Al Agnew

I agree, the weird thing is that some people never have the problem, say they get them wet all the time, but plenty of others, myself included, HAVE had it. Supposedly it is something with the bushings or washers, as others here have suggested, but why some do it and some apparently don't is a mystery. At any rate, my attitude is, why take the chance when there are other good reels out there?

I kinda doubt that you'll ever be able to get high speed readings on a jetboat. Also not exactly sure why you'd need to...can't be for navigation purposes. I have a depth finder on mine, but only use it while actually fishing. So I simply mounted my transducer on the trolling motor.

Yeah, I can't believe that Shimano keeps saying, "Noooo....we never heard of that before." It's a common and VERY well known problem and well publicized on the internet, and I know that a lot of guys have talked to Shimano people about the problem. Supposedly it was quietly fixed a couple years ago, but I don't think I'd buy a Shimano spinning reel at this point. It's true that some anglers never have a problem with the Shimano spinning reels, but I've got an old Symmetre ultralight that never gave me a problem, and a Sahara and a Stradic that were horrible with it, just getting them CLOSE to the water and they'd bind. Shimano casting reels are great. But lots of other companies make more trouble-free spinning reels. I've got a Diawa and a U.S. Reels that I'm happy with right now.

I dug up an old photo of the 9 pounder I caught...you can see from the thickness of the fish why it weighed 9 pounds when it was a bit less than 24 inches... And here's the 26 incher from an Ozark stream...probably the most beautiful largemouth I've ever caught!

I hadn't been fishing all of April except for the Shoal Cr. float trip back near the beginning of the month. Weather, work, and other things just got in the way. So I thought I'd start May out right. Forecast was for thundershowers in the afternoon, cloudy in the morning. I knew I couldn't go all day, but thought I'd sneak in a morning trip. We've had a LOT of rain. All the streams around here are high. But I figured my secret little creek would be fishable. I could have fished my usual stretch of creek from either of two accesses. It's about 3 miles between them; downstream the creek slows and turns into more spotted bass water, and I'd never fished upstream from the upper access, because I knew it was small water and a long way between fish-holding pools. But today I decided to explore up the creek a bit. I figured I had about 3 hours to fish, and thought I could make my way up a couple of miles at most. The creek was flowing about 3 times its normal volume. Of course, its normal volume is a trickle that you can step across in two paces without getting wet over your ankles. Today it was flowing strongly enough I could have floated some of the riffles. It was also a bit murky, maybe 3-4 feet visibility--it's usually very clear. The thing about this creek is that not only is it small, it's also shallow. In my usual stretch the deepest water you can find is about 5 feet deep, and most of the good pools are 3 feet or less. What I found is that this upper stretch is even shallower. It's mostly bedrock bottom, and in the whole morning of wading I never saw anyplace that was much over 3 feet deep, and most of the places I caught fish were less than 2 feet. It's a little like shooting fish in a barrel. These fish just don't see a lot of pressure, and you absolutely know you're putting the lure in front of every fish in the creek. I don't fish this creek because it's a challenge, I fish it because it's fun to catch nice smallmouth in such an intimate setting. I started out with my homemade spinnerbait, and went a good quarter of a mile before I found any water that looked like it could possibly hold a fish. It was all steep-dropping riffles over bedrock until I finally came to a little pool about the size of an average living room that was about 2 feet deep. I caught the first two smallies, both about 10 inches, and had a strike from a third one. The next pool, just upstream, was a bit bigger though no deeper, and I caught the first decent fish, a 13 incher, in it along with a couple more small ones. Then it was another long hike to what turned out to be the best pool I came to the whole morning. I have to describe it, not because I caught a lot of fish there--I caught a 12 incher and a pretty 16 incher--but because it is simply a beautiful spot. You approach the pool from below over a steep, boulder-studded rapid that drops a good 3 feet in 20 yards or so. It lays beneath a 70 foot high cliff, water-streaked and stained dark gray. Big boulders clutter the pool on an otherwise bedrock bottom, and it is smooth water that appears deep, though it's only about 3, maybe 4 feet at the deepest. The trees arch over the water opposite the bluff, and blooming dogwoods line the top of the cliff. It's achingly beautiful. From there I fished a number of nice little pools, often separated by near falls. At one spot there is a true waterfall that's about 3 feet high. No pool is more than 50 yards long. They almost all had fish. I caught some on topwater, a couple on a small jerkbait, as well as the spinnerbait. Above the waterfall, I fished two nice pools with only one small fish to show for it. I wonder if that waterfall is a barrier that keeps some of the fish from going farther upstream. After fishing the second pool above it fruitlessly, I checked my cell phone for the time and discovered it was 11:30 and I needed to be back at the car before noon. So it was a hard, fast hike back downstream. I caught a total of 25 bass, with two of about 16 inches. Not a really terrific morning for fishing, but what a gorgeous creek.

