Al Agnew

Well, dang it...I have been cripping around for a month and found out today that I have a partial Achilles tendon tear, and have to be in a boot for 4 to 8 weeks. Can't get it wet, so the only fishing I'll be able to do will be from the boat from nice boat ramps. I was wanting to try some other sections of stream in the canoe while the fishing is good. It's probably going to get worse as the rivers get low and clear, but next week's forecasted rain might make it better if it doesn't completely blow out the rivers.

Yup, I really like it. A smoother ride, and unlike my old boat, it will plane out at half throttle. The old one wouldn't plane until about 85% throttle. Really quick to get on plane, too. Goes as fast as I want to go...the faster you can go, the faster you can get into trouble!

1756 Blazer SS, 60/40 Mercury motor.

Went out again today, back on the first river. It's getting lower and clearer, and I wasn't sure the pattern would be holding. It was. I caught three that were all exactly 19 1/4 inches, and a 19 incher. Another big fish day, only caught 5 smaller ones, including a 16 incher.

Here's the big largemouth.

Here's the only one I've downloaded off my phone so far.

So in my last post I talked about this pattern I've figured out this time of year, and how I was catching some really nice fish the last few days. Today, I went on a different river, too small for the new jet boat. I wasn't sure whether the pattern would work, because this river is far smaller, and somewhat clearer. The type of spot these fish are hanging in might be too small and shallow, I thought. I tried it a couple places starting out, and got nothing. So I just drifted down the river casting to everything that looked good, trying lots of lures. You know the fishing is poor when I keep trying lures! I was skipping a lot of the spots that the pattern would fit, because they were just too small and shallow. And halfway through the float, I hadn't caught a single smallmouth, and only 5 small spotted bass and a 14 inch largemouth. And then I came to a spot that just looked like it should be a good one for the pattern. Using a crankbait, sure enough I hooked a big one. It turned out to be about 19.5 inches. I also caught two more smaller fish there. So, since I'd not been catching much of anything in the pools and around logs and rocks and all the other places that I was fishing, I decided to just paddle through everything else, enjoying the early spring wildflowers and a gorgeous day, and just fish when I came to one of those spots. Not every spot had fish. But enough did that I expected to catch fish in all of them. The next fish was a big surprise, though...a 21 inch largemouth! This is the kind of spot that NOBODY would expect a big largemouth to be. And then, the REAL highlight of the day... It's been 45 years since I caught my personal best, by length anyway, Ozark river smallmouth, a 22.5 inch, summertime, slender fish that weighed 5 pounds even on a set of scales that was within an ounce or two of being accurate. I was really wondering if I would ever beat it...but today I think I did. The massive fish hit exactly where I expected it to be, and cleared the water in a wild leap that made my jaw drop. It took a while to get it in, and when I netted it I thought, "this might be the biggest Ozark river smallmouth I've ever caught." Problem was, I had left my set of scales in the new boat. I had nothing to either weigh or measure the fish with perfect accuracy. The only thing I could do was lay it on my paddle blade...the blade is about 20 inches from where it starts to flare out of the shaft to the tip. I carefully held the fish's mouth closed, lined it up even with the tip of the blade, and squeezed the tail lobes together. The tail went at least two inches past the beginning of the flare! And it was FAR thicker and fatter than that old personal best. It might not have made 22.5 like the old fish, but I'm absolutely certain it was a lot heavier than 5 pounds. I got a couple pictures and released it.

