Al Agnew

It's not exactly like you have to scroll through every gage in the state. They are listed by river system, always in the same order. A flick of my finger gets me down the list to the river system where I know the gage is. Of course, I've been using the gages since I found out they existed, so I know just about exactly where on the list a particular gage is. I just did a little experiment...I wanted to get the cfs and median cfs on the Jacks Fork at Mountain View (Buck Hollow gage). So I opened my Iphone, went to the clock and stopwatch, clicked start on the stopwatch. Then I opened Safari, clicked on my bookmarked streamflow table, scrolled quickly down to where I knew that gage was on the list, and read it off...41.3 cfs right now, 41 cfs is median for today. Flicked back to stopwatch and hit stop. 26 seconds. The vast majority of the gages I use often are in the Meramec river system. Most of the rest are in the White River basin (including the Jacks Fork). Now if I had to check out the Elk River it might take a few more seconds for me to find it. By the way, I've been spelling it "gage" because that's how it's spelled on the USGS site. But "gauge" was what I always thought the correct spelling was.

Umm...one click on Safari, one click on my bookmarked streamflow table, and I've got cfs and median cfs for EVERY gage in Missouri, all I have to do is scroll down the list until I get to the gage I'm interested in and read what it says. I didn't have to make a custom list. I think your way is more difficult than mine.

Nice boat. Worth the asking price. Glad I'm not needing a tandem!

Why go to the apps when you can just use the USGS river gages that all their info comes from? None of the apps I've seen give you all the info the river gages themselves do. I keep the streamflow table for Missouri and Montana bookmarked on my phone...as long as I have cell phone service I can get to it with one click off my opening page of Safari on my Iphone. One more click from there gets me any of the gage pages. And I don't use the mobile friendly USGS pages, just the same page you call up on your laptop. Streamflow table for Missouri, lists every gage: https://waterdata.usgs.gov/mo/nwis/current/?type=flow Often this is the only page I need to go to, because the two far right columns on the table show the current flow in cfs, and the median flow, and all I have to do is compare current flow to median flow to see whether the stream is somewhere near normal, or low, or high. If it's something like three or four times higher than the median, it's getting too high to fish well. But if I need more info, I just click on the relevant gage.

