, herons, the occasional swan, and way too many geese which crap all over the yard.

Floated the Yellowstone once in a blizzard. Well, we hadn't planned on it being a blizzard. It started out to be a pretty good fishing day. Then the wind picked up, and the Yellowstone in that area flows NNE, which is exactly which direction the wind was blowing from. Started snowing. Wind by that time was blowing about 30 mph, steadily. River was low. The only way you could make headway against the wind was to put your back to it and row hard. There were three of us, but one had no idea how to row. So the two of us would take turns, 15 minutes of rowing then switch. When we'd switch, the rower would have snow caked on his back at least an inch thick. Had to be one of the miserable days of "fishing" I've ever had.

Yup. That's why I said the only reason to use lighter line is if you're using very light flies or jigs whose movement would be affected by heavier line.

I'll say what I always say...if you think trout can see 4 pound line and can't see 2 pound line, you're delusional. YOU can see both. Why would the trout shy away from one more than the other? Are they measuring it? In my opinion, the only reason to use very light line is if you're using very small, light jigs or flies whose movement would be affected by the slightly heavier line. In Montana, I fish the famous spring creeks near Livingston. Super clear, small water. It's all catch and release, with a dozen or more anglers on a half mile of stream just about every day, so the fish see a lot of flies and lines and really good or inept anglers. When I go I catch as many fish as most, and I NEVER go lighter than 6X fluoro, with 5X more often. I also cross things up and use streamers when everybody else is using tiny (size 20-22 or even smaller) nymphs, with 4X, and catch some of the bigger fish they often miss. Yes, there are times when the trout are being selective and actually eating tiny bugs, but I can't remember the last time I went lighter than 6X and size 20 flies. I also question the use of "tippets" on spin gear. You've already lowered your margin for error with tying on some 1.5 or 2 pound tippet on the end of your heavier line. Now you're also lowering it even more by whatever knot you tie, which is never going to be better than 85% of so of the strength of your lighter line. But heck, if you feel better using the lightest line possible, have at it. Meanwhile, I'm using 8-12 pound copoly line for smallmouth on the clearest streams of the Ozarks.

We have friends that are Australian...they immigrated to the U.S. a decade or so ago. We once went on a trip to the Arctic with them. They, of course, say "aluminium". We were in an area with a bunch of polar bears, so Mary and I started calling them "poliar bears". They asked why we pronounced it that way. We said the same reason you pronounce "aluminium". So they started pronouncing picturesque "picture-es-kyu". We thought that was an Australian pronunciation, until they told us they were just imitating us. It got to where between the four of us we were pronouncing everything weirdly.

No, they do pull from the USGS, as do all the apps. But they are citing the MEAN flow, not the median, for some stupid reason that shows they don't understand things very well. It's a huge flaw in River App. Maybe I can explain... Both mean and median take the flows measured on the given date for every year of record for that gauge. The mean is obtained by adding up all those flows and then dividing them by the number of years...it's a straight average of all flows. The median, on the other hand, is the figure obtained by looking at flows for all years and seeing what the figure is where half the flows were lower and half higher. The problem with the mean flow is that it is always skewed upwards by any big flood that happened to happen on that date. Say the river normally flows 100 cfs on that date. Most of the years it will be around 100 cfs, probably. In years of low water it might be 50 cfs. But a single big flood might be 10,000 cfs. So say you have, to simplify, ten years of record, and they look like this: 50, 70, 90, 90, 100, 110, 120, 150, 500, and 10,000. Add 'em up..11,280. divide by 10...1128 cfs. That's the mean. But obviously the river doesn't normally flow 1100 cfs. But five of the flows are 110 cfs and above, five are 100 and below. The median is therefore between 100 and 110 cfs, so 105 cfs would be the median, and THAT'S a good approximation of what the river would normally be flowing. In fact, just recently the USGS has added to the description of the box you click on each individual page to show the median on the graph; it now says, "Median day of year statistics--a indication of normal levels" (the grammatical error of "a" instead of "an" is curious, kinda like their insistence of using the spelling "gage" instead of "gauge", but oh well). This is one of the reasons I don't use the apps, but always use the actual gauges. They have more useful info, they are free, and they are not difficult to use once you figure them out. Though I'm still ticked at them for getting rid of the statewide streamflow tables, which was a single page source for most of the information I need, without having to go to the individual gauge pages. They showed both present flow and the median flow for every gauge in the state, and most of the time that's all I need to know; it gives me how close the river is to normal. Now, if you click on the individual gauge on their map on the opening page for Missouri (assuming you know the rivers on the map well enough to know which gauge you want), it does show the present flow without going to the individual page, but not the median. I actually complained about it to them, with no response. The present flow and the median are BOTH essential to using the gauges as a floater or angler.

