Al Agnew

Phil, ever since you mentioned it to me, I've been thinking about getting into that league. I just started playing again a couple weeks ago, having not played since Covid started. I'm out here in Montana and the air is a little thinner, and I wasn't in great shape anyway, since basketball is usually my main exercise. I showed up at the gym with everybody complete strangers to me...the guy who invited me said they had good players and not so good players. Well, most everybody, except for two guys, were in their teens, 20s, or at most 30s, and nearly all of them were good. I was able to pair up with one or the other of the other older guys on opposite teams so we could guard each other. I was a complete clutz after not playing for over a year. But by my fourth day of playing (2 hours, full court!), I'm starting to get into shape, starting to not feel awkward, and my shot is coming around, except after the first hour when I start to get tired. But it sure would be nice to play with guys my own age (dinosaurs).

Yup, classic hybrid!

I'll go ahead a paste my reply from your original post in the wrong place, just to further the discussion...Personally, I like my topwater rods to be shorter than my other rods. My canoe rod is 5'3" medium power, just a typical fast action. My jetboat rod is 6 ft. medium power as well. I just like the way the shorter rods work in using walk the dog topwaters. Others' mileage may vary. But from the canoe, the shorter rod really does make a difference in how easy it is to walk those lures; the shorter rod means a better rod angle with tip down, while sitting in the canoe. The rod you made sounds like it might work well as a crankbait rod.

Personally, I like my topwater rods to be shorter than my other rods. My canoe rod is 5'3" medium power, just a typical fast action. My jetboat rod is 6 ft. medium power as well. I just like the way the shorter rods work in using walk the dog topwaters. Others' mileage may vary. But from the canoe, the shorter rod really does make a difference in how easy it is to walk those lures; the shorter rod means a better rod angle with tip down, while sitting in the canoe. The rod you made sounds like it might work well as a crankbait rod.

Being sure doesn't mean being right. Nothing Biden has done at this point has reduced the supply of oil, nor raised its price.

All the floatable Ozark streams have SOME channel catfish. But the ones that are a little more fertile (slightly murky water) should have better populations. Like Gavin said, the St. Francis is a great catfish river. Lower Black below Clearwater Dam is good. Meramec, Big, Bourbeuse are all good. Gasconade is excellent. James is good. I think any of those would be better than Bryant.

Mitch, not everybody has agendas, but most people believe the people they want to believe. Your default position seems to always be to believe one side. My default position is usually to believe the other side. But at some point, you have to read or listen to both sides and make an informed decision. In this case, I think the real science is on the side that banning DDT in the U.S. was on balance a good thing, and I've read both sides.

As much of a fish nerd as I am, I just can't get too interested in microfishing...I'd rather take the seine and see what I can dredge up. But when I was a kid I microfished. My grandpa had a concrete tank that he kept his crappie fishing minnows in. He was always trapping creek minnows, and the tank was always full. I'd get a stick, some of his fishing line, and a pin, bend the pin into a very small bend, put bits of earthworm on it, and fish in his tank. I even imagined that the minnows I caught were something else. Creek chubs were giant largemouth bass. Stonerollers were brown trout. Bleeding shiners were rainbow trout. I'd make up species for any others he had that I caught, too, but those were the most common. 😆

Yeah, I scrapped the mobile app as soon as I tried it. I just bookmarked the regular web address that took me to the statewide streamflow table on my phone, and went from there.

It will take some getting used to, and they are still working out the bugs and adding features. There are things about it I like...it's easier to change the time frame from the 7 day default period shown on the graphs to 30 days or a year, and the it's a lot more precise on levels and flows every 15 minutes for the last week, and the median flow. But I don't like having to use the map to click on an individual gage, I like the statewide table of gages by river system a lot better on the old one. I wonder how long they will keep the old system, because I could see using it first and then clicking on the new page for certain things.

Worst thing is when the current is so strong it washes the trailer off the side of the ramp before you can get the boat on it. Did that once at the Riverview MDC Access ramp on the Meramec.

