Al Agnew

There is a theory that rock bass (and the other Ambloplites species) were not native to the Gasconade and Osage river systems. In looking at the range maps in Pflieger's book, it shows the Niangua as the farthest west they range, and not the Little Niangua. If you look at the connections between river systems, it would make sense that they might be native to the Meramec system but not to the Gasconade or Osage, because they would have to traverse the Missouri River to get to them, and it's believed that the Missouri was always too turbid to give them an avenue but that the far less muddy upper Mississippi diluted the mud in the Missouri enough for them to travel it past the Missouri into the Meramec. The fact that it IS rock bass, and not the other two Ozark species, that populate the Gasconade and Osage, would either mean that they ARE native, or that the goggle-eye in those two streams came from Meramec fish. It would be interesting to see an in depth study of their genetics. Ozark bass have to be native, since the upper White is the only place they are found. And shadow bass are found across the Mississippi from the southern Ozarks and Ouachitas in Arkansas, so they are probably native there.

Some more about them...all the rock bass (Ambloplites) species can radically change color and pattern contrast in a matter of seconds. Although they are known for having red eyes, when they go really dark on pattern and color, the dark pigment obscures the red in their eyes. They do this in response to mood, stress, excitement, light levels, or surroundings. Their skin cells, including the cells of the iris of their eyes, have pigment structures called melanophores which make the cell go dark or light, and chromatophores, which can change the basic color of the scale. When I said that rock bass can get just as, or more, blotchy than shadow bass, here is an example. This is a rock bass from Big River.

Actually the big dark blotches on shadow bass are not unique to them, as can be seen in these photos of the other two species. Their blotches tend to stay darker, but the others can get just as dark or darker. I find Ozark bass to be the most distinctive and easiest to identify, because of how scattered the small dark spots are, and it also has a more slender body than the other two. Shadow bass tend to have heavily mottled anal fins, while rock bass anal fins are either not mottled at all, or just slight mottling at the base. Shadow bass have the same small dark spots on the scales on the side, but these rows of spots are often interrupted with a couple unspotted scales. Rock bass scales on their side almost all have dark spots. But over most of their range, the easiest way to identify them is their location. The Ozark bass is indigenous ONLY to the upper White River system, and nowhere else on earth. The rivers where it is found include the James, Beaver, North Fork, Bryant, War Eagle, Kings, Crooked, and the Buffalo. Shadow bass are found in the Black River system (Spring, Eleven Point, Current, Strawberry, and Black), St. Francis, and Castor systems. Rock bass are found in the Osage system (Niangua, etc.), Gasconade and Big Piney, Meramec, Big, and Bourbeuse, and the small streams running into the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cape Girardeau. Over on the Spring and Neosho systems, there seems to be a mixture, with some rock bass and some with shadow bass characteristics. Farther south in AR it's all shadow bass. Here is an article I wrote and illustrated on the three species. https://riversandart.blogspot.com/2020/04/growing-up-in-missouri-ozarks-and-being.html

I might have to beg Wrench to private message me his "best" smallmouth stream north of the Ozarks! The sections of streams north of the Ozarks that have smallmouth are fairly limited. You have to find the sweet spots, the sections that have some clarity and consistent flow. Too far upstream and they are too much like prairie streams, too far downstream and they are too slow and muddy. The Salt River below Mark Twain has smallmouth mainly because the lake resulted in changing the river below to more suitable smallmouth habitat; it was probably too muddy that far downstream to support much of a population before, but there were smallmouth farther upstream in the watershed. Smallmouth populations change over time in the Ozarks, too. I haven't fished EVERY Ozark stream, though I've probably fished more of them than most. And some I only fished 30-45 years ago, and populations could have changed considerably in that time. In my lifetime, I've seen smallmouth populations crash in some streams, especially those where the spotted bass were non-native but invasive. And I've seen the smallie population get a lot better in a few, for somewhat mysterious reasons. Last year I fished two long sections of two streams that were mostly new to me--I'd floated parts of these long sections, but it had been 30 plus years ago in one of them, and nearly 50 years ago in the other. So they were virtually new to me. On both, I would consider the smallmouth fishing to have been about average. On one the numbers we caught were pretty good, but the size was lacking. On the other, numbers were just okay but several really good fish were caught. Both were four day floats. But only fishing a section once doesn't really tell you much. Did the fishing happen to be faster than normal or slower than normal those two trips? Heck, getting back to the original subject, I haven't fished Crooked Creek enough to REALLY judge how good it can be. But, I have some confidence that I can go to an unfamiliar river, and if the conditions are normal and stable on that river, I can usually figure the fish out and get some idea of how good it can be. On the other hand, I did a float on a section of the Bourbeuse earlier this summer that I'd only been on a couple times before, and that had been 30 years ago. It was pretty poor fishing back then, and this time it was the WORST fishing I've had in 40 years; I caught 2 10 inch spotted bass and a 12 inch smallmouth all day. Is it REALLY that bad? I know that there are sections of upper Current River that are poor smallmouth fishing simply because they are too cold for good smallmouth populations, but I have no explanation for that section of the Bourbeuse; it looks no different from sections above and below it where I've caught plenty of fish.