Actually, Gravier almost certainly wasn't the first Frenchman to "discover" the Meramec (the Indians would have laughed at the word "discover" here). Marquette and Joliet certainly saw the mouth of the river when they took their voyage of exploration down the Mississippi from the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico. They would have passed the mouth of the Meramec in June of 1673. With a little imagination you can picture them paddling a short distance up the river, but it isn't in their records. I wrote a chapter on the history of the Meramec Basin in my book, and it was fun doing the research of what happened back in those days. Following is an excerpt from the book, picking up right after Marquette and Joliet: The next official expedition down the Mississippi was in 1682. Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was an adventurer and would-be businessman who had heard the Spanish had neglected to build forts to defend the lower Misssissippi and was sure the possession of the great river was key to control of the New World. Receiving a grant of permission from the King of France to explore the river and set up forts along it, he set out from the Illinois River in early 1682, and on April 9, 1682, reached the mouth of the Mississippi, where he erected a column with the name of the king and the date, and claimed possession of "this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the nations, people, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams and rivers, within the extent of said Louisiana, from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio...as also along the (Mississippi), and the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the country of the Sioux...as far as its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, and also the mouth of the River of Palms, upon the assurance we have had from the natives of these countries that we are the first Europeans who have descended or ascended the river..." Thus, the Meramec and all the tributaries of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers were claimed by France. In December of that year, La Salle helped set up the first fort defending the Mississippi Valley at Starved Rock on the Illinois River, and soon French-Canadians were regularly traveling down the Mississippi and presumably up the Meramec in search of furs, minerals, and souls to be saved. Though they found a country rich in natural beauty, with park-like forests and abundant wildlife, they had little interest in settling this land; they were there for adventure and fortune. It was the mineral lead that brought the first real settlers of European descent to the Meramec Basin. Father Jaques Gravier led an expedition in 1697-1698 which found deposits of lead in at least two places within the Basin. One was at a location called Silver Hollow, near present day Sullivan. The other was discussed in his report in October, 1700, where he talked of the presence of rich lead ore "12 or 13 leagues" from the mouth of the "River Miaramigoua". At that time, Big River was often called the Little Meramec (or Miaramigoua), and he probably meant that distance up Big River, which would have been somewhere near where lead deposits would later be exploited. That same year, De La Motte Cadillac, a frontier entrepreneur, visited the lead deposits reported by Gravier and petitioned the French king for the lead concession for Louisiana Territory. Knowing that the king and his immediate supporter, Scots banker John Law, were not interested in lead, De La Motte "salted" his request by misrepresenting silver ore from Mexico as coming from Missouri. Law, who had installed himself as director-general of the Bank of France, was fooled by the ruse, and formed an investment company called the Company of the West, obtaining a grant for exclusive commerce and mining privileges for 25 years. He started a massive promotional campaign based upon the story of rich silver mines, and did a "land office business" selling shares in the company to thousands of wealthy and not so wealthy investors. Unfortunately, when the silver failed to materialize, the company bank that was using the investors’ money accumulated about $200 million in worthless bank notes and collapsed, ruining the investors in what became known as the “Mississippi Bubble”. However, while it lasted the company was influential in developing mines in Missouri. Philippe Francois Renault, director of the company’s mines, left France in 1719 with 200 miners, tools, and supplies, and purchased 500 slaves in Santo Domingo and arranged for 25 additional slaves to be sent to the mines each year. They were almost certainly the first slaves ever imported to Missouri. Renault arrived at Fort Chartres, across the Mississippi in Illinois, in April 1720, setting up a headquarters from which to explore eastern Missouri for potential mineral resources. It’s generally believed that he found lead along the Meramec, Big River, and the Mineral Fork, and at a small stream he called Fourche a Renault, he found a vein of lead two feet thick on the surface. Fourche a Renault still bears that name and is one of the two creeks that merge to form Mineral Fork, west of present day Potosi. Actually, there is some question as to whether the present-day Fourche a Renault was really the stream where he found the lead. What is known is that he received a grant in 1723 for one and one half leagues along the “Petit Merrimac” (Big River) and extending up the first tributary (Mineral Fork) for six leagues, a total of 9 square leagues. A league was approximately 3-4 miles, so six leagues would have been at least 18 miles up the Mineral Fork, which is 17 miles long from the mouth to where the stream splits into Fourche a Renault and Mine a Breton creeks. A few miles to the northeast was a place called Old Mines, because mines had previously been opened there by Sieur de Renaudiere in a brief search for silver. There the miners had built crude cabins along Old Mines Creek, calling the place “Cabannage de Renaudiere”, and in 1723 Renault built a brick furnace there. Were Renault’s mines there instead of Fourche a Renault? His own miners apparently used the old cabins, living there much of each year, one might presume that they wouldn’t commute several miles to work the mines. Some of the descendants of those early miners still reside in the Old Mines area today, and only a few decades ago, it was still common for members of the old families to speak a “Missouri French” dialect as much as English. They maintained a French culture well into the 1900s. Wherever the actual mines were, they were worked into the 1730s, and reopened in 1743. Renault’s land grants were in dispute for nearly 100 years, and the failure of the Company of the West left him in deep financial trouble, still owing for some of the slaves and lacking credit. But he continued to attempt to profit from the mines. He lived in a stone house near Fort Chartres until 1744, when he gave up his holdings to the crown, sold his slaves, and moved back to France. Note that my research showed some things a bit differently from this original post. Many sources say that Miaramigoua meant "Little Meramec", and Big River was often called that. Record keeping and accounts of journeys wasn't all that common back in those days.

If you wanna shoot a 700 pound brown bear with a .44 magnum, you really better be a good shot...and be ready to climb a tree while waiting for it to die.

100% largemouth. And note: on smaller largemouth, especially under about 10-11 inches, the maxillary (upper jaw) does NOT extend beyond the eye. You cannot use that to ID the little ones.