My biggest MO largemouth by weight was a hair under 24 inches and weighed an even 9 pounds. Of course, it was a pre-spawn female. Biggest by length was about 26 inches, from an Ozark stream no less, estimated weight about 8.5 (caught in February).

I'm kinda "boat poor"... 16 ft. Blazer aluminum with 40 HP Evinrude Etec jet, 24 V Minnkota trolling motor 14 ft. Buddy Boat, aluminum, 6 HP Mercury motor that is about 50 years old (the boat is nearly 40 years old)--my dad actually keeps it at his house and uses it these days. Two 16 ft. Old Town Penobscot Royalex tandem canoes Three Oscoda fiberglass 14 ft. solo canoes--I keep two of them at the cabin in Montana. Wenonah Vagabond Royalex solo canoe--my favorite solo A Pakboat 15 ft. folding canoe My brother-in-law now owns two of my old canoes, a Wenonah Sandpiper solo and my first canoe, a 15 ft. Grumman aluminum. I can borrow them from him if I want. And I'm part owner of a big raft for floating in Montana.

I'm going to maybe take you in a different direction. If you are not used to fishing from a canoe, fishing tubes and other such lures that you fish rather slowly and close to the bottom can be frustrating if you aren't well-versed in their use. The canoe is constantly moving either from current or wind, and keeping touch with such lures in such conditions isn't easy. That's one thing to consider. Another thing to consider is what kind of fish you really want to catch. Interested mainly in smallmouth? Or perfectly happy to catch goggle-eye and sunfish with your smallies? Third thing to consider is your tackle. UNLESS you are perfectly happy to catch lots of sunfish and small bass, ultralight is not necessarily a good choice. If you hook a big smallmouth, your margin for error is considerably less with ultralight. It also necessitates playing the fish long enough that if you want to release it, the stress can cause the fish to die later. But most importantly for your purposes, ultralight limits the types of lures that you can fish successfully...for instance, it's very difficult to get a good hookset while fishing tubes and other soft plastics with an ultralight rod, and it's not easy to fish some of the other lures you probably should be using. A decent medium or medium light spinning rod and 8 pound test line is in most cases a better choice of tackle. So...you'll find it easier to use lures that you can simply cast out and reel in fairly fast, lures like crankbaits (Rebel Crawdad in the smaller sizes or other diving crankbaits with bodies of 2-2 1/2 inches), spinnerbaits (1/4 ounce single and tandem blade safety pin types in white, chartreuse, or black), 1/4 ounce buzzbaits in the same colors, floating Rapala minnows. The easiest soft plastic to use in this type of fishing, and usually quite effective, is a curly tail grub on a 1/8 ounce jighead--you just cast it out and reel it in at various speeds. The tubes and such are great baits, and you can use them when you stop the canoe in a good-looking spot and wade or fish from the bank. I wouldn't recommend using live crayfish unless you're experienced at it. Even if you want to keep smallies, you can't legally keep very many on the Buffalo, and it's far too easy to deep-hook them and injure them badly on crawdads if you aren't experienced and careful. If you really want to use the ultralight and want to catch all kinds of fish but not necessarily big smallmouths (although it can happen), one of the most overlooked things to use is a simple white marabou crappie jig. Just cast it out and reel it fairly slowly and steadily, letting it sink a bit around good cover like rocks and logs. Another real easy bait to use on the ultralight that will catch a lot of fish is a Beetle-spin.