Heck, I don't know anymore. I used to know one that I thought had to be the best, but it's declined considerably. I catch more fish from Big River than any other stream on average, but that's just because I've fished it so much for 60 years that I pretty much know what I'm doing on it more than any other. I've always said that it's a whole lot easier to tell somebody which is the WORST than which is the best, because there are a bunch of stream sections that are very good, but not many that are very bad.

I don't know why the tournament organizations don't just set up virtual tournaments. Set all these young techies up in a big arena with all their electronics in front of them and it all being videoed on big screens, and let them go to town staring at their screens and playing a tournament video game. Because that's about all this is. But hey, these companies are meeting a demand for gadgetry. If you got the money...

It's not like Crooked Creek gets enough fishing pressure... Back in the 1970s or so, Crooked Creek had gotten the reputation of being the best smallmouth stream in the Ozarks, with magazine articles touting "numerous 3-5 pound smallmouth". I believe much of this started because a handful of the guide businesses on the White River found out they could drum up some extra business by guiding smallmouth floats on Crooked Creek, but there were writers who wrote glowing articles about how great it was. I remember one article in particular that talked about floating the lower portion of the creek, describing it as low water levels and brushy and log-jammed and full of cottonmouths but terrific fishing because few people braved it. I was and still am very skeptical about that old article...because TYPICALLY the lower portion of Crooked, from a few miles downstream from Yellville all the way to just a couple miles above the White, goes almost bone dry by mid-summer. There are only isolated pools, and LONG stretches with no water at all. That lower portion of Crooked is the most spectacular example of a losing stream in the Ozarks. In the flowing portions upstream, even at its lowest, it still flows 60-90 cfs when the lower section has no flow at all. I've fished it a few times, and caught some really nice smallmouth, but I wouldn't consider it anywhere near the best stream in the Ozarks now, and it probably wasn't then. I think those 3-5 pound smallmouth were at best guesstimates of 1.5 to 4 pounders. And it just ain't that big of a stream; only about 25 miles are commonly floatable. So I really question why AGF should see fit to give it more publicity.

One of the differences I've found between trout and smallmouth is that you can fish closer to trout. How many times have you fished the eddy line or the drop off at the bottom of a riffle for trout from no more than 10 or 20 feet away? In clear water, that simply doesn't work with smallmouth. In clear wading streams, often you need to be making 20-30 yard casts. If wading upstream, you need to be casting into the pool above from within the riffle, not waiting until you get into the pool. Smallmouth feed aggressively, but they are also very wary and aware of what is going on around them. On a stream like the upper Bourbeuse with its murky water, you can get by with casting closer, BUT even then, the fish might not be seeing you but they'll be hearing your feet crunch on the gravel bottom. Other than that, without knowing exactly which streams you're fishing and watching you fishing them, it's tough to say what you're doing wrong. This time of year, smallmouth should be easy to catch. In warm water they feed actively and are not picky about what they eat. The lures you're using should be producing at least some fish. I will say that none of the lures you're fishing are ones I'd fish in wading size creeks, but that's just me. When I go to one of my wade fishing creeks, I basically throw one small box in my pack with three or four walk the dog topwaters and maybe a smallish plopper type, and that's all I need. Wade stealthily, make long casts, don't worry too much about accuracy because if the smallmouth don't know you're there, they'll sense and come after a lure 5-10 feet away from their holding spot. Fish these topwaters fast and don't give them a chance to inspect them; you're seeking purely reaction strikes.