I watched something almost exactly like that video one time in, believe it or not, Alaska. It was the 4th of July, and we had booked a fly-in trip to a supposedly remote lake to fish the inlet where the stream feeding it enters it. What we didn't take into account was two things...it was the 4th of July, and if you can fly a float plane onto it, it isn't exactly remote. So when the plane landed, there were about 20 other float planes tied up to the bank along the shore of the lake, and this tiny little creek entering the lake. It also happened to be a dry summer, and the creek was simply too low for the salmon that were supposed to be entering it to get up it. So there was a big pod of salmon right at the mouth of the creek in about 2-4 feet of water...and they were totally surrounded by fishermen. If it wasn't for the fact that our float plane pilot's plan was to leave us there for the day and fly back in to pick us up that evening, we would have told him to turn around and fly us back right then. The pilots of the other planes were either "guides" as well, standing dutifully behind the nimrods with their nets, or they were just lounging on the hillside overlooking the circus, watching with amusement. Mary and I fished for a while casting toward deeper water well away from the group of 30-40 anglers, hoping to catch a few strays from the pod, and indeed did catch a couple, but it wasn't much fun, so we joined the other pilots in watching the show. And a show it was. There was one guy in particular, dressed head to toe in the latest in Orvis, chest waders even though he was standing in a foot of water (and the water was not all that cold, given the time of year), camera around his neck to record his catches, fly vest pockets full of whatever. And he was really good at snagging those sockeyes--yes, snagging them, not legitimately catching them. When he would hook one, he would kinda pose in classic manner, trying to look like a nonchalant expert. And there was another poor guy with only one arm fishing next to him, and the fish would invariably end up going around the feet of that unfortunate soul. So one time the Orvis nimrod was going to walk around the front of the one-armed man to play his fish, and stepped just a little too far out...off a ledge. He disappeared, only his hat showing. The fish was tied up around the one-armed guy, who had put his rod in his teeth and was trying to pull out Orvis guy with his only hand. Finally Orvis guy's guide came to the rescue and helped him out of the water, his waders full, his camera soaked along with the rest of him. It gets better. The guide suggested Orvis guy go up into the brush and change clothes. Orvis guy clambered up to the bank, dug clothing out of a big pile of gear, and disappeared. Now, our pilot had warned us to keep watch for a female brown bear and her two half grown cubs, who came out of the brush sometime early in the afternoon every day to do their own exploitation of the pod of sockeyes. If she showed up, everybody was to retreat to the hillside where we were watching. He said she had never bothered anybody, but just get away from the spot and leave her to her fishing. A few minutes after Orvis guy disappeared, suddenly he reappeared, barefooted and in his tidy whitey underwear only, running gingerly on the rocky bank...the three bears right behind him. (I have pictures of this, but I can't find them right now.) He ran on down the bank, but the bears were only interested in fish, so they calmly waded out into the pod of salmon as everybody else retreated. But the two cubs quickly got bored with fishing. One of them spied Orvis guy's pile of gear...backpack, three more fly rods sticking up, cooler. (Now note that it wasn't the only pile of gear lying around, but apparently the other people were smart enough not to have some nicely smelling food in their gear.) The bear ambled up and proceeded to tear into the backpack. Score! A big hunk of summer sausage disappeared. Then for some reason the bear took offense to the fly rods, and proceeded to chew all three into shorter sections. Orvis guy's guide pulled out a big revolver, probably a .44 magnum. The other guides and pilots started shouting at him to put it away. He shouted back that he was only going to shoot into the air to scare the bears away. The other pilots and guides told him not to even think about it. So he put the gun away, and eventually the cub lost interest in the gear after leaving it in tatters. But wait, I'm not done yet. So now the other guides and pilots and clients were all down on the Orvis guy's guide. So they really were tickled pink when the cubs again lost interest in fishing and went walking down the bank, investigating the float planes. Now everybody else had made sure the doors were shut on their planes...but not Orvis guy's guide, who was apparently also his pilot. His float plane door was standing open. Score again! The bear disappeared into the float plane, and came out with a bag of potato chips, which it ate. Then it went back in, and I swear, came out with a bottle of beer! It chewed the bottle for a bit but was unable to get it open and lost interest. It entered the plane one more time, and you could hear things being moved around...I suspect it found more food and ate it. Finally it left the plane for good.

I am very surprised at how many of you hold the reel seat between index and middle finger. Most spinning reels are designed to be held between middle and ring finger; the space between the bail and the reel seat is designed so that your index finger can pick up the line easily while holding the reel seat between middle and ring finger. Unless you have big hands, it would be more difficult to reach the line with your index finger when it's farther behind the bail. I have average hands for a 5'8" guy, and I would find it pretty difficult to reach the line to pick it up.

How many of those help wanted signs we are seeing everywhere are for the low pay jobs we’ve been talking about? The Covid relief payments, at their height, were $1400 a month. Equivalent to a $9 an hour job, approximately. Want to live on 9 bucks an hour for a year or two? Remember, most other forms of “welfare” cut off after a year. So you would have been living in less than $17,000 a year. Poverty level is $26,500 for a family of four. Assume two work-age adults, both lost their jobs and were eligible. So yeah, they might have been doing a bit better taking the money than both scrambling for poverty level jobs. But the money is running out.

