Al Agnew

It's one reason I prefer fishing rivers. The fish are right there in front of you, you don't have to figure out where they are. Makes me look competent at fishing!

Let's assume, for a moment, that a percentage of the Pittman-Robertson money is being wasted. These legislators want to repeal the act. They want to cut off ALL the money. Which means that they are cutting off the well-spent money with the wasted money. Without replacing it with anything at all. So why in the heck anybody who gives a crap about hunting, fishing, and conservation can be for this is simply beyond me. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I've advocated for using length rather than weight for a long time. It eliminates a LOT of the problems with weight, including making sure all scales used are perfectly calibrated and accurate. And in so many ways, it's a truer measure of the skill of the angler. With weight, you're depending upon the luck of such things as how healthy the fish is, what it just ate, etc. The 20 inch fish you just caught might weigh 4 pounds if you caught it during the spring or after it had just eaten a 10 inch redhorse, but that SAME fish might weigh 3.5 pounds at the end of August without having eaten anything for a few days. Same fish. Didn't take any more skill to catch it when it weighed 4 pounds than it did when it weighed 3.5. AND, if you measure and immediately release, you aren't constrained by limits. What if I can go out and catch 30 fish over 12 inches in a day, including a best five or six that were all over 17 inches, but some other guy beats me out having caught 6 fish all day, but one of them just happened to be 21 inches and and his other best four were all slightly over 17 inches? Who is the better angler, me who put 30 in the boat, or the guy who put 6 in the boat but lucked into one really big one and beat my best five by a quarter inch because of it? So why not allow every fish over 12 inches or 14 inches or whatever to count, no matter how many you caught, since you are quickly releasing them anyway?

This certainly confuses many people. Here is the deal: you must register outboards. You must also register the boat that the outboard is on. Trolling motors are exempted from being registered THEMSELVES. But putting a trolling motor on a boat means that the boat is now a motorized craft and must be registered. If you don't have a bill of sale, you can't title the boat. If the boat isn't titled, you can't register it and get the numbers for it. You CAN contact the Highway Patrol and have them inspect the boat and check the serial numbers to make sure it hasn't been reported as stolen, and then they can give you a waiver and you can get it titled and registered. However, I've never heard a good story about that happening. Doing it is apparently WAY down the list of priorities for the State Patrol. I used to register and title my canoes, because I occasionally used them in other states that require paddle craft to be registered (Minnesota, for instance). But when I decided to try a trolling motor on one of my solo canoes, it wasn't registered and I didn't have a title for it, so I thought about going the Highway Patrol route, but was told that it was a huge hassle. So I just took my chances. Never had a problem, but also rather quickly decided the trolling motor was more trouble than it was worth.

While that's true that very few, if any, other people will ever catch an Ozark river smallmouth that big, I don't think you have to catch one that big yourself before you can question the claim that somebody else did, unless the photos truly show it to be that big. Like I said, I believe Jeff. But it's an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims will always demand proof. Doesn't really matter, as nobody is claiming it as an actual record. It's just an amazing fish that was caught and quickly released.

I believe it was caught on a crankbait.

Had a lot of discussion about that photo and that fish on Facebook. Plenty of people don't believe it was 23 plus inches. Since Jeff was wanting to get it back in the water as quickly as possible, he measured and weighed it quickly and held it while a couple quick photos were snapped, and then released it. It is unfortunate that he didn't get a photo of it on a bump board or against a ruler, because it gives people a lot of opportunity to question how big it really was. As for the weight...if it was indeed 23 5/8 inches, it COULD have weighed that much. Jeff caught one on the Meramec a few years ago during a tournament that was weighed on accurate scales at 6 pounds plus (I don't remember the actual weight), and nobody measured it. My own personal opinion is that Jeff isn't lying...I've only met him once or twice but I'm good friends with one of the guys he fishes with a lot. Since the fish was caught WHEN it was, there was no way to get it to a certified scale to be weighed accurately. It could have been a state record, or could have just missed.

Great account! But you missed what may have been an opportunity to add redeye bass to your life list. Arizona, specifically the Verde River and tributaries, holds pure redeye bass (yes, the kind of bass that are native only to the Coosa river system in Alabama and Georgia.) Nobody is sure just who stocked them in AZ.