If I'm understanding you right, you want a square-stern canoe so that you can use some kind of motor with it? If so, your choices are limited, especially if light weight is a priority as well. Such a canoe would work well on the lower 30 miles or so of the Gasconade, but would not be a very good choice for smaller and faster Ozark streams. If you want something a little more versatile, you might consider a double ended canoe rather than a square stern, and use a side motor mount. Several good motor mounts on the market, and they are also easy to make. I made one out of a single 2X4...cut notches in it so that the notches match up to opposite sides of the gunwale where you want the motor to be mounted. Notches should go about halfway through the 2X4. If the gunwales will allow it, and most canoe gunwales do, you then simply drill a hole from the top edge of the 2X4 down through the gunwales, and run bolts with wingnuts in the holes to fasten the board securely (of course, the board should have about 8 inches sticking out the side to mount your motor!) Aluminum is still a good canoe material if you want durability and acceptable weight, but it's noisy and it grabs rocks, logs, and even gravel. It takes a lot to poke a hole into an aluminum canoe. Fiberglass is slicker, can be a little lighter, but it's almost as noisy as aluminum. It scratches very easily and is susceptible to destruction if wrapped around anything. Scratches and even holes can be repaired, and it's usable as a canoe material for Ozark streams, but far from optimum. Old Town makes a lot of canoes out a poly plastic. As heavy or heavier than aluminum, but quite durable, slides over obstacles well, and it's quiet. It isn't easy to repair, however. Royalex is probably the material of choice for Ozark river canoes. It can be the lightest of the major canoe materials, is reasonably easy to repair, is quiet, and is pretty tough stuff. Unfortunately, it's also one of the more expensive canoe materials. The plastic that Coleman uses in their cheap canoes is durable enough, but heavy, flimsy (by flimsy I mean that the plastic is so likely to flex that it requires the aluminum pole set-up to stiffen it enough to be usable), and very difficult to repair. Still, if you can put up with the weight and want to use it mostly on the lower end of the Gasconade with a motor, the Coleman square stern Scanoe wouldn't be the worst choice you could make. (It WOULD be the worst choice for an all-around Ozark river canoe, however!)

The river level graph on the gage site is useless unless you already know what level is normal and what is too high. But the flow in cfs graph is the one you should be using, along with the table that has the heading "daily discharge statistics, in cfs...". With it, you can get a pretty good idea of what the river is doing and what is floatable and fishable. Here's how: On the graph, you'll see those little triangles. Those signify the median flow for each day, based upon all the years of record for that gage. That's the figure that means that 50% of the time the river was lower than that on the given day, 50% it was higher. It's a pretty good approximation of the "normal" flow for that day. If the river level is pretty close to those triangles, the river is pretty close to normal. Now look at the table. On it you'll see the "most recent instantaneous value", which is what the river is flowing right then (within an hour or two). You'll also see the "median", which is the flow that corresponds to the little triangle for the day on the graph. That's the "normal" flow. And you'll also see, along with some other figures, the "80th percentile" figure. The river has flowed less than that figure on the given day 80% of the years of record. It's actually a decent approximation of the high end of floatable and fishable flow. So, today (April 18th) the Big Piney near Big Piney, MO was flowing 686 cfs. Median flow for today is 575 cfs, so the river is somewhat above normal. But the 80th percentile figure is 1340 cfs. So the river is well below that figure, and much closer to the median. So...it's slightly above normal but not enough above normal to be significant. If it was flowing, say, 1200 cfs, it would be getting a little marginal, and if it was flowing 1500 cfs it would almost certainly be too high. Another thing to note...in the fishing report that somebody gave for April 15-16, the river was obviously floatable and fishable. Looking at the graph, you'll see that the river was dropping from about 1000 cfs at the beginning of the 15th to 800 cfs at the end of the 16th. So that also tells you that the river is very floatable and fishable at 1000 cfs. You can also start to get an idea of how river level corresponds to flow by comparing the two graphs. It was dropping from about 4.5 to about 4.25 during that time. So now you know that it's floatable and fishable at 4.5 in mid-April. Early May shouldn't be considerably different than that. So, I'm guessing that as long as the river level is no more than 4.75 you should be good. 5 would be getting iffy. Of course, you also have to look at what the river has been doing in the last few days. A reading of 4.75 that's in the middle of a drop from a much higher level could still mean muddy water. A reading of that when it's still going up could mean the same or worse. But a reading of 4.75 when it's starting to drop after a slightly higher rise would be more likely to be okay.