Got anything to refute what I said, or are we just name-calling now? Please explain how we bring back manufacturing jobs without lowering wages and benefits and scrapping regulations so that we can compete with the Chinas and Indias of the world. Please explain how it's possible to employ every American who wants to work and make a living above the poverty line when we've become a service economy. Please explain how we provide good and useful education for youth in poverty in the inner cities and poor rural areas, so that they can be employed at good jobs above the poverty line. "Liberals" don't have any answer for this. Neither do conservatives. We all need to face the facts. Regardless of Trump's pie in the sky promises in 2016, the world has moved on, and things have changed. We need to start figuring out how to live with the world as it is, not try to bring it back to some former utopia that never existed. Does that mean raising minimum wage? I don't know. I doubt it. Raising the minimum wage to a level that allows such workers to live above the poverty line is almost sure to raise the price of the goods and services they produce, and then they are STILL below the new poverty line. And we've gone way too far down the road already of the upper management getting ever richer while the poor stay poor and the middle class disappears; the people with money have the power, and the people in power make the rules.

Bingo. I never see a teenager working MOST service jobs. Maybe some in fast food joints, but the vast majority behind the counter at the quick shop or the grocery store, the restaurant workers, hotel workers, and just about any other service job are adults, often women. Here's the unpalatable truth...we have become a service economy. Without service jobs paying minimum wage or just a bit better, there wouldn't be anywhere close to enough jobs to employ all the adults that need and want work. And the service jobs keep shrinking with self-checkout and other forms of automation. So unfortunately, service jobs ARE going to have to be "careers" for many. It's one reason why the disparity between the rich and poor keeps getting bigger. The person who once was able to get a factory job paying a decent wage and benefits (thanks mainly to unions) is now having to take a job that pays minimum wage because the factory jobs ain't there anymore and they ain't coming back.

Probably you should do a little experimenting. The Morningstar is 32 inches wide at the gunwales and 36 inches wide maximum--it has some tumblehome. That's not bad for paddling solo, and it MIGHT be perfect with the seat placed so that the front edge of the seat is very close to the center of the canoe. I generally like that seat placement and have moved the seat on several of my solos over the years to that position. It's generally best for tracking, initial stability, and all around handling. But you might find that placing the seat in the widest part of the canoe makes it a bit more difficult to get efficient paddle strokes (in most efficient strokes, the closer your paddle is to vertical during the stroke, the better, and wide canoes make you have to reach farther out to the sides to get a good angle on your strokes). So it might turn out to be a bit better to keep the seat so that the front edge is 6 inches to a foot behind the center. Of course, you'll have to move the center thwart, and when you remove the seats from their present placement you will have to replace them with thwarts as well or the Royalex may begin to warp because of not enough support. When you do that, give it a lot of thought and experimentation with placing gear, rods, etc...if you have to move things around anyway, you might as well move them to the perfect positions for your purposes!

I described my rod situation elsewhere, but as to the question of why kayaks are so popular, fact is that solo canoes have never been really popular, especially in this region. So most people never paddled anything but a tandem canoe; if they tried to paddle it solo it wasn't a whole lot of fun, and if they only paddled with a partner it took cooperation between them. So when kayaks suddenly began to gain popularity, all of a sudden a lot of people were trying them out and finding that they were fun and gave you a great sense of independence. No wonder they lapped them up and thought they were better than canoes. And then, the kayak companies began a lot of smart marketing, adding all kinds of gadgets for anglers, sponsoring guys to video using their kayaks for fishing and write articles about how great they were. And meanwhile, the canoe manufacturers had no clue how they could better market solo canoes, which had always been a niche market with a pretty small niche. Once you start adding geegaws to a canoe, it quickly becomes heavier and more cluttered, and the beauty of a canoe is in the simplicity. And then Royalex became unavailable, and the already limited choices in solo canoes became even more limited. You can find a hundred different models of kayaks just about anywhere, but only a handful of good solo canoe models for fishing and floating purposes. And cost is also undeniably a part of it; good solo canoes start at well over a thousand dollars these days with a few exceptions.