I floated the trout section of the North Fork a few summers ago, a couple years after the huge flood that went through. I was with several other guys who were fly fishing for trout, but I wanted to see if I could catch any smallmouth. They must not have been biting that day...I caught a few little largemouth, but that was it. The other guys didn't catch much either, though.

Doesn't take long for them to deteriorate. I lost a fly rod one time in the Yellowstone, knew about exactly where it was, waited two weeks for warmer weather and went swimming for it. Found it. The reel was toast, way too much sand in it. The rod was okay once I cleaned up the algae on it, but the cork handle looked like it had been chewed by a mouse. When I was a kid, I went on a vacation with a friend's family. We were fishing below the dam at Wappapello when I snagged a rod, cheap glass rod with a Zebco 202. It hadn't been in the river long, but the reel was in sorry shape. I could cast about 20 feet with it. Later that week, we relocated to Clearwater, and we went up the lake from Bluff View and stopped on a gravel bar at the head of the lake to fish for catfish. I had brought along the Zebco, so I baited it up with a couple kernels of canned corn and tossed it out the regulation 20 feet, propped it on a stick, and went about baiting up my other rods. I looked up just in time to see that Zebco go flying through the air and into the lake! I guess that rod and reel was just meant to be lost.

Nope, other than a few escapees from Rockbridge. I haven't fished Bryant in many years, but I've fished the North Fork in recent years and caught several smallmouth of 18-19 inches. No reason there wouldn't be fish that size in Bryant as well.

The wild canid genetics is really plastic. But I think the genetic studies of the ones that were being captive-bred pointed toward red wolves being a distinct species, but one that very easily got polluted with coyote genes. The coyotes in the northeastern U.S. supposedly have some wolf in them, believed to have got there by them passing through southern Canada on their way to the northeast. But really, I have my doubts. Most coyotes in the eastern U.S. simply spread from the midwest, and I think evolution selected the ones that were a bit bigger and could utilize the abundant deer. I've seen coyotes in Missouri that I suspect had a bit of red wolf in them; they were leggier and their markings looked very little like typical coyotes. Wolf classification depends upon whether the splitters or the lumpers are the more influential at the moment. Back in the day, there were something like 25 subspecies of wolves. I doubt that anybody knows exactly what the wolves in the eastern U.S. looked like; maybe like wolves in eastern Canada, maybe not. Mexican wolves DO look quite a bit different from typical wolves--a little smaller, thinner muzzled, more of a ruff around their heads. But back in the old days there was no isolation between supposed subspecies so they probably just blended into each other on the edges of their ranges.

I did a lot of work with red wolves in the past, studying them for paintings, including a few I did for MDC. Fact is that they don't really know exactly what their pack structure is or was, because they were mostly gone by the time anybody started to study them. And they interbred with coyotes to such an extent that it was difficult to find pure populations; I think the last remaining population from which breeding individuals were taken was down in far south Texas on a wildlife refuge. They were breeding them for a while at the Wolf Center in Eureka, MO, and that's where I was able to study them. At one point in the late 1980s, MDC was pondering whether to try reintroducing them (they were a native MO species, especially in the Ozarks), but they finally decided it was pointless since there were so many coyotes that it was unlikely that any tiny reintroduced population of red wolves would remain genetically pure; they'd just be swamped by coyote genetics in short order. There was supposed to be a reintroduction in the Land Between the Lakes in Tennessee/Kentucky, because they thought that maybe the lakes would isolate them enough for them to hold their own against the coyotes. And the reintroduction in North Carolina was thought to be viable because the eastern coyotes hadn't quite made it that far in huge numbers at the time. But, now eastern coyotes are everywhere, and personally I don't think that red wolves can exist for very long in the wild anywhere, unless you can somehow isolate them from coyotes. This is one critter that I think you just give up on as far as wild populations, and maybe try to maintain a small breeding population just so they don't go completely extinct. And of course that brings on its own set of problems with not enough genetic diversity to keep them healthy. The ones I studied were cool looking animals, considerably different from either coyotes or gray wolves if you knew what you were looking for. Long legged, beautiful facial markings of bold black, white, and tan, and noticeably bigger than coyotes (but not nearly as big as gray wolves). Their ears were much bigger than gray wolves, too, and their muzzles not quite as heavy. I wish it was possible for them to still exist in the wild, but I just don't think it's practical.