Zebco No-brainer--any spincast reel. Dark-thirty--when you plan to get home from fishing. Conversely, when you hope to be sitting on your favorite fishing hole at the beginning of the day. I'm goin' in--what you say when you're about to make a difficult cast to a monstrous tangle of rootwads. I'm in--what you say when the cast is successful. Abort--what you do when such a cast looks like it ain't gonna make it. Suicide cast--what you call such a cast. Professional overrun--backlash Fetal emerger--egg fly pattern

Once you look at the gages for a while before or after a trip, you will be able to figure out what the numbers on the water level graph signify, but you can use the flow in cfs graph even if you aren't experienced in reading the gages, as long as you use this rule of thumb--on the Meramec at Sullivan and the Gasconade at Jerome, you will probably need at least 500 cfs to make running the rivers in those areas anywhere near easy, and 700 cfs or more is better. On Big River, you need at least 400 cfs to make it even marginally runnable. Some guys can run these rivers at 250 cfs, but the margin for error is very tight at levels like that. I don't have time right now, but I'll try to start a new thread when I get time on advanced river gage reading!

I have a 1652 Blazer with 40 Evinrude Etec, tiller steering. You CAN run in 3 inches or so for short distances...might touch bottom but probably won't do much damage. But that isn't really enough water for the pump to work efficiently and if you have to go more than a few feet at that depth it probably won't be pretty. In other words, you will probably be okay going over a log or maybe even a rock that's only three inches deep, but I wouldn't want to try 40 feet of riffle water that depth. Loading and unloading simply takes a bit of practice and planning. I do a lot of fishing by myself in mine in the wintertime. I have a mental checklist...rear end tie-downs off, winch clip off, drain plug in. I have about 30 feet of good rope tied to the front end of the boat, and I tie the other end of it to the trailer in front of the boat, back it down until the boat floats off when I apply the brakes firmly, very slowly pull up until the trailer is far enough out of the water that I can reach the end of the rope without getting my feet wet, pull the boat over to the shore next to the ramp, tie the rope to something so it doesn't float away, pull the trailer on out. I always carry a pair of hip boots, and if I'm using a gravel bar instead of a concrete ramp and it ends up being too shallow to float the boat off the trailer I can always get out and work it off without doing a balancing act on the trailer tongue and pushing...I have a sports hernia and don't want to do that kind of straining. A pair of hip boots is a must if fishing in cold weather, because there WILL be times when you misjudge something and run the boat aground! Always attach the kill switch and wear the life jacket when running. It's real easy to hit something and get thrown from the boat!

Yeah, I'd forget about putting in at the Prongs, and do Buck Hollow to Bay Creek. From the Prongs to Buck Hollow is really no better and probably not as good scenery as from Buck Hollow on down, and can be more difficult floating if the water is either up (willow jungles) or down (skinny water). There are no other choices for canoe liveries other than those at Alley Spring.

