Al Agnew

Five years for my wife. Basically she is now at the point where she has no more risk of it returning than anybody who hasn't had it.

Yesterday, I was thinking about floating the river today. The weather forecast looked good, except for the wind--10-15 mph. Since I would be in the solo canoe and I knew the river was going to be high, adding the wind factor meant fishing would be difficult. And I had stuff I really needed to get done this week. So I ended up talking myself out of it just before I went to bed. But I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking about fishing. I thought of one of my favorite float stretches, and then of a certain spot on that stretch, where a tributary comes in. It was a spot that SHOULD hold some good fish this time of year under these conditions. And suddenly, lying there in bed, I thought, "I bet there is a big one RIGHT THERE." When I woke up this morning, I immediately remembered that thought. And I told Mary that I'd changed my mind...I wanted to float that stretch. The river was as high as I expected. The wind was a little worse than I thought it would be. And fishing was difficult. I was hoping that the fish would be chasing spinnerbaits, and it's easy to fish spinnerbaits from the canoe under adverse conditions. But by the time I came to that spot, 2 miles into the float, I'd caught on a couple smallmouth, okay fish, 13-14 inches, but not what I'd been hoping for. As I approached THE spot, though, I caught a 14 incher on a swimbait. So I carefully positioned the canoe out of the current and tossed the swimbait into the spot. Strike. Another 14 incher. Toss it in again, a bit downstream. Strike. Heavy fish! When I saw it, I knew it was over 20 inches. Got it in, measured it carefully...21 1/4th inches. It's been at least 10 years since I've caught one that big. I should always follow my hunches! The fishing remained slow and difficult the rest of the trip, but that fish made my day, and my year so far.

I was planning on doing a float on one of my favorite river sections tomorrow. It's a long stretch, so I was going to get on the river shortly after daylight, and planned to float until nearly dark. But this morning I got up, puttered around the house for a while, and then thought to see what the forecast was for tomorrow. Ugh! Warm, but cloudy, and worse, 20-30 mph wind! Forget it. So I told Mary I was going today instead...it was still going to be a bit windy, but not like tomorrow. And with rain in the forecast for the rest of the week, today was about my only good choice. So...go on the long float, or a shorter one? I really wanted to do the long float, but it was already after 8 AM, and it's more than a half hour drive to get to the put-in. But I couldn't stand it. I was going to do that long one. I didn't get on the river until nearly 9:30. Told Mary to pick me up at 6 PM. I knew I was going to have to keep moving, but I hoped that the fish were doing what they had done just a week or two later last year, sitting in little eddies just off the main current, and eating spinnerbaits. If that was the case, I could cherry pick the best spots as I went by and surely catch some good fish. After the first mile with zero fish, I knew they weren't on the spinnerbait pattern. The wind was already blowing and pushing the canoe around, but I was able to make a couple quality casts at a spot that always holds good fish, a deeply submerged log jam off a steep mud bank just above a tributary creek. I tossed a swim bait in and came out with a 17 inch largemouth. But then the wind blew me into it, and there was no chance of getting anything else. I really wanted to keep fishing the swim bait, but the wind just made it nearly impossible to fish anything like that on the bottom. I switched to a Wiggle Wart and fished it for the next couple miles, with only one little spotted bass to show for it. Then, in a deep, rocky pool, I finally hooked a nice fish, a 16 inch smallmouth. But after that, the fishing went back to being terrible. I caught a few more fish, mostly 13-15 inch largemouth and one smallie that was about 13 inches. I kept switching back to the spinnerbait, hoping they'd turn on to it, and finally got a good strike that turned out to be a 15 inch spotted bass. But nothing was working well. I came to a long pool that is deep and rocky at the lower end. There was a flat near the head of the next riffle that looked a lot like the kind of spot I have found schools of smallmouth and spotted bass on the Meramec this time of year. I let the wind blow the canoe into the bank on one side and started making long casts all the way across the flat with the crankbait. Second cast, bingo...13 inch smallmouth. Next cast, another one. Next cast, a bigger one that got loose, a couple casts later, a 17 inch smallie! NOW I had it figured out! Nope. That was it for the flat. But I started looking for similar flats as I came to each pool. Problem was that I couldn't find any more good flats that were deep enough at the lower ends of the pools. The water was fairly clear, and I was pretty certain the fish wouldn't be on flats where you could easily see the bottom. I kept trying anyplace that looked like a possibility, including flats near the heads of the pools and big eddies well off the banks. Nothing. The day was passing quickly, and I was having to paddle through any pool where the wind was hitting, because it was almost impossible to fish either the crankbait or the swim bait in such places. I'd pick up a fish here and there, but not many, and no more good ones. Mary called, and I told her that I would be at the take-out by 5:30. I had in mind a couple spots that I wanted to concentrate a bit more on, so I put down the rod and paddled until I got to within a mile or so of the take-out. The spots I wanted to fish carefully were just too much in the wind. I tried, though. So I got to the take-out with 15 minutes to spare. I carried the canoe up the bank, piled all my gear next to it, took the lures off all my rods...except for the swim bait rod. I walked back down to the ramp...which was at the tail end of a deep pool with a deep flat right there. My second cast with the swim bait...a strike and a heavy fish! Smallmouth? Couldn't tell. Big, though. I got it in, and it was a spotted bass/smallmouth hybrid (a meanmouth, but I hate that term). All I had to measure it against was my rod, but I noted exactly where its snout came to on the rod with it's tail even with the end of the butt. When I got home I measured it...20 inches, give or take a quarter inch.