After having my original jet boat for 20 years, and wanting to have a jet boat in Montana so that I can chase some smallmouth on the lower Yellowstone, I bought a new jet boat. Mary actually kinda talked me into it--I love that woman! The new one is a foot longer and 20 more horsepower, and I've had it out a few times and love it. After 20 years, the trailer on the old boat really needed work. The 2 x 4 wood, carpet covered bunks had basically rotted away until in places there wasn't much wood left and the boat was sitting on a layer of empty carpet. I bought new wood and carpet and prepared the bunks for attachment, but then the fishing got good, and I was more interested in fishing than in working on a boat trailer that I didn't intend to use until I got it out to Montana. It took me a lot of years, but I have finally figured out three reliable patterns on river smallmouth this time of year, just before the water temps warm to the point that they start thinking seriously about spawning. On the Meramec where I live, one pattern is almost magic most of the time in March; the fish are going to be in a certain type of location, and they will be eating. I went out last week twice in the new boat, once for just a couple hours with Mary, who is recuperating from a hip replacement and doing very well, the other time a nearly full day trip by myself. On the trip with Mary, I went downstream from the nearby ramp. I first tried fishing along a rocky bank in gentle current just to see if some fish were hanging in that type of spot. I only caught a spotted bass. So I headed down a bit further to the first spot with the right setup for my March pattern. Yup, fish were there. The first one I caught was a 17.5 incher, followed by a couple smaller ones, on a crankbait. Moved to the next pattern spot, caught several smaller ones and hooked a really big fish that came unstuck. Tried one more spot, caught two more smallish smallmouth. By then the sun was getting low, and Mary was ready to head for home. On Friday I went to a different area, planning on spending the day running from one of those pattern spots to the next. I made sure I had a full tank of gas, because I expected to cover more than 10 miles of river. The first stop was not a perfect setup, and I caught nothing. Tried the nearby rock bank, nothing. Tried my alternate type of pattern spot just below, nothing. Skipped down to the next primary pattern spot, a perfect setup, and the fish were there. I quickly caught a half dozen smallies, including two that I estimated at 18 inches each. In my old boat I have a ruler glued to the forward edge of the front deck, so that I can use my trolling motor frame to put a fish's nose on like a bump board, but I haven't gotten around to adding the ruler to the new boat, and had nothing with which to measure my fish. I fished the long run below the pattern spot, again just checking to see if the fish were scattering. I caught only one fish, but it was a 17 incher (I think). A guy in a jet boat ran past me, and I heard him stop in the next pool downstream. I knew there were none of my pattern spots in that pool. I ran past him, and yup, he was fishing in a spot that would be great in January but was unlikely to hold fish now. I felt a little smug, knowing something he didn't. After that, I couldn't find any more bigger fish, but every spot I came to produced a smallmouth or two. I had gotten on the water around 10 AM, and it was now after 3 PM, so I decided to start working my way back up; there were small places, worth only a few casts, best approached from downstream, that I wanted to fish. Again, no big ones but most held a fish or two. I had mostly been using the crankbait, but started trying a swim bait in some of these spots after the crankbait failed to produce, and it caught some fish. So when I got back to where I'd caught those two 18 inchers not long after starting out, I decided to see if the swim bait would pick up a fish or two that had earlier turned down the crankbait. I'm glad I did that. I caught the biggest smallmouth I've caught in a couple years. Although I didn't have a way of measuring it, I did have a scale. 4.51 pounds--I think it was about 21 inches. Next cast, a 3.5 pounder that I guessed at 19 inches. A couple smaller ones. But it was a Friday afternoon with gorgeous weather, and next thing I knew there were jet boats going by one after another, and one with a whole fam damily pulled right in front of where I was fishing, right through the middle of my pattern spot, to park on the adjacent gravel bar. So I cranked the motor and headed for home. Got up early Saturday morning to fish with a couple buddies for a few hours before the motorheads got on the river. All three of us knew the pattern. So we immediately headed for the first spot. Nothing. But the second spot was full of fish. It was tough to fish due to the setup, but we all caught fish; nothing big, but up to 16 inches. It was a bit frustrating to me because I wanted to fish the swim bait, but that morning I'd picked up the wrong rod, and didn't have a rod with me with enough backbone to set the hooks well with the big swim bait I was using. I briefly hooked and lost a half dozen fish in that spot. Next spot Aaron caught a gorgeous 20 incher, and Clay caught a couple. I was still struggling. We fished a few more spots, and caught a few more smaller fish. We fished one spot that was slightly different, but that we knew should hold fish, and caught nothing. Coming back down a little later, we decided to try it again; we just knew there had to be fish there. Sure enough we caught several smaller fish. I'd given up on the swim bait and was fishing the crankbait when I hooked a big one, which turned out to be 19 inches. And then the boat traffic got thick and we gave it up. Yesterday was a chore day. And today was supposed to be so much cooler. In a way I was glad; the hot weather had warmed water temps up into the low 60s, which was going to wreck my pattern. But I hoped that the cool day would slow the transition down. Plus, it gave me a chance to work on the trailer of my old boat. I dropped off the boat in the water at my neighbor's place, and spent a few hours getting the empty trailer back in shape. Then I grabbed my tackle; heck, the old boat was already sitting there in the river, so why not fish a couple hours before loading it back on the trailer, just to see if the pattern was still holding. Water temp was still 59 degrees, which should be perfect. Ever have one of those days when things just went from annoying to worse? Unloading the boat was the start...in pulling it over to where I wanted to park it, I stepped into a sandy mud area that was about bottomless, and sunk halfway to my knees. Which was a bit painful as well, since I'm currently suffering from Achilles tendonitis. Working on the trailer was a series of annoyances when things that should have been easy turned out to be more involved than I expected. And then, as soon as I climbed into the old boat and put down the trolling motor, I dropped it right on a rock and broke off one blade of the prop. Aargh!!! I went ahead and fished for a bit, even though running the trolling motor was making my teeth rattle. First spot, nothing. Second spot, one small fish. Third spot, nothing, fourth spot, nothing... The fifth and final spot was the charm. Caught a 15 incher first cast on the crankbait, and then a 19 incher (I still had the ruler on the old boat!) on the next cast. But that was it. Heck of a week or so of fishing, though. Tomorrow I'm hitting a different river in the canoe instead of the jet boat. We will see if my pattern holds true on it.