I just don't worry much about rod weights. I basically use a 4 weight to cast dry flies, a 5 weight to cast nymphs, and a 6 weight to cast streamers. If I'm going to fish anything but a small creek and can only use one rod, it will be a 5 weight...if it's a small stream I might go down to the 4 weight, or a my 7 ft. 3 weight on really small, closed in creeks. I can cast streamers, if I have to, on the 5 weight. My all around do anything rod is a St. Croix Legend Ultra 5 weight...love that rod.

It's kinda funny how many people complain about the price of lures, and swear they won't buy a $7 or $15 lure...yet they use soft plastics all the time, just as you're saying you'll use a lot of Ned Rigs. Think about it. A package of the average soft plastic, with maybe 10 in the package, costs as much as a lot of lures. And how many of those 10 soft plastics will you go through in ONE DAY? Not to mention...how many jig heads and hooks and sinkers will you lose in a day? How many packages of soft plastics and jig heads and other terminal tackle will you go through in a year? How many hard baits do you lose? If it's a topwater lure, you probably won't lose but one or two in a year if a fish breaks them off. If it's crankbaits, probably a few more...how many of those Rebel Craws did you lose last year? The point is, you'll probably spend a lot more on soft plastics than you would have if you'd used nothing but those $7-20 hard baits, all the while thinking you're saving money. I just checked, and one of the swimbaits I tend to use a lot, the Keitech Fat Swing Impact, sells for about 70 cents apiece. If the swimbait bite is on, I will go through a dozen or more of them in a day, plus losing one or two of the jig heads I put them on at about the same price, if not more, apiece. That's a good $10 it cost me in one day. But if it's a day when deep diving crankbaits are the ticket, I MIGHT lose one or two of them at $10 or so apiece, and if it's a topwater day, I almost certainly will end the day with the same one I tied on that morning.

Yeah, the salmon thing is a big deal, with a simple answer but a near impossible solution. Everybody knows that as long as all the dams are there, the salmon aren't coming back. But the dams are too sacred, so they keep trying to nibble around the edges of the problem with things they think they can do something about, like invasive smallmouth eating salmon fingerlings.

I've floated and fished the New several times. Gorgeous river and the rapids are fun in a solo canoe, too...but I've never been impressed with the fishing. I do better on Ozark streams.

Barlow has a gravel bar access, if I remember correctly. May or may not be able to launch your boat with the water high. There are other Forest Service accesses, but the only access with a ramp is Anna Adams MDC access. It's all good water.

First of all...are you sure you can put in at 133? From what I've seen on Facebook, the owners of the property have shut off all access recently. Second, to get the most out of the gauges, stop going by level in feet, and go by discharge in cubic feet per second. It's a universal measure, while level is different for every gauge. And if you use flow in cfs, you can find out what the normal flow is for the date. Right now it's at 3930 cfs. That's a heck of a lot of water. And even assuming no more rain, it will only be down to something like 2500 to 3000 cfs by Saturday. Normal flow is around 450 cfs. It may or may not be muddy, but it's going to be moving fast, and certainly very murky at least. Muddy water is pretty much a no-go for me. I want at least 18 inches of visibility. Only advice I'd have is to look for fish in eddies along the bank, on the downstream end of islands, and as Seth said, around the mouths of creeks. Bigger crankbaits and spinnerbaits to find them, then slow down with jig and trailer type lures to see if there are more than one where you find one.

My canoes look way worse than that. Looks like the vinyl outer layer has worn through but not the next layer, or you'd see holes down into the foam in the center. Skid plates applied now will keep that from happening, but I hate putting them on until I absolutely have to, because they do affect the speed of the boat and add a bit of weight. I assume you can still buy skid plate kits, but the last time I just got some G-Flex epoxy and kevlar cloth and used that. And the only reason I did that was because I had a wide area with several cracks and holes down into the foam layer, so I needed to cover up the whole area. In the past, I've just filled in the holes with the two part epoxy for plastics that you can buy at the big box hardware stores.

That looks almost exactly like a hybrid I caught on Big River a few years ago. Mine was 21 inches, didn't weigh it.

They can and do, with both parent species or each other. That's a big part of the problem. It's getting to where there are few pure smallmouth left in the lower portions of the Meramec river system; they've all been genetically polluted with spotted bass genetics. The hybrids have a bit better top end size than pure spotted bass, probably not as big a top end size potential as the smallmouth. They don't fight any harder than either species.