Yeah, it's kinda tough to take something that has become automatic for me after all these years, and try to break it down in a written description of what I actually do. You're right, in many places you can just get the canoe into the slow current on the other bank, but on my rivers that means you have to make a fairly long, cross-current cast to the good bank. I'd rather keep the canoe close to the good bank and fish more parallel to it, so that my lure is in the good stuff longer. One thing is for sure, low water and little wind makes it all a whole lot easier.

Exactly. Since I don't like to get out and wade much, if I need to fish the slow stuff, I look for spots where I can get the canoe into an eddy, or up against a log or rock, even slide it up onto a water willow weed bed or up against the bank. But most of my warm weather fishing is with the "power" stuff. Wrench explained it well. The rod never leaves my (left) hand, and at the end of a cast, if the canoe position needs to be corrected, I grab the paddle and make the one-handed strokes I need to do so. Usually, I'm looking ahead to figure out the current line where I want to be, and getting into it with plenty of time. Once I'm there, the positioning strokes are mainly keeping the canoe pointed the way I want it to be. And most of them are backstrokes at various angles, or as Wrench said, sculling strokes. Just one example...I'm drifting down a bank. The current is faster toward the middle, away from the bank. I'm casting ahead, at an angle to the bank or almost parallel to it. I've already realized that the slower current is close to the bank. I'm wanting to keep the canoe with the back end of it in the slower current, because if the front end starts to get into the slower stuff and the back end starts to veer out toward the middle, the canoe is going to soon be sideways to the current. So my corrective stroke is to get that rear end back into the slower current. Say I'm fishing the left bank. My usual corrective stroke would be a backstroke with my right hand, turning the paddle blade so that I'm pushing the paddle outward, maybe even reaching back way behind my seat and pushing the stroke outward more than forward (pushing the paddle forward is a back stroke because it moves the canoe backwards, just to avoid confusion). On the other hand, if I'm drifting the right bank and the front end starts to get into slower water, my corrective stroke is still on the right side, since I don't want to lay the rod down to switch hands, but now it's reaching way out from the canoe as well as behind me to start the stroke, and pulling the paddle forward and toward the canoe. Heck, in a solo canoe, I often scull, and if I'm sculling holding the paddle a bit behind my body, it's slowly turning the back end of the canoe in that direction as well as moving the whole canoe sideways. Or sculling with paddle in front of my body does the opposite. Probably way more than anybody wants to read.

Haven't ever seen any paddlefish in the upper portion of the river. Decent catfishing from Steelville downstream.

Yup...I think calling them white suckers is the best we can do. They just fit that better than anything else.

My grandpa and great uncle once left on a Thursday to go fishing somewhere pretty far away for the time, back in the late 1940s. They told my granny they would be back on Sunday. Sunday came and no sign of them. She was kinda used to that, though, so she didn't think much of it. By Thursday she was beginning to get a little worried, but what was she gonna do? Finally they showed up the next Sunday. When she confronted them, Grandpa said, "Well, I didn't say WHICH Sunday, did I?"

Well, they ain't as cheap as an inner tube, but if want something that's like tube fishing only a heck of a lot better, get a Water Master one person raft. Or one of the other brands that are very similar. This is the ONLY watercraft I've ever used that makes it exceedingly easy to fly fish from the craft by yourself. It's a big, oval-shaped "tube" with a platform on the rear part of the oval hole in the middle that you sit on, so you sit a lot higher, out of the water, but with your feet dangling in the water. You use swim fins to kick yourself around and keep yourself in position to fish, hands free. You can have a stripping basket across the front that is an accessory, but I don't use it. When you come to places shallow enough to wade, you just stand up in the hole...don't have to worry about the thing drifting away because it still surrounds you. If you need to go somewhere faster and easier than what you can do kicking with the swim fins, you just raise your feet out of the water and onto a strap going across the front, and use the attached oars. The only drawback is trying to walk in shallow water with the swim fins on. And oh, yeah, it's not the best thing to use on really windy days. But other than that, it's SWEET. I use mine out in Montana on the Yellowstone River, where it's the perfect one person fishing craft, nothing else comes close. It wouldn't be quite as good on Ozark streams because there's a lot of almost dead water where you'd have to turn around and kick yourself backwards to go down the pool fishing, but I've really thought about getting one for Missouri anyway. It also fits into the bed of my pickup blown up and ready to fish, and only weighs about 38 pounds.