I see what you're saying. And yes, this may be an unintended consequence of all the splitting going on. Like I said, it complicates things. I know MDC biologists know about the change of status of Neoshos, but the biologists don't make the regulations, and the enforcement people HATE complicated regulations. At some point they are going to have to come to grips with this.

That's a good question. It would be a technicality...I could imagine some doofus catching and keeping a 10 inch Neosho bass, getting a ticket for undersized bass, and fighting it because the regulations don't say anything about Neosho bass. I suspect that fairly soon, the wording of the regs will change and say something like, "smallmouth bass, including Neosho bass". There probably hasn't been enough DNA testing done to know whether the smallmouth in other streams across the Ozarks have some Neosho genetics, or are also genetically different from smallmouth in other parts of the country. The Ozarks is somewhat isolated from the rest of the native range of smallmouth, so it's quite possible that the original Ozark smallmouth were ALL different genetically from, say, smallmouth in the Tennessee River basin. It's a bit like the situation with redeye bass, which have now been divided into a bunch of new species, most of which are native to only one river system. Of course, the Ozarks situation has been complicated by widespread stocking over the years up until the conservation departments decided stocking was useless. It's also quite possible that the Neosho bass are all hybrids, but still distinct enough from the rest of the smallmouth that they still deserve species status, for this same reason...they were once REALLY genetically different, but the difference has been diluted by stocking of other smallmouth, but the hybrids are still genetically different ENOUGH. Obviously, the whole thing is complicated!

The state still just says rock bass in the regulations, too, even though we now know there are three different Ambloplites species in the Ozarks. It's a matter of keeping the regs as simple as possible for all the anglers who don't have a clue about present species status. If the regs singled out Neosho bass, 90% of the yahoos would be saying, "Neosho bass? What the heck is that?"

Gates is not as bad a coach as many think, but he makes mistakes, and I sometimes question his whole coaching philosophy. And he's not as good a recruiter as many think. His portal additions are not great. He really missed in the portal this year; tried to get a good big man but couldn't, settled for Phillips just like he settled for Gray last year and Vanover the year before. Got Mack, and for whatever reason abandoned him. His only good portal addition was Stone. But tell me, would ANYBODY on this year's team except Mitchell be a starter for any other Power 4 team still in the tournament? Maybe Pierce. Certainly neither Robinson or Barrett the way they played the last month. Stone might be a good 6th man. Fact is, to drag this team of mostly mediocre talent into the tournament, especially after the fiascos in the non-con season, was a real coaching accomplishment. He has a great recruiting class next year, but they are going to be freshmen. Crowe projects as being an immediate impact player (he better be, because I'd bet they paid a lot of money to get him). The others, maybe not, at least immediately. And Gates's track record on developing recruits is spotty. To win next year, with the few guys they have returning, he's going to need to hit it big in the portal. Even if Robinson returns, who will they have? Robinson and Barrett for guards, Pierce, and Burns are the only guys that had any kind of role this year.