I feel ya. Mary had us spend a bunch of money rebuilding raised beds, refurbishing a little greenhouse, and getting water lines run to irrigate, that we had inherited from the former owners of our place in Montana last summer, and this spring she bought a whole pile of seeds and sprouts to plant in them. I told her last year that I was fine with her gardening, but I didn't want to plant or to weed. I ended up digging a bunch of holes and sticking plants in them, anyway, because she had a knee replacement and then bursitis in her hip and couldn't do some of the squatting and such necessary to plant stuff. But I don't really mind. It's kinda cool to grow stuff and then get to eat it. Except that now we're back in MO, and the lettuce will be ready to pick before we get back to Montana.

Sure wish it would work out for me to take part in one of these tournaments. I started playing again about a year ago out here in Montana. Joined an athletic club with a great gym, they play pickup basketball 2 hours a day every day of the week, plus 2 hours for "distinguished gentlemen" on Tuesdays and Fridays before the two hours of adult all ages. I hadn't played in two years. I started playing with the older guys, in terrible basketball shape even though they only played half court 4 on 4. Took several months and a bunch of minor injuries to get myself in shape. Now I play the two hours with the old guys, plus one other day a week with the younger guys full court, plus on most Fridays I play an hour with the young guys AFTER playing two hours with the old guys. Other than annoying plantar fasciatus, I'm feeling pretty good for a 72 year old! (I'm not the oldest of the old guys playing...there are two that are in their 80s!) When I come back to MO, I play two hours a night two nights a week at the nearest YMCA, full court, all ages. I need another place to play, because I've found that I need three days a week of playing to keep myself in good shape. It took a while, but I got my 3 point shot back (I'm the streakiest shooter alive; I'll hit five in a row and then miss the next 6; works out to 40 plus percent, which isn't bad), and I'm getting a little better at driving to the hoop and pulling up for 10 footers. The biggest thing you lose with old age is the balance you need to move quickly and effectively; I'm still reasonably quick, but don't have enough control of my body.

I'm actually a little jealous. I'm out here in Montana, and was waiting with great anticipation for the Mother's Day caddis hatch on the Yellowstone. A week ago, the caddis started to appear. The river was in pretty good shape, and warm weather was forecast but not too warm. And then it rained about as hard as it ever rains in Montana, and it was a rain just warm enough to melt some high snow. And it was followed by two days of 75-80 degree temps. The caddis got thicker, but the river blew out. Now today it's 37 degrees and snowing, the caddis have obviously disappeared, and the river is high enough that even this bit of cold weather won't bring it down enough to be fishable. The Mother's Day caddis hatch happens with all conditions right about once every four years. This ain't gonna be one of those years!

Oh, that brings back memories. Back when tournaments first came onto the scene, we started a local bass club. I was fresh out of high school but I knew how to catch bass back then (ain't worth a crap at it on reservoirs now). We didn't fish for money, we just got together for the competition and bragging rights. Got a 10 dollar trophy if you won. None of us had what passed for bass boats back then (and the "new" bass boats would be laughed off the lake these days). Heck, some of us fished from canoes with a trolling motor, and I had a 12 ft. aluminum johnboat for fishing the lakes. There were only about 15 of us in the club, so usually no more than 6 or 7 boats, and we mostly fished the local public or semi-public lakes like Bismarck Lake and Sunnen Lake; we fished Wappapello and Clearwater once a year. Well, Terre du Lac hadn't been a thing for very long at that point and they were still trying to sell lots, so they contacted us to help organize a tournament to publicize their lakes. So of course we fished it. You could fish any of the three biggest lakes. One lake had the reputation of being terrible fishing. One was muddy. So I fished the third one, along with about 10 other boats. We just all kinda lined up and went around the lake fishing the banks...over and over and over. I just used my favorite crankbait and kept casting, and at the end of the day, I had the biggest bag...on that lake. A couple guys fished the muddy lake and blew us out of the water.