Every section of the Meramec has its tricky places. In general, you will find the easiest running below the mouth of the Bourbeuse (there's a good ramp at the mouth of the Bourbeuse but you probably should run upstream your first few times, at least). If the flow at the Sullivan USGS gage is over 1000 cfs there are plenty of places upstream from there that are easily runnable. I got my first jetboat about three years ago, so I well remember the learning curve. The first thing you have to remember is that you don't have much motor in the water, so whenever you make a turn at speed the boat has a tendency to slide sideways instead of turning...or slide sideways even while turning. I found it helpful to get out on a lake for a little while and practice making sharp turns, to get a feel for what the boat and motor will and won't do. It's a whole lot better to spin out in the middle of a lake than in the middle of a riffle. And you can also get a feel for how to correct for the boat sliding sideways...it's a whole lot like driving on ice and correcting by steering into the slide. You also need to get a feel for just how shallow your boat WILL run at various speeds. I did this by trial and error. The first time I took my boat on a river it was on the Meramec about Moselle (mouth of the Bourbeuse) in fairly low water. A mile or so up the river there was a split channel, and when I took the left side I encountered a log spanning the entire river, about 5 inches under the water at the deepest. I stopped before I got to it--luckily the water was deep enough that I didn't ground out when I stopped--and looked it over, and also what the river was like above it. I figured that if I tried to run over it, the worst that could happen was that I'd bump over it and there wasn't anything else to hit above it, so I cranked it up and ran over it. Never touched it. That gave me the confidence that I could run the boat in 5 inches of water--I since have learned that 5 inches is about the minimum "safe" depth to run (by scraping gravel in water that was about that shallow later on) when I'm by myself in the boat. And you need to practice shutting the boat down quickly AND throwing the motor into neutral. There will be times when you are forced to stop in shallow water, and you want to be able to both stop and shut down the motor so it doesn't suck gravel when it sets down. It might run in 4 or 5 inches of water, but it will draft more than that when it's not on plane, and when you first start it up again you better be in something like 18 inches of water, because it will sink down in the back where the motor is before it gets going. I've sucked a lot of gravel by trying to get started in the middle of a riffle after having to shut it down. Another cautionary point...loading and unloading the boat off the trailer in strong current is tricky. The ramp at Meramec State Park can be a real pain when the river is up a bit, because there's a pretty strong current sweeping by the ramp and the last time I was there is dropped off way too quick and just about floated the boat, trailer, and all away. And if you are fishing and using the trolling motor, you will have to learn how to handle the boat with the trolling motor is strong current as well. Maybe the most dangerous obstacles are those that are found in slow water, especially in bad light or windy conditions. The worst things I've hit have been logs and rocks that come up to just under the surface in the middle of dead pools. Sometimes you just can't see them.

One fish that comes to mind... It was my second year to flyfish in Montana...we'd gone out in mid-July, but it was the second record flood year on the Yellowstone and it wasn't quite fishable yet early in the week, so we went over to the lower Madison to do a drift trip. The Madison was up a bit as well, but fishable. It was the first time I'd really tried flinging big streamers on the fly rod--you gotta remember, I wasn't a very experienced fly fisherman at the time. So we're drifting along this outside rip rap bank right along the highway, with the current really honking along it. I'm frantically trying to hit the little pockets in the rocks as we're flying by them. I get the big woolybugger into a nice little eddy behind a big rock, and before it even has a chance to sink this humongous brown rolls on it. I could see the fish's whole side, and it was easily as big around as my thigh. I'm in the back of the drift boat, and neither guide Tom nor buddy Tom saw the fish, but I certainly did, and shouted, "I got a giant fish on!" The fish simply shot out toward the middle of the river behind the boat, screaming the drag, and when it got to approximately the center of the river it just stopped and hung there in the current, as the boat got farther and farther and farther away, until I was far down into the backing. And then the hook pulled out. I can still picture that great brass side with spots the size of dimes when it rolled on that streamer.

Geez, guys, I just stop off at a KFC on the way and buy a bucket of chicken to go along with the potato chips for supper, venison sausage and potato chips for lunch, and Little Debbies for breakfast and deserts. (I'd rather fish than cook on the river--if the wife goes along she plans something a bit more elaborate.) Dutch ovens? Upside down cake? Apple dumplings?

Reminds me of my only canoe race. My buddy Rick and I entered a 22.5 mile race on Big River back when we were teenagers. There were a lot of serious canoe people there with fiberglass canoes so light you could see through them, a lot of what I later would learn were very fast canoe designs. We had an old 17 foot Grumman aluminum with a bottom that bowed noticeably upwards in the middle. We DIDN'T wax the bottom or anything else, just showed up and signed up for the race. Our only advantage was that we knew the river like the backs of our hands, and knew where we could cut across the inside of bends. That may have gained us a few minutes, but not much. At least we didn't have to scout riffles, we could just pound our way through them. During the course of the race we simply paddled like crazy, and when we'd see another contestant up ahead we'd paddle even harder to catch up to them. We passed a bunch of other contestants, and ended up coming in 6th, covering the 22.5 miles in a little less than 3 hours. The winners were more than an hour faster than that, but we beat some of the people who had really fast canoes and looked like they knew what they were doing. When we reached the end of the race, I raised up to get out of the canoe, fell out of it into 6 inches of water at the edge of the gravel bar, and just laid there for several minutes until I could move. If I hadn't landed with my head on my arm to prop it up out of the water I think I'd have drowned!