Mitch, those "disastrous effects" are being pushed by people with agendas inimical to conservation in general. As has been pointed out, DDT was never banned across the globe, and is still being used in many tropical countries. It was banned in the U.S. I doubt that there was a single person that died in the U.S. due to DDT being banned. And if you're talking about "disastrous effects" of decisions, there may very well have been truly disastrous effects on human life if DDT HADN'T been banned in the U.S. and curtailed across the world. What would make you think that something that had that bad of effects on highly visible wildlife wouldn't have had serious but not so immediately obvious effects all across the food chain with continued widespread use? We see a lot of serious unintended consequences just about anytime there is extensive and widespread use of pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals that alter food chains and biological systems. It's always a balancing act between the good they do and the damage they do.

Mary and I loved "My Octopus Teacher". Fascinating.

You are probably right, but that last one still throws me. That's one heck of a big white sucker if that's what it is. Wish I did have my fish ID books available right now, because it really has me curious. The size, shape, and head shape just don't quite fit anything that is found in the Ozarks.

Nope. I've caught plenty of chubsuckers in seines while seining minnows for walleye fishing in the winter. They are shorter, thicker fish, and as you say they max out at 10 inches--I never saw one over 6 inches myself.

Yup. When I'm in Montana, whenever anybody from Missouri visits I know I'm going to be rowing all day. I don't really mind it, and always plan on stopping at a lot of good looking spots and wading, but I can say from experience that it's pretty much impossible to fish and row. But after fishing by myself for 50 years from a canoe, I can do very well fishing while paddling. I may be a world champion one-handed paddler.

Dang, Ham...I'm pretty good at IDing fish, but those kinda have me stumped. I don't think either of the ones you're stumped on are redhorse at all. The first one looks like a really big white sucker, with the scales that get smaller toward the head. And that last one...if you were in Montana I'd call that a mountain sucker. The really long body and really long head look just like the mountain suckers I catch out here in Montana fly fishing. And it for sure doesn't look like any of the redhorse species. It just doesn't match any sucker species that I know of in Missouri. I'm in Montana right now and don't have my fish ID books, but I can't find anything on the internet that both looks like that one and lives anywhere near Missouri or Arkansas.

I fish out of a solo canoe most of the time...don't care for kayaks. But the times I HAVE fished from a kayak, one of the things I did was bring along a short, single blade canoe paddle. I use the double blade for simply getting somewhere in a hurry (I also use a double blade in the canoe if I'm going to be paddling upstream, or paddling through a lot of long, dead pools), but when drifting downriver fishing, the single blade is far more precise in keeping the boat in good fishing position. You can use it one-handed without ever putting down your rod, and make a lot of one-handed draw and pry type strokes that are next to impossible with a kayak paddle unless you use both hands. Second thing that I learned long ago is to anticipate. Read the water ahead of you, pick out the spots you absolutely want to fish, and plan ahead to put the boat in position to fish those spots...don't wait until you're on top of them. And use anything you can to slow or stop yourself. I'm good at running up to logs and sticking a foot out to hold myself, or getting into little eddies, or running the canoe up onto rocks. Third thing is the lures you use. It's tough to fish slow stuff on the bottom from a moving canoe or kayak. It's one reason I tend to use a lot more fast moving lures like crankbaits and spinnerbaits.

I've always had the idea that some individual fish are genetically more susceptible to being caught. They are more attracted to fishing lures, which to be honest are NOT perfect imitations of natural food. I suspect that other individual fish are genetically NOT programmed to attack most of the lures we use. In other words, there are probably fish that are basically uncatchable, except under extraordinary circumstances. Some of the biggest bass I've seen and caught were seen or caught when they tried to take the lure away from a smaller bass. It's possible that was the only way they'd be interested in that lure. Studies have shown that bass learn to avoid lures. One study I remember used several lures, and one of them was a Rattletrap. They learned to avoid the Rattletrap more quickly than any other lure in the study, probably because of the loud rattle being distinctive--as I remember, none of the other lures had loud rattles. Maybe the reason that certain lures are hot for a year or two after they first come onto the scene and then go cold is that most of the fish that were genetically programmed to attack those lures were caught enough times that they either died, were eaten, or finally learned to avoid them.