It's no doubt low, but not sure where you got that figure. The median flow for the day is 472 cfs today. Median is the best approximation of normal. The Mississippi at St. Louis isn't unusually low. It's flowing at 102,000 cfs, median is 93,550 cfs. The lowest it's ever been measured on this date is 25,700!

It's so bittersweet seeing these old videos and photos of the White River. One of my greatest regrets in life is that I was born too late to see the White as it was back then. Some things of note: It's interesting how big, wide, and slow some of those pools were. Typically, the White flowed just slightly more water than the James where they came together. The James probably flowed around 500 cfs on average in, let's say, late June, and the Kings flowed another 300 or so, so the White where these guys were floating it would be flowing around 1300-1500 cfs over much of the float to Cotter. That's about the same volume as Current River around Van Buren. But the White was a slower, wider river. I have some old topo maps showing the contours that are now under Bull Shoals, and they show the river dropped about 2 feet per mile. That's considerably slower than the Current. It appears the riffles were still fast, but the pools were long. Note that none of the smallmouth were very big. The biggest one on the stringer they held up was maybe 15 inches, and the others were no more than 12 inches. I really don't think the fishing was any better, if as good, back then as it is now. Of course, part of that is that the knowledge and equipment was not nearly as good. But you have to realize that 1940 was only 15 years or so after the big logging boom ended. Land around the river was eroding, and fish and game laws weren't very enlightened back then. And everybody ate the fish they caught. It showed Ray Bergman, fishing editor for Outdoor Life, as one of the celebrities that floated with them. He wrote a book that is one of my cherished possessions, called "Freshwater Bass". In it, he devotes one whole chapter and parts of several others to fishing for Ozark smallmouth; the White was one of his favorite places to fish. He fished with both a fly rod and casting tackle, and talks about how sometimes when he was there the river was up and murky, and they caught lots of fish on casting tackle, but when it was low and clear, he preferred the fly rod. My favorite chapter was the one he devoted to floating the Buffalo River. He had arrived at the Owen Boat Line to find the White was high and muddy. So Jim Owen started calling people (no easy task in the late 1940s-early 1950s!) all around trying to find cleare water. And finally got a report that the Buffalo was low and clear. So they loaded up those big boats on those trucks and headed for the Buffalo. He doesn't say where they put in, but based upon the descriptions, it was either Woolum or Carver. The guides had apparently never floated it before. The river was indeed low and very clear, and they couldn't catch much on their usual casting tackle, but Bergman kept seeing lots of smallmouth. So he broke out the fly rod, but forgot to change his leader. Hooked what he said was at least a 4 pounder, and it immediately broke off because he was using way too light a "gut" leader. He wrote that the river was very low, and the guides had to drag the boats a lot. And then they came to what was certainly the losing reach below Woolum, where most and sometimes all the river sinks underground for three or four miles. He described it as not having enough water to float an ax chip! The guides knew they couldn't drag the boats, so they went up and found a farmer plowing with a team of mules, and he used the mules to drag those loaded boats the three miles or so as the guides and clients walked behind! But like many others, Bergman said the Buffalo was the most beautiful river he'd ever seen...and he wasn't even in the most scenic parts!