Last fall I wrote here about trying my smallmouth baitcasting tackle out here on the Yellowstone River for trout, and hooking (and losing at the bitter end) the largest trout by far I'd ever hooked anywhere but Alaska. I called it sacrilege because I was almost embarrassed to be fishing casting tackle on an iconic fly fishing river. We've been out here since early March, and it's been a pretty sucky spring so far. Cold. Snow. And WIND. So far I've actually had one nice day a couple weeks ago that I got on the river by myself in my little Water Master raft, and one day floating in the little drift boat with Mary. Both days, the fishing was pretty decent. Both days, I took nothing but fly tackle. I hadn't fished the casting rod since one more day last fall. We got up this morning, and I checked the forecast. I had two options I was thinking about for today. One was fishing. The other was maybe fishing maybe not...I belong to an athletic club in Bozeman, and there's open pickup basketball there every day of the week from noon to 2:00. There's also pickup basketball for older guys (like me) from 10:00 to noon on Tuesdays and Fridays. I almost never miss the old guys game, and had played yesterday. Sometimes I stay afterwards to play with the young guys for an hour or so...the old guys play half court and it's not as much of a workout as playing with a bunch of 20 somethings full court. But yesterday, not enough young guys showed up after I'd played with the old guys (by the way, I'm 72, and there are three or four men playing that are older than I am...one is in his 80s!). So I thought maybe I'd load up my waders and fly tackle along with my gym shoes and clothes, and head over to the athletic club. If there weren't enough guys again, I'd drive on out to the lower Madison and wade fish. I checked the river at the house...it's been very murky for the last couple days from a somewhat warm heavy rain over the weekend. It was still murky but fishable, and had come up a few inches during that time but seeemed to be dropping a bit. What to do...Mary said, "Just get on the river. I'll pick you up at 3:30 wherever you want to fish." Well, it seems the older I get, the more piddling around I do before I actually get on the river. I checked to see if the Water Master would fit into the back of the 4-Runner, so that Mary could use it to shuttle me. Had to rummage around to find a carabiner that I could use to click into the latch on the hatchback of the 4-Runner...last summer I'd tried hauling a couple kayaks in the back, and found out that the darned open hatchback gives you that loud warning ding-ding-ding without over stopping, which is exceedingly annoying on a 30 minute drive, but if you push a carabiner into the open latch on it, the latch clicks closed and the car is fooled into thinking the door is shut. Stored the carabiner and a length of rope in the 4-Runner, unloaded the raft from it and into my old Chevy truck, gathered all my gear, and at the last minute, grabbed the only jerkbait I still had and my baitcasting rod and threw them in. As I drove through town, I stopped at the butcher shop to get a good sandwich made for lunch. Stopped again at the only sporting goods store in town that might have actual lures instead of flies, and bought a couple countdown Rapalas. Stopped again at the quick shop for gas and grabbed a sweet tea and a couple donuts to eat on the way to the put-in. And finally made it to the river about 10:15. There were a couple guides and their clients getting their boats and tackle ready, so I threw on my waders and asked them if they minded if I went ahead and put in, and they said to go ahead, they weren't quite ready. So soon I was finally on the river. I didn't rig up the baitcasting rod in their presence! I stopped at the first riffle eddy to drift nymphs along the seam. Nothing. Stopped at the next one, hooked a whitefish and then a heavy fish that turned out to be a mountain sucker, one of the more annoying fish to hook, because they are covered with a snotty slime that hardens and sticks to your hands, your net, your line...yuck. No trout, but I did briefly hook a 10 inch rainbow that leaped 4 feet out of the water twice like a fishy maniac. Okay...might as well try the jerkbait. I put on one of the new Rapalas. Fished it for a half mile before hooking and losing a decent brown. Shortly afterward I caught a 12 inch rainbow, and then a 17 inch rainbow. Stopped at another riffle corner to nymph. Nothing. Back to the Rapala. Nothing. The day was gorgeous. Sunny, 60 degrees, no wind. The fishing wasn't. I stopped for lunch and savored my excellent sandwich, watching a stretch of bank just below where if trout are rising anywhere, they will be there. Saw one small rise. Midges were sparsely flitting across the surface. An occasional mayfly fluttered by. Not much happening. Might as well keep fishing the Rapala...nope. Why not put on that Pointer 75 that I'd hooked that giant trout on? So I did. I started down that bank I'd been watching, and immediately caught a 15 inch rainbow and then a 19 inch brown. Hooked a slightly bigger brown and lost it on the next stretch of similar bank. Caught another nice rainbow. Fishing wasn't fast by any means, but the quality of the fish was making me happy. And then the sky began to cloud over. And then the wind made its presence known. I was drifting down a fairly fast rip-rapped bank and getting no action, until a huge brown struck right at the boat, nearly jerking the rod out of my hands. I saw its side turn as it struck, had it on briefly, and lost it. And then nothing. And then the wind really cut loose. Blowing out of the northeast, which means blowing straight upstream, 30 miles an hour. The temperature dropped into the upper 40s. I was done. I rowed hard against the wind the last mile to the take-out, getting there in plenty of time to wait for Mary to show up at 3:30. Tonight as I write this...it's snowing.