I carry five rods in my solo canoe. I like short rods in canoes, not just because they fit better, but because when you're in a seated position I like the somewhat different angle to the water that you hold a shorter rod with the tip near the water--this is especially true if working walk the dog topwaters. So my rods are generally 5.5 feet, but one of them is often a 6.5 footer (and my topwater rod is 5'3"). In stowing the rods, I'll have two longer ones lying with handles resting on the sides of my bench seat and tips tucked beneath the gunwales in front, two shorter ones lying with the handle resting on the thwart right in front of me and the tip under the front end cap, and one more also resting on the bench seat sides with tip tucked under the rear end cap. Thus none of my rods are sticking out to get snagged on anything or get in the way when I'm playing a good fish, and all are within instant reach and always rigged and ready to go. My tackle box is an auto battery box, which five 3701 Plano boxes fit into perfectly, and it goes under my seat (I had to raise the seat slightly on a couple of my solos for it to fit) with the opening facing forward and the Plano boxes lying flat. So all my lures are also instantly and easily available, just slide out the appropriate box from between my legs. On multi-day trips, I carry a 4 person tent, sleeping bag, inflatable mattress with a closed cell foam pad for a little more of a barrier against the occasional rock sticking up on the gravel bar, a small pillow, two high end coolers that both fit crossways in the canoe, whatever clothing I need, and if it's a cool weather trip, a plastic box with cooking gear--I don't bother cooking anything on hot weather trips. So the two coolers, and two dry bags with the tent, sleeping stuff, and clothing apportioned into them, are the main bulky items in the canoe. I could certainly fit a bit more stuff in the canoe if I wanted, but it would entail the gear being higher above the gunwales and make rod stowage a bit more inconvenient. Still, I'm getting to where I'm considering taking some kind of camp chair. (As for the two coolers, that's actually only for trips of more than two days--one cooler holds the stuff I'll eat and drink the first couple days, the other the stuff I won't get into until the third day. If it's just an overnighter, I'll only carry one cooler and could fit a bunch more stuff into the canoe instead of the second one if I wished.)

Man, miss a couple days and a lot is going on that's right down my alley... Solo canoe length--longer is better, up to a point. In my opinion, 14 foot solo is the sweet spot for Ozark streams. Long enough to stow your rods (unless all your rods are 7 footers) and to hold more gear for overnighters. Also long enough that it will track reasonably well. But short enough to be easier to handle, maneuver, and get through tight spots on small streams. I paddled a 12 ft. Old Town Pack for a long time, and it was perfectly serviceable and a lot of fun as long as you didn't want to go anywhere really fast. If you're just now thinking of buying a solo, there just isn't a lot to choose from these days with the demise of Royalex, so don't be turned off by a short canoe...it will work. Canoe vs. kayak...every time I see somebody saying they prefer their kayak for day floats, I'm pretty sure their canoe isn't a good solo. Comparing a kayak to a tandem canoe is comparing apples to hand grenades. A decent solo canoe will do everything a kayak will do and do most of it better. A tandem canoe is a means to the end of getting down the river if you're paddling it solo. A solo canoe is pure fun. Initial vs. secondary stability...in a way this is personal preference. Some people like a canoe that feels really stable. Others like the better paddling performance of one that might feel tippy (usually because it's narrower and longer) but has good final resistance to tipping over (usually because it has straight sides instead of tumblehome (sides curving inward, which is often a characteristic of wide canoes because it makes solo paddling easier). Personally, I like a good compromise, medium length, medium width, straight sides. Carrying canoes on pickup trucks...I've carried 14 ft. canoes in the bed of pickups with 6 ft. beds plenty of times...including in beds that had a cover that rolled up into a container in the bed and cut the bed length down another 8 inches or so. Key is to lay it flat, right side up, in the bed, AND have a good place to tie it down at the TOP of the bed, so that the tiedowns are pulling the rear end UP as well as forward. And put a red flag on the rear end! But since I do so much canoeing, I put racks on my pickup. And I searched a long time for perfect rack solutions. What I have now is a Pace Edwards bed cover that rolls up, combined with Yakima Track Racks. It's the only combination I was able to find where both the racks and the cover attached separately to the bed.

True. I always have to chuckle when I see somebody complaining about a high dollar topwater lure that will last years, when you can go through two or three bags of soft plastics in a day if the fish are taking them.