Lower Black is where most of my winter walleye fishing was done, back before I stopped doing it in favor of winter smallmouth fishing. Quite a few people fish lower Black for them in the winter. Unfortunately, one of the best winter holes is the old gravel dredged hole at the Highway 67 bridge, and it has a nice boat ramp so it's exceedingly easy to fish. I've spent a lot of time there from November through mid-February in the past. My biggest Black River walleye was 31 inches and 12.5 pounds, but I saw several caught that were in the 15-17.5 pound range 40 or more years ago. The problem is that too many people keep every legal walleye they catch. The big girls get cropped off before they can reach top end size. MDC actually live trapped walleye just downstream from Clearwater Dam during spawning season (and by the way, walleye spawning on Black and Current River starts early; they will have left their wintering holes and moved to the vicinity of spawning riffles by Feb. 20th most years), in order to get the eggs and milt to hatch the walleye they stocked in the St. Francis. Stocking began in the late 1990s, and has continued sporadically since. There were a lot of mistakes made in stocking walleye in the Ozarks before genetic studies in the 1990s confirmed that the native river strains were vastly different from the lake strain walleye that were being used for stocking. All the big Ozark reservoirs had walleye spawning runs up into the streams feeding them when they were first built. These native river strain walleye were programmed to spawn in river riffles. They were never really abundant, but they grew huge--Arkansas's state record was a 21.5 pounder that came from Greers Ferry and was caught on one of the forks of the Little Red above the lake during its spawning run. Missouri's state record has been a 21.1 pounder from Bull Shoals just below Taneycomo Dam in 1988, another river strain fish. But since the river strain fish were never very common in the reservoirs, lake strain walleye from Michigan and Wisconsin were stocked in most of the lakes. They spawned in the lake, and outcompeted the river strain fish, so that now you seldom see a double digit walleye in these lakes and the spawning runs up into the streams above are pretty thin. That's why it was so important to get pure river strain fish from lower Black River. As far as I know, walleye are absent from Clearwater Lake; apparently when the lake began to fill the walleye were all downstream. So now you have pure river strain fish in only the undammed rivers, or rivers downstream from dams. You can still catch river strain fish from the Spring River, Eleven Point, Current, Black, and Castor rivers, as well as the restocked fish in the St. Francis. Note that there were river strain walleye in the Osage, Gasconade, and Meramec and their larger tributaries. But these were not the same genetically, and don't grow as big. One of my buddies caught the largest one I've ever seen come out of the Meramec a few years ago. As I remember, it was around 11 pounds. I could talk about these fish for a long time, they are so interesting. There used to be good walleye fishing below the most downstream mill dam on Big River, but growing up and extensively fishing Big River upstream from Morse Mill, I never saw a walleye. Then the mill dams all fell into disrepair and became easily passable (except for one, and it has a fish passage. About 20 years ago I caught several out of a school of walleye in upper Big River just downstream from Bonne Terre, but I've never caught another one up there. I've never heard of one being caught on the Meramec above the mouth of the Huzzah, but I suspect they do migrate that far upstream at times. The Bourbeuse, on the other hand, used to have walleye up to Noser Mill. Walleye also come out of the Mississippi in the small creeks that run into the river between St. Louis and Cape to spawn. I've caught juveniles in Establishment Creek up around Bloomsdale, and spent quite a bit of time trying to catch them on Saline Creek, with limited success but there were some in there around spawning season. But these were not the same river strain...probably closer to Meramec walleye in genetics. I doubt if there is enough of a run into any of these creeks to make it worth trying to target them anymore.

Dang, wish I would have known you might catch a muskie. I'm writing and illustrating a book on how to draw, sculpt, and paint fish, for taxidermists, artists, and sculptors, and I need some good photos of muskie viewed from directly above and below (nobody takes such pictures). I would have had you do so.

Glad to see the walleye...the St. Francis was once one of the best trophy walleye streams in the Ozarks, but they gradually disappeared after Wappapello was constructed. It seemed that, other than poachers gigging and snagging them on the spawning riffles, that they may have migrated down into the lake and through the dam during the winter in numbers enough that there weren't enough of them left. There are also other theories on exactly what happened to them. At any rate, MDC restocked the river with walleye that came from Black River, presumably the closest genetically to the old St. Francis walleye, two or three decades ago. But there hasn't been much talk of them in the river since...I get a report now and then that somebody caught one or two, but it certainly isn't well known.

I know what you're saying. I went for many years fishing just as hard as I possibly could. Thousands of casts a day, never missing a spot as I drifted down the river, trying all kinds of different things if I wasn't catching enough, stopping and pounding the best looking water. Seldom stopped for lunch, or to swim, or even just to get out and stretch my legs. Halfway through the day, my butt would be agonizingly sore, and I'd have this stabbing pain in the middle of my back between my shoulder blades. When I would get out of the canoe for something, I'd have to walk like a bent over old man for a dozen steps before I could even straighten up. Then one day, I started out the day telling myself, "You don't have to catch every fish in the river." I started stopping and walking gravel bars, paddling gently and easily through the dead water instead of fishing it, stopped working myself to death to slow the canoe in fast water long enough to make a couple casts. I stopped experimenting all the time if the fish weren't cooperating; I was either going to catch them on what I wanted to fish, or not catch them. I still probably fish harder than most, but I don't fish nearly as hard as I used to. No back pain, and I take care of the butt pain by getting out and walking every hour or so.

Winter fishing almost by necessity is less variable than warm weather fishing. In the summer, I can and do fish by wading, floating, or jetboat on small creeks, floatable but not jetboatable streams, and the jetboatable rivers. I can and do catch fish on topwaters, all kinds of fast-moving lures, or just about any other kind of lure I want to fish. I can experiment with lures I make. I can fish for bass on streams close to home, or make road trips to streams in a different part of the Ozarks or a different part of the country. I can fish for trout in all those different ways and places as well. And that's not even touching on all the other fishing I COULD do for all the other species, but don't because I'm not as interested in it. In the winter, I am limited in speed, techniques, lures, and spots. 90% of the bass will be in less than 5% of the water, and they will be susceptible to being caught in a relatively few ways with relatively few lures. Trips to other places are less desirable because you are driving for hours for just a few hours of fishing per day, and you have to spend much of the time on the water looking for fish instead of fishing to them. So yeah, it takes a different mindset.