All you have to do is go to some of the fishing groups on Facebook to see how little so many people know about identifying fish. And even more appalling is how many of them are sure they know and are completely wrong, but will argue with you about it even after you carefully explain to them why the fish isn't what they think it is and instead is a different species. I wrote an article for my blog several years ago on how to tell spots from largemouth at a glance. I can tell them 100% as soon as I lift them from the water, and can't remember the last time I wasn't sure about a bass in MO. It isn't those things that so many anglers go by like tooth patches and maxillary in relation to the eye or shallow or deep notch between the dorsal fins. It's two simple things about the general appearance; the rows of small dark spots, one on each scale, below the dark blotchy horizontal band, that form thin dark lines. And it's the area of scales between the dark horizontal band and the lateral line, which are always rather prominently dark-edged (well, technically the base of each scale is dark, but the effect is to make those scales look like they have dark edges.) In largemouth, there may be small darker spots on the scales below the horizontal band, but they don't connect with each other to form those thin dark lines. And the scales just below the lateral line in largemouth are not dark-edged. I once took a lady from the Nature Conservancy on a float trip on upper Big River. She had never fished in her life, and knew nothing about fish. It was one of those days when you couldn't keep the spots off, and the largemouth were also active, as well as smallmouth. I probably caught 70 or so altogether. So when I caught the first few, I told her what they were. She asked how I could tell and I explained, but said, "I'll bet, if we catch enough today, by the end of the day you'll be identifying them as soon as I pull them from the water. You can guess each time I catch one, and I will only tell you if you are wrong or right; I won't tell you why anymore." And by the end of the day she was identifying all three species flawlessly. Her only failure was when I caught a couple hybrids near the end of the day. https://riversandart.blogspot.com/2019/08/how-to-tell-spotted-bass-from.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawJkG2ZleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHtEmEZFMFarpAFFkJv_FlG-94BVqI7VprLwJwIu_5qnt1nk_TREP3Se4BPyT_aem_bL2zNGSrXqm4FfqpDpcUdw

A whole lot of anglers don't know the difference. But I think that the agents would be using something simple to identify them, even if it's not exactly correct...the tooth patch on the tongue. 10-15% of largemouth have a tooth patch, but it's an easy ID feature and some largemouth mortality from using it is probably considered acceptable. And there's one simple way to avoid getting ticketed if you can't tell the difference...don't keep them.

Kinda fun to see this old post resurrected. What strikes me is that of all these stories, everybody remembers almost everything about catching that one fish. There are fish that are like that; you remember the exact spot, the strike, what lure you were using, the weather that day. In 60 plus years of fishing for stream bass, I've amassed a lot of memorable fish, fish that I remember almost everything about them. I've actually sat down with my topographic maps that cover all of my home river, Big River, and traced my way down the stream pinpointing the exact spots where I caught most of the 19 inch plus smallies I've caught over all those years. And whenever I get on the river now, I get a special feeling of anticipation as I approach every one of those spots. And maybe not surprisingly, there are plenty of spots where I've caught more than one big one. In my original post, that 4 pounder I caught on the three day float in that slight narrowing of the channel between two long pools...over the years I've caught 6 memorable fish on that exact spot. The most memorable, though, was a 17 incher with a deformed back that, if it had been straight, would have added an inch to its length. Why was it so memorable? Because I caught the same fish from the same spot the next summer, and it had gained an inch. And the third summer, I looked for it the three or four times I floated that stretch, but didn't see it again...until I paddled upstream from the access below one day during deer season. It was an exceptionally warm couple of weeks in November, and that day the fish were out and hitting topwaters like it was August. And at the head of the pool just below the lower of the two pools where that narrow spot separated them, I caught that same fish the third time...and it had gained another inch.