The old timers I knew who fished Black and Current rivers always knew the walleye would vacate their wintering pools around the 15th-20th of February and head for spawning riffles. They thought spawning was in full swing by the first of March.

Yeah, I was just talking about the species you're likely to catch in MO and AR. While there are brown bullheads here and there in the Ozarks, they are not common to my knowledge.

I got a couple pictures of the 19 incher, but they aren't worth showing. Didn't take any pictures of the fish I caught yesterday or today; I don't bother with taking a picture usually unless they are 19 inches or better. Which shows you that I didn't catch any big ones today, either. Caught a couple dozen, all of them between 13 and 15 inches except for one that was 16.5. First fish I caught, a 16 inch largemouth, was on a spinnerbait, everything else on crankbaits. Caught fish in a variety of different types of water, but scattered.

Forked tail equals channel or blue catfish. Doesn't matter whether they are little or big. Little catfish with forked tail and black spots--channel catfish every time. Square or rounded tail can be flathead, bullhead (yellow or black), or if small, could be a madtom of one species or another. Flathead should be pretty unmistakable, however. Big, wide, flat head and wide mouth, splotchy brown and yellow coloration, big adipose fin (the fleshy fin on the back near the tail). Little flatheads look pretty much like big ones. Bullheads are never splotchy, and have a short, round head. Little bullheads are black (even yellow bullheads). Madtoms never get more than about 4 inches, on most species the adipose fin connects with the tail fin, they are brownish and yellowish but most have dark bands across their backs.

Minner Dinner. Don't see anything wrong with eating creek chubs. Can't be any worse than sardines. I like sardines any way you can get them.