Good point. Get yourself an app for your phone called Sim Daltonism. It's free, and supposedly will show you what things look like with various forms of color blindness. Bass supposedly see in dichromatic vision; they have well developed cones in their eyes for seeing red and green, but not blue. (We humans have trichromatic vision; we have cones for red, green, and blue. Some species have a greater range of vision than we do; they can see into the ultraviolet.) The app will show you what various colors look like to a bass, but only an approximation that should hold true in clear, shallow water. Light works very differently underwater than it does in the air, with various colors "disappearing" (actually turning greenish gray) at various depths as their wavelengths are absorbed by the water. A lot of what we THINK bass see in colors is totally untrue, and makes little sense in reality. However, because bass DO have red cones, they do see red, pink, and orange in something close to the same way we see them...as long as the water is clear and not too deep. But in the typically clear water of Ozark streams, those colors rather quickly turn to grayish green as you go deeper as the red and orange wavelengths are absorbed by the water. But they should still look pretty close to how we see them at the typical depths that you might drift an egg pattern.

Hmm...Aphonopelma hentzi has always had the accepted common name of Texas brown tarantula. I've never before seen it called Arkansas chocolate. Usually there is just one universally accepted common name, decided upon by the taxonomists. But the accepted common name does occasionally change; for instance, black rat snakes now have the accepted common name western rat snake. I've seen a few over the years in Ste. Genevieve County. Can't remember seeing one anywhere else. One of them I saw was crossing the highway adjacent to our Ste. Genevieve County house. You know it's a big spider when you see it while driving! I know they are basically harmless, but I can see where it would scare the heck out of people who don't know much about spiders. Now THIS critter scares the crap out of me; I've seen a couple in the Ozarks, and yes, they are that big...giant red-headed centipede!

That's kinda typical fishing for the lower portions of so many of the Ozark rivers that slow down before they enter the flatlands. Once you reach the stretches where spotted bass predominate, it really is very seldom good fishing. I've had the same thing happen on the lower Strawberry, and on Castor River, Whitewater River, and every creek flowing into the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cape Girardeau...and now that I'm thinking of it, same thing many years ago on the Little Black, lower Black below Hendrickson, Crooked Creek in Bollinger County MO, Tavern Creek, Maries River. On some of these streams, the change is abrupt; you go from fast water and mostly smallmouth to slow water, nothing but spotted bass, and not a lot of spotted bass. I've done floats where I biked from the take-out back to the put-in to pick up my vehicle. One of the best ones is Big River at Washington State Park. It's about 3 miles from the Park boat ramp on Highway 21 to the park picnic ground, and about a 1.5 miles by road. The bad part is that it's about a half mile of steep uphill from the take-out to the top of the ridge, steep enough that I had to walk the bike up it. But once you reach the top of the ridge, it's all downhill from there, and you better have good brakes on your bike!

Mineral Fork produces some big fish, but some of those are big ones that winter on Big River and come up the Mineral Fork to spawn. I've fished Big River all my life, and have never seen, much less caught, a smallmouth there that I thought would break 6 pounds. I once had a memorable day on Mineral Fork where I and my brother put 13 smallmouth in the canoe that were over 17 inches...the biggest one was 19.5. (That was quite a few years ago, and I wouldn't expect to be able to do that today even though the access problem means some parts of it aren't pounded all that much.) So no, I don't think you'd ever catch a 7 pound plus smallmouth on the Mineral Fork.