I've been having fun the last couple days. Using the search engine, I've been going back through all the posts I have made throughout the years (beginning in 2006) on these forums. I figured if I posted on a topic, I probably found it interesting, and chances are it's still interesting. I found out that I've started about 460 topics over the years, and have posted over 6,700 times, so that's a lot to go through. And there have been a LOT of very interesting topics. I've also been going back through those 460 plus topics I started, because a lot of them were fishing reports, and they've really made me remember a lot of great fishing trips. I decided that quite a few of the ones I wrote could be adapted to be compiled into a book at some point, so I've started rewriting some of the ones I like best. So a big shout out to Phil for hosting this place, because the only thing I enjoy more than talking about fishing is...fishing.

And yes, mussel larvae are parasitic on fish. The larvae, called glochidia, have to attach to the gills of the host fish, and different mussel species need different species of fish for the glochidia to take hold of the gills and survive. Some species use the lure structures to attract the right kind of fish, and then spew their glochidia when the fish gets close, but others release groups of glochidia in packages that resemble the fish's food, and the fish eats the package. If the fish is the correct species, the glochidia feed on the blood from the gills for a few days or weeks, grown into juveniles, and drop off.

A number of different mussel species in Missouri and Arkansas do the same thing. MDC even put out a great little short video about them using a "minnow" lure to attract fish.

Out here on the Yellowstone River, we've really gotten into finding petrified wood. It's pretty common on the bars on the Yellowstone, mostly really worn and rounded, pieces from marble size to as big as a loaf of bread. We've tumbled a few pieces in our rock tumbler. In 2020, since we couldn't do a whole lot of other things, we spent a lot of time roaming the bars along the river looking for it. But a lot of other people were looking for it, too, and we didn't get high enough water last spring to move the rocks around and expose more petrified wood, so last year wasn't nearly as productive. Here are most of our petrified wood finds from 2020.

Thing is, guys, that problems with "clean" energy sources that we see now won't necessarily be problems in the future. Technology can be a wonderful thing. But you can't get there from here unless you start getting there. You start with what we have, lithium batteries for instance. And you make the decision that we are going in this direction, and start working to improve battery technology, and more importantly, give innovators incentives to improve battery technology by showing that is the direction we plan to go. Regarding MOcarp's graphic photos of failed wind turbines...yup, they kill birds. In fact, in some places there is an employee that works daylight to dark at the wind turbine farm watching for eagles. If he sees an eagle headed toward a turbine, he shuts down the turbines that are in the eagle's path. Because that's more economical than paying the fine for killing the eagle. But that doesn't mean present wind turbines can't be improved to kill fewer eagles. And as for turbines blowing up from too much wind, that's a problem that was pretty much fixed once it happened a few times. Now the turbines sense when the wind is getting close to overloading them and shut themselves down. Again, the earlier technology isn't the end-all and be-all. I may have said this here before...I've certainly said it elsewhere. But we made a huge tactical error as a country when we turned the production and transmission of electricity over to private, for-profit companies. Because by necessity electric power is a monopoly. But also, because it's so necessary to have reliable electricity that we can't easily turn away from the path we're on. But consider this...I have an off-grid solar powered cabin. I've had solar power for going on four years now, and it's been perfectly reliable with two exceptions. One, it was slightly undersized, so it doesn't always keep up completely with the demand we put on it. And two, the interface between the backup propane-powered generator and the solar system has failed on two occasions, both while we were absent, and the generator didn't shut off when it should have but kept running until it ran out our propane tank (an expensive failure!). But, the point is that the solar is pretty darned reliable now and wasn't prohibitively expensive. It requires little maintenance and it works beautifully (cabin has a fridge, microwave, propane furnace, water well pump, propane on demand water heater, and can handle anything we want to power, including such things as charging my trolling motor batteries at night). Which brings me to the point I was about to make... It would be ideal right now and certainly in the future if electric power was far less centralized. If every home had their own electric power generation, like rooftop solar or any other small scale type of power generation, depending upon what would work best in their location. And/or, if municipalities had their own power generation systems, from small scale solar farms to methane from household waste to any of a number of other systems...maybe if they were located on a river, run of the river hydro, for instance. And all these little systems were tied to the regional electric grid, with the grid there mainly to supplement the power when a home system or municipal system failed or couldn't keep up. Yeah, won't work with the present grid system, because the grid wouldn't be a profit generator anymore. But look at the upside...you'd have a huge new industry geared toward producing, installing, and maintaining all these small scale power systems; it would be the next big thing making the economy boom. You'd be able to get rid of every coal-fired power plant. You wouldn't even need those big wind farms (which, if nothing else, are a horror to live next to). And...you'd have power generation that was not vulnerable to natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Pie in the sky? Maybe. I don't know all the ins and outs of keeping up a grid just to supplement all the small scale power generation. But smarter people than me think this could work. But we've gone so far down the road of electricity being a profit engine for a bunch of industries that it's really difficult to change it.