Having gotten vaccinated, last week I finally got to fish with somebody besides myself or Mary. Tuesday was the first day of fishing...warm day, but right after the snow melted so I kinda figured the river might be high and cold. But my buddy said it would be good. He was right. We didn't have a thermometer, so I don't know how cold the water was, but although the fish were still in their wintering pools, they were eager to take crankbaits, and I also fished a swimbait all day with good results. We didn't count the fish we caught, but it had to be more than 80, and the vast majority of them were over 13 inches. We had a good number of 16-17 inchers, at least a half dozen that were around 18 inches, and my biggest, a 19 incher. So when another buddy asked me to go with him on Friday, I jumped at the offer. Different stretch of the same river. It had been rather cool, and Friday was cloudy and very cool; in fact, it sleeted on us pretty good. And the fishing sucked. What few fish we caught were in wintering pools and in deeper water. I doubt that we caught a dozen all day. I hooked one that felt big, but lost it, and on the very next cast to the same spot caught a 17 inch largemouth on the swimbait. Other than that, we caught a couple 14-15 inch smallmouth and everything else was small. Water temp was about 44 degrees. So that brings us to today. I fished by myself, fished some of the same wintering pools we'd caught so many from last week. Most of the fish had moved out. Water temp was 46 degrees, climbed to nearly 50 degrees by late afternoon. I caught a few in each wintering pool I fished, but it was more like they were summer residents. Crankbait and swimbait worked for them, but the fishing was slow. Later in the day I fished some transitional water, pools that are still somewhat slow but not wintering pools. Picked up a fish now and then. Finally fished an area around a tributary, and found a few fish there as well, including the biggest of the day, a 17.5 inch smallmouth...those fish were apparently getting ready to ascend the trib. It's interesting that when these fish decide to move out, they move out seemingly all at once. Mary and I plan to go out tomorrow again, fishing a different section yet. We'll see what happens.

I have fond memories of Lahontan cutthroats. Not that I've ever caught one, but I was able to gather some photos of them from people in the Nevada Fish and Game Department that later I used for reference in completing my entry into the first ever Nevada trout stamp contest, which I won. That led me to making a trip to Reno to sign prints at a sports show, where the booth across the aisle from mine had a big smallmouth mounted and showing prominently. Which led to talking to the guys in the booth, who were at the end of their first year guiding a 6-day wild river smallmouth trip on the John Day River in Oregon, which led me to trading a painting for a trip for Mary and me, where I fell in love with the John Day... Oh, and I also made some money off the Nevada trout stamp! That was back in 1987.

I've actually done research on it, and the scientific literature is definitely lacking. The most common theory is that it has to do with what they are eating...especially crawdads have red pigment that gets concentrated in the fish. But I highly doubt that's right, because you see the red lips in the winter when crawdads aren't supplying much of a food source, and not so much in the summer when they are really eating crawdads. Also have see it attributed to nosing around on the bottom trying to stir up crawdads and such, but highly doubt that, too, for much the same reasons. And a few sources just say that it's mainly a function of water temperature, with their lips getting red in colder water--which does nothing to answer the question of WHY. I guess their lips get chapped. Wrench, if you have a better answer I'm all ears (can you have all ears when you're reading instead of listening?)

Guys, the red eye thing on bass is the same as their body color changes. The same individual fish can have red eyes or dark eyes. The red pigment in the eyes is always there, but is often obscured by the pigment cells called melanocytes, which have inclusions of pigment that expand and contract. If they expand the cell turns dark, and in the eyes, the dark cells obscure the red pigmented cells. If they contract, the red shows. Most of the time but certainly not all the time, red-eyed smallmouth are light in color overall. You see the red eyes more in the winter, when the fish are often light and brassy in color. Why? My theory is that the gravel bottom is much cleaner in the winter as the algae that covers it in the summer dries up, so the bass turn lighter to blend into it. The melanocytes in the eyes just "go along" with the rest of the melanocytes over the body. But the cells can operate in groups instead of all over the body, hence the vertical bars and other markings showing up strongly at times and not showing up at all at other times. I've often wondered if the bass have any conscious control over their pigment cells, or do the cells react to stimuli without the bass having control of it.

When I first saw the pictures, I was certain it was a sauger. Sure hoping the DNA shows it to be one. You'd make the second state record holder I know!

I'm not 100% certain, but I think it's a redspotted sunfish, Lepomis miniatus. A juvenile female, probably. Redspotted sunfish are found in the Jacks Fork, though I've never caught one.