90% of the people who catch good smallmouth vastly overestimate their weight, and often their length as well. That guy that dismissed 20 inchers probably has never caught a 20 incher, but believes the 18 inchers he's caught were 22 inches and 7 pounds. In reality, it takes a really chunky 20 incher to make 4 pounds. Most 18 inchers won't quite reach 3 pounds. The average person catches a 16 incher and thinks for sure that it's a 3-pounder, when it's probably not over 2 pounds. It's always been this way. Back 50 years ago, I would read the big hunting and fishing magazines, and there would be ads for guide services on the White River. Some of these guides also offered trips for smallmouth on Crooked Creek. They advertised that Crooked Creek was full of 3-5 pound smallmouth, with some reaching 6 pounds. I thought naively that Crooked Creek must be the mecca of big Ozark smallmouth. Later, I figured out that Crooked Creek is no more capable of producing 5 pound smallmouth than any other Ozark stream, and those 3-5 pounders were actually 16-18 inchers, and the 6 pounders might be 20 inchers. You always wonder, though, whether somebody else is catching bigger fish or more big fish than you are. I've caught a heck of a lot of big Ozark stream smallmouth, but there have been guys on here at times that swore they caught a lot more big fish than I ever have; that they catch these 4-5 pound smallmouth every time they go. Who knows, maybe it's true. I used to keep careful records, and when I did, I found that I caught something like one 18 incher per 10-12 hours of angling, and averaged maybe one legitimate 20 incher per 100 hours of fishing. I think that these days, my average on 18 plus inchers might be a little bit better, but the 20s still come darned rarely...seems like I catch a dozen 19 inchers for every 20. Anything that reaches 21 inches is pretty much the fish of a lifetime for most river smallmouth anglers, and a 22 incher is an incredible fish for anybody I know. I've been fortunate enough to catch a 22 incher and a rather slender 22.5, both of which weighed 5 pounds even on a scale that probably wasn't completely accurate. In recent years I've caught a couple that were 21.5 inches or slightly longer, but didn't reach 22 inches. But my heaviest smallmouth ever, no matter where caught, was a 21.5 incher caught in Minnesota where they are a lot thicker and heavier for their length; I didn't weigh it but I'm certain it weighed more than any smallmouth I've ever caught in the Ozarks. However, I consider the biggest smallmouth I've caught in the Ozarks were "better" catches because they come so few and far between. The thing I strive to do in smallmouth fishing is to catch GOOD fish consistently, using the lures and techniques I like to use. If you catch plenty of good fish, a big one will come along now and then. One of my fishing buddies classifies fish like this: there are "nice'uns", those fish that are better than average, like 15 inch smallmouth. "Good'uns", like 17 inchers. "Big'uns", like those 18-19 inchers. And "Holy crap, what a fish'uns", the ones over 20.

You are correct. That's the gauge for Greer Spring, and is pretty much useless in itself for gauging the river either above or below Greer. In times of low water like now, about the only thing you can possibly glean from it is to figure that the river above the spring is probably flowing less than 100 cfs, so if you take the flow of the spring (right now 411 cfs) and add 50-75 cfs to it, you'll get the flow of the river directly downstream from Hwy. 19.

The low water bridge at the Leadwood Access is still, thankfully, pretty much the cut-off point for spotted bass. I've only caught a couple upstream from it, while downstream they make up 30-40% of the bass population. I'd never caught any above it until three or four years ago.

If you examine the gauges a little more closely, you'll notice that the river has been significantly higher than the median for the whole summer. The gauge at Bardley is at 832 cfs right now after having slowly dropped from 850 to 810 cfs throughout the week. The median, which is a good approximation of normal for this time of year, is around 400 cfs. Why is that, you ask? Check out the gauge for Greer Spring. It's been hanging around 410-420 cfs, while the median is around 270 cfs! Apparently the groundwater that supplies Greer and other springs within the Eleven Point watershed is very well recharged from all the rain earlier, and the springs are still pumping out a lot more water than they normally would be at the end of summer. So yeah, the river is higher than it normally is (though unless it's more than three times the median, I don't worry much about the fishing; it will still be clearish and fishable). That does not mean it will be floatable above Greer. I floated Cane Bluff to Greer a few weeks ago. The Bardley gauge then was showing around 970 cfs, and the river up there was barely floatable, maybe flowing about 90-120 cfs if I had to guess (you need a minimum of 100 cfs for relatively easy floating). By now, barring a rise from rain, it will be well below 75 cfs.

Hey, I'm old. The first time I used it was, as near as I can remember, about 43 years ago, on my wife (who wasn't yet my wife at the time). And I've used it about as much on other people as on myself. So 10 or 12 times on myself in more than 40 years doesn't seem that excessive to me.

It will still come out easily unless, like the one in me, it's in the very tip where you can't push against the eye in the proper direction. And I'll bet the emergency room doctor didn't use the string trick. It's amazing to me the number of doctors that don't know it. I once argued up and down with the doctor brother of my fly fishing buddy about it. He was sure it would never work, even after I told him I'd used it more than a dozen times with no problems. (Now, I think I'm up to 22 times that I've used it.)

Not really. The thin dark lines of connected spots on the lower sides are never seen in pure smallmouth, but are found in spotted bass, Guadalupe bass, and all the new species that were once considered redeye bass. The dark blotches actually look more like shoal bass.

I make my own. Body is about 3.5 inches.