Taxidermist has a very good point if you're talking about any plastic or fiberglass canoe compared to aluminum. Aluminum sticks to everything, logs, rocks, even gravel, and makes pushing it over shallow areas or obstructions much more work. Most of the plastics and also fiberglass slide over obstructions with ease. Royalex is probably no better than fiberglass in that respect. It IS a little better than the Ram-X stuff. If you have a fiberglass canoe you should give it a buffing of paste auto wax every couple of months, which makes it even more slick to slide over stuff. If you have a Royalex or other plastic canoe (other than the Colemans and such), a coat of Armor-All, Formula 303, or Teflon Protectant does the same thing. It really makes a difference--in fact, you have to be careful with it afterward because if you set it down on a bank with any kind of slope it may just slide right into the water and halfway across the river. Trust me on this, I've had it happen to me...in cold weather! And whatever you do, don't put a coat of any of that stuff on the inside! Again, keel-less is NOT necessarily for whitewater when you're talking about any canoe material other than aluminum. All the best tracking designs (and poorest whitewater designs) in fiberglass or plastic are just as keel-less as the whitewater models. Keels on plastic canoes are purely for stiffening the hull, and do nothing to help the canoe track better. And they do almost nothing to make moving it sideways more difficult, either.

Closest stream with canoe rentals and shuttle services is Castor River, about an hour or less west of Cape. Castor is one of the clearest streams in the Ozarks, rivals upper Black River in normal clarity. It's not very big, gets too low for easy floating in the summer but has plenty of water in the spring. Lots of smallmouth, but the super clear water can make for tough fishing. There are two or three campgrounds and canoe rentals in the area around the Hwy. 34 bridge. Other than that, Whitewater River is marginally floatable if you have your own canoe and somebody to shuttle you. More spotted bass than smallies in the sections that are big enough to float. And a little farther, maybe an hour and a half from Cape, is the St. Francis. Only canoe rental is at Sam A. Baker Park. They can also put you in on Big Creek, which is a St. Fran tributary that would be a nice springtime float. Big Creek is mostly smallmouth, St. Francis has all three bass species. St. Francis also sometimes has a white bass run up from Wappapello Lake, and some years they stay in the river in the Sam A. Baker area all spring. And there is a chance of catching a walleye in the St. Francis.