Well, some fairly easy walks that really give you the feel of the St. Francois Mountains...Elephant Rocks State Park--paved walking trail through the huge red granite boulders. People wonder how those boulders, which are mostly BIGGER than elephants, got there. They've always been there. The granite was once one huge mass. Stress cracks appeared in the mass. Weathering widened the cracks to chasms, separating the granite into the boulders, and rounded the boulders. Really cool place to see. Millstream Gardens Conservation Area--a paved trail to the overlook of the huge shut-ins is about a quarter mile. It's the St. Francis River running through the shut-ins, site of the whitewater races each spring and the wildest whitewater in Missouri (unless you have guts enough to tackle some of the much smaller creeks that also have shut-ins after a big rain). Absolutely gorgeous spot. You can also drive to the parking lot at the upper end of the shut-ins and look downriver and see the beginning of the canyon anyway, if you can't walk a quarter mile. "Shut-ins" is an Ozark term for a deep, narrow canyon, and shut-ins are typical of streams in the St. Francois Mountains, where the streams run through volcanic rock that is more than billion years old and very hard and highly resistant to erosion. Johnson Shut-ins State Park--another shut-ins, this one on the East Fork of Black River, a smaller stream than the St. Francois. Pretty easy walk to view the shut-ins. And as a bonus, you get to see where the Ameren Electric Taum Sauk upper reservoir failed and the water scoured a path down the side of Proffit Mountain and through the shut-ins. Other than that, just drive the roads and look at the "mountains". Far different landscape than the rest of the Ozarks.

Mary loves winter. She loves snow and ice, and short days. I'm just the opposite. If we had her wish, we'd live in Montana full time. If I had my wish..................well, heck, I kinda like it the way we have it. We plan to visit a warmer clime sometime during the winter from now on, for a week or three. We have friends, a couple who are childless like us, and they go to Florida for however long they feel like it, taking a camping trailer and just moving from one area to the next whenever they get tired of the spot they're in. We just bought a camping trailer ourselves, and next winter we plan to go with them and stay as long as we wish, which may not be as long as they do. Our friends call us a couple times a week while they are there, since we're kinda their designated "let you know where we are". They had planned to come back to Missouri last week, but saw the forecast and decided to stay in Florida until the weather up here moderates.

Well, we have a third of a mile of driveway. Fortunately I have a tractor. It took about an hour and a half to blade it all off today.

Need a better photo, but it's either a song sparrow or a fox sparrow. Fox sparrows are a more rusty reddish brown and a little bit bigger than white-throated sparrows. If that doesn't fit, it's probably a song sparrow.

Now THAT sparrow is a white-crowned! And finch is definitely a purple finch.

Nope, it's a white-throated sparrow. White-crowned sparrows have a different arrangement of the white on their heads, and lack the very obvious white throat and the little patch of yellow between their beak and eye (the area called a lore). On white-crowned sparrows that area is black.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure. You can't be 100% safe, but the testing done on the Pfizer vaccine showed that out of 37,000 people tested, something like 4% did contract the virus but only one got a serious case. It's not me that I'm worried about yet, it's the slight possibility that I could still contract it, and even if I had a mild case I could pass it on to someone else. Our niece has asthma and other possible respiratory conditions that put her at higher risk, and so far has not been able to get the vaccine, and we really want to spend some time with her. So I will still avoid dine-in restaurants for a while.

Well, I don't share your distrust of the CDC. But how about the Mayo Clinic, University of CA-Davis, National Academies of Science? All say, quoting, "There is no evidence" for the virus spreading through food, and no known cases where it was spread through eating food. Like I said, and they all say, the virus is spread through respiratory droplets. You simply can't get it by ingesting food, you have to breathe it in. Does that mean that there are all these studies showing it ABSOLUTELY can't be spread by eating it? Nope. How are you going to study that, without having people eat food that somebody with Covid has just breathed on? You can't prove a negative, by the way. You can always prove that somebody DID get it through eating it. But you can't prove that nobody ever did. Just Google "can you catch Covid 19 from eating food?" You'll get a whole lot of links saying you can't. A few say that to be on the COMPLETELY safe side, to take the food out of the container it came in and into a clean container before eating it, and to wash your hands after handling the original container. A couple sites say what I said, that there is a very slight possibility that you could get enough of the virus off the food container and onto your hands, and then put your fingers up to your nose or mouth and breathe in the virus.