I haven't floated through the Fort since about 2002. Back then, there was a dam near the upstream end of the stretch through the fort that would have definitely stopped you from running with a jetboat. But I just spent a bit of time looking for it on Google Earth, and can't find it. There was and still is a low water bridge in the middle of the fort that would be unrunnable. There was once a dam a short distance above East Gate...the dam is still there but the river bypasses it and has for many years.

I've caught two or three above Leadwood. But from Leadwood downstream they now outnumber smallmouth, or at least that's how the numbers of those I catch shake out most days. The Leadwood low water bridge is the final barrier to upstream spread of spots, and it's mostly held for many years.

Mitch, spend some time on Facebook...if you have the number and variety of "friends" I have on there, you will be exposed to hundreds of memes per day where one side is attacking the other side and mostly misrepresenting what the other side is all about. It's done by so-called conservatives and so-called liberals, by so-called Democrats and so-called Republicans. I say "so-called" because it's been proven that many of these vile memes originate in Russia and other countries, but then get passed along by ordinary Americans who take them in hook, line, and sinker. Somebody said recently in a discussion like this that we are being divided by the political elites (and they meant on both sides). I responded that, nope, we are being divided by cynical people motivated by greed or ideology who continually post crap on social media, and we are also being divided by cynical media personalities who know that outrage sells, and the more they can rouse the rabble the greater their market share is. And we are completely complicit in this, because many, perhaps most, of us NEVER make the attempt to actually hear what the other side is saying, we let the personalities on our side TELL us what the other side is saying. And those personalities have a vested interest in demonizing the other side. You are looking at it from your side. You think the dividing is all being done by those commie liberals. Bullcrap. The dividing is being done by both sides in just the ways I've described above, by making the other side look as horrible as possible and by people never actually listening to the viewpoint of the other side. One of the truths I've learned in nearly 70 years on earth is that we all have an infinite ability to convince ourselves that what we want to be true is true, and to grasp any evidence that reinforces our viewpoint and ignore or denigrate any evidence that doesn't. With all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips, we are becoming more and more tribal, using the internet not to get facts or wide ranges of opinions, but only going to the places on the net that tell us what we want to hear.

Kinda interesting that "there is no imminent danger of catastrophic failure of the dam", but they want to "minimize" the risk of catastrophic failure. I did a lot of reading about the Teton Dam a while back. It was a dam in Idaho, built by the Bureau of Reclamation, which failed as soon as it was filled, and wiped out a couple towns downstream. It was the only huge dam failure (so far), and was another factor in the defeat of the Meramec Dam in Missouri because it happened while all the controversy about finding caves in the Meramec Dam site was going on. It failed because they allowed it to start filling before the main spillway was finished, so when it so happened that it was a record snow winter and the snowmelt coming into the lake was far greater than what they expected, the lake filled too fast and simply supersaturated the earthen dam. Reading about it was amazing, and I wrote this about it for the book I was writing: The snowpack the following winter was extremely heavy, and by March of 1976 dam operators knew the reservoir would be filling more quickly than the standard rule of one foot per day. They had no real choice in the matter, since the main outlet works that would have been able to carry off the excess water had not yet been completed, and they were depending upon the auxiliary outlet, which was designed to carry only a fourth of what the flow of the Teton River coming into the reservoir was going to be that spring. By mid-May, the river was in full flood, and the dam was at its mercy. No mercy was given. On June 3, a small leak in the dam appeared. The next day there were three leaks. They remained small throughout the day. But the next morning, Saturday, June 5th, 1976, there was a large stream of muddy water coming from the right abutment next to the dam. Another leak developed at the contact point of the dam with the abutment. At 9:30 AM yet another leak appeared twenty feet from the right abutment, which quickly became a torrent eroding the dam. The chief engineer ordered the main outlet works to be opened even though he knew it would be hours or days before they could begin to carry off the water above the lake, and sent bulldozers in to try to stop the huge leak in the dam face. At that point the hole was the size of a swimming pool, spewing pulses of muddy water. The bulldozers had no effect. A whirlpool was forming on the surface of the lake on the upstream side of the dam. At 11:30 AM the hole suddenly widened by 20 feet and the bulldozers fell into it, their operators leaping off and running for their lives. At 11:55, the crest of the dam collapsed into the reservoir, and two minutes later a third of the dam disappeared and a massive flood rolled down the canyon. Beaver Dam is a partially earthen dam. It really sounds like that keeping the flood pool too long may be saturating the earthen part of the dam and weakening it. Kinda worrisome.