It is absolutely a smallmouth/spotted bass hybrid. No question about it. Neosho bass used to be known as Neosho smallmouth, and was considered a subspecies for many years. They are now considered a separate species. But they are not indigenous to the Sac River and tributaries, so it couldn't be one...plus, they don't look like that. I refuse to call the hybrids meanmouths, but this fish is a hybrid, and the hybrids are fertile, so they can back cross with either species, and produce a LOT of variation in appearance. The keys to identifying this one is the visible horizontal band on the midside (you can call it a lateral band, but it isn't the lateral line, which is a row of scales with sensory pores--they sense vibrations in the water), and the hint of the rows of small dark spots on the lower side that connect to form thin horizontal lines...neither of those characteristics are found on pure smallmouth.

It's not nearly that simple when it comes to fish species. Yes, they can interbreed. Same as spotted bass interbreed with smallmouth bass, or Florida bass interbreed with northern largemouth bass (and now the Florida bass is considered a separate species, by the way). However, the two strains or species do have different spawning habits and locations. The walleye stocked in the big lakes are lake spawners, spawning on wind-swept banks and seldom ascending the rivers above the lakes to spawn. The native walleye are river spawners, and apparently never spawn within the lakes. So they end up not interbreeding very much. The problem with the lake strain walleye in the big lakes is that they ended up outcompeting the river strain fish, and contrary to what that study mentioned showed, they simply don't grow as big. When Greers Ferry Lake was built, the first few years people were catching huge river run walleye in the forks of the Little Red above the lake. The state record was broken there. And people were saying the next world record could come from Greers Ferry. But those spawning runs in the forks above the lake petered out, and the huge walleye are no longer caught in Greers Ferry. Same thing happened at Stockton Lake. And the other big reason the river run fish disappeared is that the tendency of both adults and fingerlings to move long distances downstream meant that a lot of them ended up going through the dams...and then they couldn't return to the lakes and the rivers above the lakes. As for the study showing the stocked fish being heavier on average, I'd have to know a lot more about the study and the fish stocked. The abstract was a bit confusing, noting that the stocked fish had the A marker and the native fish had the C marker, but then later stating that nearly half the fish that were hatched naturally before stocking started had the A marker. And it made no mention of where the stocked fish came from originally. Given that the study is 20 years old and DNA analysis has come a very long way since then, I would question the information in the study. But that's not my observation above about growth rates and top end sizes, it's what the biologists told me. We are living in a time where the "splitters" among taxonomists are dominant, with DNA studies showing a whole lot of fish we once thought were the same species are different enough to warrant being considered a different species. The Neosho smallmouth, once considered a subspecies, is now a separate species. And it's looking likely that there will be more smallmouth split off, including the smallies of the Ouachita Mountains region in Arkansas and Oklahoma. The redeye/Coosa bass of the Southeastern Appalachians has been split into something like 9 different species the last I checked; there are now at least 15 different black bass species. And most of them can and do interbreed. The different redeye species are endemic to different watersheds and each one is found only in one or two watersheds. The invasion of both spotted bass and Alabama bass (which are almost indistinguishable from spotted bass by appearance) into these watersheds has caused a major decline in the whichever native redeye species is in that watershed, mostly by the invaders interbreeding with them.

Arkansas stocked non-native strain walleye for a lot longer than Missouri did, but now agree that it was a bad idea. What this movement information shows is that Arkansas and Missouri need to work together and be on the same page with regulations and management of these fish.