For many years I was into hunting artifacts...and had some good places to hunt them. My former grandfather-in-law had a farm down near Cape Girardeau, with a field on a high bench in the V where two creeks came together. I found artifacts from just about every period of Native American history there, from Dalton points that were more than 9000 years old to late Woodland and even later. Found a half a chert hoe, that had been used long enough to smooth and polish the working edge of the chert, and given the hardness of chert, that was a lot of use! Had another couple fields east of Bonne Terre that were just full of artifacts, and were plowed every year. That was the key back then...now hardly anybody plows fields anymore. No till agriculture lost me many of my best spots! Found a lot of stuff along the banks of Wappapello when the lake was down 5 feet or so in the winter. Of course, these days it's totally illegal to pick up artifacts on COE reservoirs. But my very best find was a spectacular, perfect Dalton point, that I found in the Lamotte Sandstone country in Ste. Genevieve County. I was just walking along a tiny, seasonal creek in the middle of the woods that had a sandy bottom, not even thinking about looking for artifacts. But when you do it a lot, your eyes get trained to look for them even when you're not looking; I still peruse every bit of bare dirt I come across, no matter where it is. So when I saw a tiny bit of light colored chert on that sand bottom, I bent over to check it out. I'm not in the same place my finds are right now or I'd post a photo of it. These days, most people hunt points in creek bottoms, trying to pick them out from the gravel on the bottom. I got back into it a little by doing that; found one nice point on the bottom of the wet weather creek behind the house last year, and a couple nice pieces in the wet weather creeks around my cabin on the Meramec.

Cool find, but don't think it's a dragonfly. Nearly all, if not all, of the rock in the northern Arkansas Ozarks is marine in origin...it was originally sea bottom, and therefore would have sea critters in it. The "body" appears to be a crinoid, and the "wing" impressions are another form of sea life.

That was in 2019. If you look at graphs of economic measures, they would show more or less steady upward trends beginning in 2010 or 2011, trends that simply kept going upwards at about the same rates through 2019. That includes employment trends. And we have no idea whether those trends would have continued if it wasn't for Covid. But Covid did happen. Did it just hasten the crash from the inherent weaknesses in the economy? There were plenty of economists who said, continuously, that all those upward trends were bound to come to a screeching halt at some point.