I love spotted bass where they belong, and it's sad that they have been such a disaster to smallmouth in the Meramec system (and the Gasconade, for that matter). Yup, they ARE fun on topwater...I was on upper Big River day before yesterday and caught 28 of them on top...along with 21 smallmouth and only 5 largemouth. I hate it that they now outnumber the smallmouth up there.

We lost our innocence on 9/11. We had thought that, having outlasted the Soviet Union and converted China to a greed-driven instead of ideologically driven country, we didn't have much to worry about. The thing I remember most was how absolutely gobsmacked everybody was..."oh crap, there are terrorists out there who not only hate us but have the capability to really do serious harm to us". I remember how much most people, no matter what their political persuasion, were on board with invading Iraq and Afghanistan to "do something". It didn't last long, but it may have been the last time, and may be the last time, Americans actually put aside their differences and support a common goal. I don't believe the conspiracy theories, sorry. I have no illusions about the competency of government agencies. Their very incompetence at times argues against grand conspiracies--how do the numbers of government workers in on the scheme ever keep it all secret? It could have been prevented, we had the knowledge and the intelligence, but our intelligence agencies were rivals, not partners. And the scheme would be unnecessarily complex...if you had the means to bring down the towers in the first place, why not just do it and frame some "terrorists", rather than having somebody do suicide missions flying planes into them plus the Pentagon? But I'm also just as certain that the Bush administration (not so much Bush himself but Cheney and Rumsfeld and some of the other "hawks" in the administration) was quick to take advantage of the event to drum up popular support for their ideas of nation building. It wasn't ideological, it was geopolitically strategic. Iraq has oil. At the time we were dependent upon a bunch of countries which didn't like us for a majority of our oil, and that didn't look like it would change any time soon. So turn Iraq into a country "friendly" to the U.S. (maybe even a puppet government), and bingo, we'd have a stable oil supply there at least. Of course, by this time we've learned that we simply aren't effective at nation building when the people with the most influence in that nation are medieval religious nutcases that hate our brand of society. But at the time they probably thought it was easily doable. Heck, we all did. I was never sure about the whole weapons of mass destruction thing, but I thought, naively, that they were competent enough to pull off the nation building and that it might turn out well in the end. In the 20 years since, we've learned, or should have learned, a lot of things. One of the things I've learned is that if we have an outside enemy to rally against, that enemy is still not likely to prevail. We've been pretty effective as a government in keeping another 9/11 from happening. But...once that outside enemy fades into the background like Islamic terrorism has, we are ripe for being manipulated into going against a different enemy. And now, the different enemy is the people in our own country who don't agree with us politically. We are being conditioned by domestic greed and foreign influence in social media to hate each other, and I'm not sure how we back off from that.

It drives me nuts, and I always kick them over as well unless it's a place that is already "civilized", like in a campground or access point. On Facebook people get all indignant when they see complaints about rock stacking..."it doesn't hurt anything". Well, what part of "leave no trace" do you not understand? Why do you think other people want to see your lame attempt to shout, "look at me, I was here"? But I've been called rude and selfish for calling them selfish and self-centered. As if I shouldn't expect for wild places to be wild. As you can tell, the whole thing ticks me off.

Some days are worse than others...this trip the fish were hitting it fairly well; I was hooking maybe 75% of the ones that hit it, including those that hit it more than once. I've also experimented a lot with hooks and hook placement. Most walkers have two hooks, but I've been using those that I could find that have three trebles. Which brings its own set of problems. Having three trebles makes lipping fish downright dangerous; I've begun to take a net with me on float trips. And it also means that the rear treble is almost always on the outside of the mouth and often gets snagged somewhere on the fish's body, which I don't like. And in addition, with the placement of three hooks, the front treble is pretty close to the eye of the lure and your line gets tangled on it with some regularity. And finally, on every lure I've bought with three trebles, the middle and rear hooks are too close together and get tangled with each other. So I have taken to replacing the rear hook with a much smaller one, and bending down the barbs on it. I'm even going to experiment with leaving the rear treble off completely. It seems to actually make some lures walk more easily, and since 95% of the fish I hooked are always hooked on the front or middle treble or both, I don't think the rear hook is even necessary. Not to mention that when the fish DOES take in the rear hook, it's often down in their throat. I'm going to make some with just two hooks, one fairly close to the eye and one fairly far back but not all the way at the rear end.