Many years ago, I spent a lot of time in the winter fishing for walleye on lower Black River. There were three large gravel dredged holes at that time where the few anglers who fished for walleye concentrated their efforts. The usual way everybody fished was with big live minnows from the bank or from an anchored boat. We didn't catch a lot of walleye but there were big ones caught; we never even bragged about a fish unless it was 10 pounds or better. As more anglers discovered walleye fishing on the rivers, and the big dredged pools began to fill in with sand and gravel, and also because I discovered winter fishing for smallmouth, I pretty much stopped fishing for those big walleye. But I always thought that the Black River strain of walleye had the potential to grow to world record sizes. My personal best was 31 inches and 12.5 pounds, but I saw walleye caught that were 15 pounds and better, including two that weighed 17.5 pounds. I kept in contact with some of the guys who fished for them, and by the 1990s I was hearing of far fewer really big ones being caught. And I really began to think that we would never see the really big walleye these streams could produce unless people began to value the big ones as more than just table fare. I advocated catch and release for the big ones, and tried to convince people that these fish, with their potential for great sizes, were a unique resource that deserved more protection. Although I no longer fished Black or Current, I occasionally caught walleye on the Meramec fishing for bass. There weren't many guys concentrating on walleye on the Meramec, but I know that it was exceedingly rare to catch one over 10 pounds on the Meramec. I suspected that the Meramec fish were a different strain, without that potential to grow really big. So I got a message a few weeks ago from the biologists who are in charge of Black and Current, wanting to know if I was interested in hearing what they'd been finding out about Black River system walleye. They knew I occasionally posted about Ozark walleye on Facebook and in angling forums. Of course, I said "SURE"! Guys, what they've been finding out about these fish is amazing. First and maybe most importantly...I was right. These fish ARE a different breed, and have the potential to grow to huge sizes. They grow fast and they live a fairly long time--if allowed to. In fact, DNA studies are now showing that these fish are so different from lake strain walleye and even river strain walleye everywhere else that they are probably going to be classified a different SPECIES, not a subspecies or strain. The biologists suspect that walleye endemic to the upper White River, now mostly buried under the big lakes, were originally this same strain/species. But wholesale stocking of lake strain walleye by both Arkansas and Missouri over the years in the big lakes have pretty much diluted the genetics of the native river fish to the point where they are no longer the same as the Black River fish...and they no longer have the potential to grow to near record sizes. By Black River strain, we are talking about fish endemic to the streams running into Black River, even far down into Arkansas. These include the Eleven Point, Current, and Black rivers in Missouri, and probably the Spring River in Arkansas. It may have also included the St. Francis River; at one time the state record in Missouri was a St. Francis River fish. But the walleye died out on the St. Francis (a bit more on that later). At present, and for the last 20 years, the biologists have been collecting eggs from Black River walleye and raising them to stock in the St. Francis. It now has a viable fishery, but supplemental stocking is necessary to maintain it, so they continue to capture Black River fish to get the eggs to raise. And for the last five years, since they've been capturing them anyway, they've been really studying these fish. And here is the most important thing they've found: only the females grow big, and anglers have been legally keeping mostly females. In some streams, including the Eleven Point, the length limit is 18 inches. And even where it's 15 inches, many anglers won't keep one until it's up there close to 18 inches. And the males of these Black River strain walleye seldom get bigger than 18 inches! The biggest they've captured was only 22 inches, and they've captured very few over 18. So that 20 inch fish you kept was almost certainly a female. The females are in effect being selectively cropped off, leaving the males. The males become sexually mature at age three, when they are 14-17 inches, and grow to at least 11 years, where some are STILL under 18 inches. So the biologists now know that the regulations in Missouri are not good for these fish, and changes may be coming in the future, though they are still a long way from figuring out what to propose. Whatever it is, it's likely to be special regulations only on the Black, Current, Eleven Point, and St. Francis...unless they find these same genetics elsewhere. They found that while the males are 14-17 inches at age three, the females at that age commonly are up to 21 inches, and they captured one that was 26 inches! And from there the females continue to grow. Some reach 30 inches by age seven, and most are 30 inches or better by age eight. In capturing males and females, they found that they caught more than five times as many males; the males are apparently naturally more abundant, AND are not being cropped off like the females. They also found that the bigger the female, the more eggs she has. Most in the 18-22 inch range produce about 50,000 eggs. The two biggest they've captured, both around 31 inches, had over 300,000 and over 400,000 eggs! Another reason to protect the bigger females. There is one other amazing thing they found out, and that's how much these fish travel. They do their capturing on Black River just below Clearwater Dam. As part of their studies, they tagged some fish with electronic tags, and set up sensors along the rivers that pick up the signal from these tags as the fish pass the sensor. They captured an 18-inch male, and tagged it, on March 10. They had a sensor in the pool where they captured it, right below a spawning riffle area. It hung around the pool, continually recorded on the sensor, until March 30. Then it disappeared, and they next picked up the signal in Corning, Arkansas, on April 12! There they lost it, because there were no other sensors installed farther down on Black River. But a sensor was installed on Current River in Arkansas that August, and on October 31 the it picked up that fish. On November 7 it passed Corning. On November 12 it passed the Highway 67 bridge on Black River upstream from Poplar Bluff. And on November 17, it reached the next pool below the pool where they had captured and tagged it. It hung in that pool and the pool where it had been captured until it spawned, and then did the same migration at almost exactly the same time frame. It did this four years in a row, and was finally caught and harvested on July 21 after the fourth spawn and migration...on Current River upstream from Doniphan. That's a total of 230 river miles that fish traveled, TWICE every year, from its spawning area to its summering area and back! And it isn't just the adults who travel. The fingerlings soon leave the spawning riffles and head downstream long distances as well. It's likely that this downstream migration is a big reason why the walleye died out in the St. Francis. Once Wappapello Lake was built, both fingerlings and adults almost certainly migrated all the way down the river to the lake, and down the lake and through the dam...never to return.