Wait a minute...don't you guys remember the several "polar vortexes" that hit a few years ago, maybe three years ago? Maybe none of them lasted more than four or five days, but that was a cold winter with several days of weather colder than what it looks like we will get this time. I remember a guy I knew decided to take his jetboat out on the Meramec on the first day after one of those vortexes had passed. The river wasn't completely frozen over but there was plenty of shelf ice coming much of the way to the middle of some of the pools. But he ran upstream with no problems. His problems were coming back downstream...his wake broke off a lot of the shelf ice, and it jammed up in the riffles!

Some good suggestions already given. Mid-April is usually about the time that smallmouth fishing gets fairly easy...the water temps have warmed up to around 60 degrees and the fish will hit just about anything, though they will just be beginning to spawn most years. (Keep in mind that catch and keep bass season is closed then; you can catch and release, but I suggest using fast moving lures and not targeting them on the beds.) But April is one of the iffiest times to plan a long float, because of frequent heavy rains that may raise the river to dangerous levels. It's the best time to go high, farther upstream than normal floating sections, though on some streams you can go too high and the fishing won't be good. I don't get the fixation some people have with using hammocks on Ozark streams. The best, and really the ONLY places to legally camp outside of established campgrounds, is on the gravel bars. You DON'T want to go up and camp in the woods. For one thing, once you get off the gravel bars you're on private property that you don't have a right to be on. For another, gravel bars are bug-free, and that includes ticks and chiggers, which will be active by then. But most gravel bars have no trees. Sure, you can maybe find a gravel area that might have some big sycamores growing on it, but such places are not common. And otherwise, you will have to take a frame for your hammock so you can set it up without using trees. Technically, all gravel bars on Ozark streams are okay to camp on, even though the landowner actually owns them. But some landowners won't agree, and think they have the right to run you off. My suggestion is to never choose a gravel bar that has a house or cabin within sight of it, or a lane coming down onto it, or other signs of frequent use like lawn chairs or bbq grills, or a road that you can see it from. And especially in the spring, pay close attention to easy escape routes off the bar if it comes a gullywasher. Ozark streams are known for flash flooding, and it can happen if there is a rain upstream from you even if you never get a drop of rain. Make sure the gravel bar doesn't have a low spot on the back of it that separates it from the high bank, and scout out exactly where you would quickly drag yourself, your gear, and your boats up that high bank in the middle of the night if the river starts rising. You didn't say how you planned to get your vehicles shuttled, but I assume multiple vehicles and self-shuttling. As somebody mentioned, not all public accesses are safe to leave a vehicle for multiple days. Some of them are still just road right of ways, and even the Conservation Department accesses have had crime problems occasionally. So as you're planning your float, you might want to find a campground or canoe rental place that will shuttle you or at least let you leave your vehicles there and let that be your take-out. You might also think about knocking on a door or two at the nearest houses to your put-in and take-out and ask them if you can leave a vehicle parked at their place somehow. April is a good month for solitude IF you go during the week. I'd plan on putting in on a Monday and taking out on Friday. Weekends in April with good weather can be a zoo on many rivers, but most of the kids are in school (hopefully) during the week. So I'd plan for five days and maybe 45-50 miles. That's short enough that you have a lot of choices. Here is my list of the MOST popular streams, those that have multiple campgrounds and canoe/kayak liveries...these are the ones where you will least likely find solitude, so if you have to do it over a weekend, avoid them: Meramec, Huzzah, Courtois, Big Piney, Niangua, James, Elk, North Fork, Eleven Point, Current, Jacks Fork, Black in Missouri. Buffalo, Crooked, Mulberry, Kings in Arkansas. But even they will be okay if you can go during the week in April.

As moguy said the bottom one is an American goldfinch in winter plumage. The other one...either a male house finch or male purple finch. Like Billethead, I'm about 90% sure it's a purple finch. They've been pretty scarce around here for the last 10 years or more, but getting a good influx of them this winter.