Who gets oil out of the ground in the U.S.? The oil companies. The oil companies are multi-national. They are in it to make as much profit as possible. They get their oil from wherever they can make the most profit. Like it or not, U.S. oil is not cheap oil. Not only do the oil companies have to adhere to environmental regulations that some other countries don't bother with, they have to get the oil by fracking, or drilling in cold seas, or in the Arctic. Was the U.S. oil independent? Nope. The U.S., on average the last decade or so, produces something like 18% of the world's oil. But not all that oil goes to U.S. refineries. And here's what people don't seem to realize...during 2020, the last year of Trump's administration and the first Covid year, there was less oil produced in the U.S. that there will be this year, and about as much as there was in 2021. 2020 saw a big drop in oil extraction in the U.S. And yet during 2020 gasoline prices were not much over $2 a gallon. Why? Because DEMAND had dropped precipitously with Covid. And why did U.S. production drop so much in 2020? Because with low demand and very low price at the pump, it was no longer profitable for the oil companies to extract and sell U.S. oil, so they shut down a lot of operations, preferring to get their oil from cheaper places and ship it to the U.S. So in 2021, demand started to rise with the easing of Covid restrictions. And so did prices of gas. Yup, Biden did a few things that were unfriendly to the oil companies...BUT, none of them were responsible for reducing U.S. oil production NOW. And most of them are not even in effect now because they are wending their way through the courts. So why aren't the oil companies getting a whole lot of oil from U.S. sources NOW? Because once you shut down production at a site, it takes a while to get things back up and running. But again, by the end of this year, U.S. oil production will probably be back up to somewhere around 2019 levels, before Covid. But do you think that gasoline prices will be at 2019 levels? Dream on. The oil companies are milking this for all it's worth, and it doesn't help that things are pretty tense right now with the Russia thing, and everybody is afraid of what the future holds, so will continue to make as much money as they can right now. Fact is, the policies of any presidential administration have far less impact on oil prices than world affairs in general do...because those oil companies are multi-national, and really are more or less monopolies, or at least they completely collude with each other to keep the prices at levels where they can maximize profit. Gasoline prices dropped like a rock at the end of the Bush administration, skewing what was a very high average gas price during most of his administration. Why? The Great Recession. They rose during the Obama administration. Why? Coming out of the Great Recession. They dropped near the end of the Obama administration because there was a glut of oil, which remained the case during the Trump administration...until Covid. Then there was still more oil being produced than the demand supported, even with drops in production, so oil remained cheap. Electric vehicles? The auto companies are reading the handwriting on the wall. In 10 years EVs will make up a significant percentage of all new vehicles. If battery technology continues to advance, it might come sooner than that. And THAT will reduce demand for oil. But how much will it affect price? Who knows? Maybe the holdouts who continue to buy and use gasoline powered cars will be willing to pay high prices for that gas. The oil companies will do everything they can to keep their profits up. It's a changing world, folks. Things are weird right now for a multitude of reasons, and it sucks. And things are going to get weirder in the next 10 years. Doesn't matter who is in power. Vote for whoever you want, but don't expect miracles if your guys win. If you can't afford the gas to play now, don't expect it to automatically go down when the other party is in power. Start planning for a future of high gasoline prices, and figure out how to afford your fun. And by the way, if it costs you $50 to drive to the lake now, it still cost you $25-30 in 2020. The question is not whether you can afford the $50, it's whether you can afford the $20-25 MORE it cost you than it did in 2020.

I use short rods for fishing from the canoe...my longest canoe rod is an old Loomis 6'6" crankbait rod that I used for many years for my boat crankbait rod, but then broke 6 inches off the tip. Still works, just a shorter, heavier power crankbait rod now (it was a medium power that was actually pretty light before breaking it, now it's kinda between a medium and medium-heavy). My topwater rod at present is a 5'3" really old Lews (was once 5'6" but had three inches broken off its tip, kind of a theme, I guess). My canoe spinnerbait rod is a St. Croix 5'6" medium power that's probably no longer made. Have another 5'6" medium-light all purpose rod that the brand slips my mind right now but it may be out of business. Then a 5'6" All Star that is pretty ancient as well, and my two jig and soft plastic rods are Kistlers that were once 6'6" but have had 6-8 inches broken off. The last actual 5'6" rods I bought were Gander Mountains, but I don't like them much...still I have them as backups. The BPS 5'6" medium power Tourney Special was a favorite after I sanded the handle down to about half its original diameter, hated those thick handles with an extra bulge in it. But I broke it a year or two ago. I bought a great 5' topwater rod about 15 years ago on EBay that some guy had made off some Loomis blank, and used it until about two years ago when the handle started coming loose. At some point I might fix it. I've also made a couple short rod by buying longer, medium light power spinning rod blanks and cutting a little at a time off both ends until I got the power and action I wanted. But I've broken every one of them over the years.

As the others have said, you can't make long range plans for March trips. March is one of the least consistent times of year not only for water conditions but for actually catching fish. My suggestion: pick some options of middle portions of larger rivers. March on smaller streams can be really iffy. And have several widespread options, in case you get a lot of rain in one area and not in another. Like maybe middle Gasconade around Waynesville, Current below Round Spring, James above Table Rock, Buffalo below Gilbert. Put them in order of which you want to float the most to least, and then make your final decision a few days in advance while watching weather forecasts.

Yeah, slow water just doesn't lend itself to tight line nymph fishing. A lot of days, if I'm wade-fishing, I just skip the slower water going upstream using nymphs, and hit it coming back downstream with a streamer. Or I'll use a dry/dropper in the slow water.