Good point. I guess it would be better to say that a river from source to mouth is comparable to dozens of lakes, all of them different. So it has dozens of times the number of different habitats that a single lake has, no matter how big that lake is.

There are more species in several Ozark rivers than in any of these lakes. For instance, the Meramec River has more than 100 native species. When you think about it, lakes are just one habitat, while rivers have a diversity of habitats, from the tiny clear creek-like conditions near the headwaters to big, slow, mud-bottomed, murky river habitat near the lower ends. So they have much more diversity of fish species.

I've been fairly fortunate to not run into too many "river dicks" over the years. Perhaps it's because I shy away from places and times that might be crowded. The one time that stands out still, after probably 20 years...I was fishing below Tan Vat. In a nice run below a riffle, smooth water, 3 feet deep, a whole pod of nice trout were rising to a sparse caddis hatch. I had caught the first two I casted to, and was looking forward to picking off a few more, including one a bit farther upstream that looked to be a fairly big brown. And then these two youngish guys, decked out in Orvis's finest from head to toe, came walking up the far bank, and splashed into the water right in front of me, wading on up right through the middle of where all those fish were rising, never even glancing at me. Maybe they were simply clueless and didn't see either me fishing or those rising fish. But it smacked more of, "I'm jealous of that guy for sitting there fishing for those risers, so let's screw up his fishing." It wasn't even easy for them to wade up that 3 foot deep fast water; they could have walked another 50 feet up the bank and crossed at the riffle.

Welp, where is ICE when you need them?

WestCentralFisher covered it pretty well. It's a good mile from the parking lot on Hwy. 8 to Maramec Spring, so it makes a lot more sense to go on into the park. I always carry my rod unrigged until I get to the river from the Park parking lot, so there are no misunderstandings about me fishing within the park. I fished it last week, and while I spent more time trying to catch smallmouth (and they weren't there or weren't active that day; I only caught a half dozen little ones), I did catch several trout including a really nice 18 inch brown on a jerkbait. And I brought a fly rod along too, and spent an hour or so fishing with it for trout and caught four. No, it's not as good as places like Current or Eleven Point, but you CAN have some pretty decent trout fishing there. Cardiac/Suicide is a good option. Just depends upon how much you want to walk (or climb). One is a long walk and a really long walk back up the hill. The other is a whole lot shorter but a whole lot more difficult!

The fish in your photo is a hybrid (what some people call a meanmouth, but I don't like that name).

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.