First a little history...My wife and I had almost floated Shoal Creek a few years back. We had been visiting people in Wichita, and I'd thrown the canoe on the car for the drive over to Kansas specifically because I wanted to float a SW MO stream I'd never done before. When we came back, we were going to spend the night in Joplin and float Shoal Creek the next day. But that evening, while driving around and looking at Grand Falls, we discovered we were having engine trouble. A call to my brother, who was an auto mechanic by trade, resulted in the advice that we oughta drive home as soon as possible and hope the car didn't totally throw craps before we got there. So we didn't get to float Shoal Creek, and I had wanted to float it ever since. I met FishinSWMO and his family at the put-in at Lime Kiln a little before 9 AM after a pleasant drive across Hwy. 60 from Springfield, where my wife was getting together with a bunch of friends for the weekend. According to the USGS gage, the creek was slightly above normal, but it was reasonably clear, visibility about 3 feet or so. Water temp in the mid-50s. Weather was sunny at the start, but WINDY. During the day it would cloud up and then clear off, but the wind was a constant, mostly downstream blow up to 30 mph. The fish just weren't doing much in the morning. By the time we stopped for lunch, I think SWMO had caught two bass and I'd caught nothing, zip, zero, nada. But finally in the afternoon the sun came out strongly and the water warmed a bit, and we started catching a few fish here and there. I'd only caught one very small spotted bass before I found a quiet backwater that had a school of largemouths that really liked a black tube, and caught 4 fish there, the biggest about 15 or 16 inches. A bit farther along we came to a big, gently swirling eddy lined with logs at the bottom of a riffle. I hooked a real nice fish that looked like a largemouth in a tangle of logs right at the edge of the riffle and lost it when it hung me up in the logs, then caught a smaller largemouth and a nice goggle-eye in the same place before the wind caught the canoe and pushed it too close to that spot. But I let the canoe hang up in that tangle and was in good position to fish the rest of the eddy. In total I caught 3 smallmouth, biggest about 12 inches, and several more smallish largemouth, along with some goggle-eye, on the black tube. SWMO had been steadily catching a fish here and there. I probably didn't see all of them he caught, since I was in my solo canoe and he in his Tarpon so we were separated part of the time. I think he was catching a lot of his fish on jerkbaits. I caught one more really nice largemouth, 16 inches or a little better, on the tube, but by that time we were getting pretty close to the take-out and when I broke the tube off on a snag I was too lazy to tie on another one so I picked up my jerkbait rod and fished a Pointer 100 the rest of the way, catching a couple more largemouth on it. So total I caught about 14 or 15 bass and some goggle-eye. I'd guess that SWMO caught a similar number of fish. All in all, a good day other than the wind, which was a real pain. I saw a big tom turkey pretty close-up, which was a nice bonus. I was impressed with the difference in Shoal Creek and the more typical Ozark streams I'm used to fishing. No bluffs, no rocky banks other than a few rip rap areas, very few slow pools, lots and lots of logs to fish. The danged trains were noisy! An interesting stream to fish, and one I'd like to re-visit in the summer when the water willow beds are green and the stream is down a bit to make the best fish-holding areas more obvious. Thanks to SWMO for showing me this section of Shoal Creek!

I have to disagree a little more strongly on keels. The ONLY reason manufacturers put keels on canoes is to stiffen the bottom, whether it's an aluminum canoe or some kind of plastic. The keel on an aluminum Grumman does a bit to keep the canoe going straight--maybe 10% or so better than the shoe keels that Grumman put on the canoes they marketed as whitewater models. But the keels on canoes such as the Colemans and some of the Old Town Royalex do VERY little to make the canoe track better. The keel on the Coleman is simply a groove to make the internal bracing fit without sticking up so high off the bottom on the inside, and the rounded keels on some Royalex canoes keep the bottom from flexing lengthwise--you'll only see them on the canoes with wide, flat bottoms. I always preferred a keel on an aluminum canoe rather than a shoe keel, which was just a narrow ridge about 1/2 inch thick on the bottom, because the higher regular keel was often the first thing to hit a rock, and thus protected the rest of the bottom of the canoe to an extent. I do NOT like keels on plastic canoes for much the same reason--they catch more abuse than the rest of the bottom, and the problem with that is that they are simply a wrinkle in the bottom no thicker than the rest of the bottom, so they concentrate the wear. What makes a canoe more easily go straight when you want it to--or turn when you want it to--is purely a function of the hull shape below the waterline. The straightest tracking canoes have no rocker (the ends below the waterline do not turn up but the whole bottom is a straight line when viewed from the side). Whitewater canoes, designed for easy turning, have considerable rocker--the canoe looks somewhat like a banana when viewed from the side. Straight tracking canoes are narrower than whitewater canoes in proportion to length. And perhaps most importantly, straight tracking canoes have very sharp entry lines. If you were underwater and looking straight up at the bottom of the canoe, the waterline would have very sharp points on both ends and stay very narrow for a considerable distance toward the center before gracefully widening out in the middle. Whitewater canoes have a waterline shape that is closer to a bathtub--blunt ends that very quickly widen out. Most "recreational" canoes are somewhere in the middle between these two design extremes. Most Royalex canoes fit that description. The wider, flatter-bottomed Royalex canoes marketed as sport or fishing canoes lean farther toward the maneuverability extreme. The Old Town Penobscot I mentioned before has the sharpest entry lines of any Royalex canoe, which is why I like it. It is still fairly maneuverable, but tracks very well.

It seems to me to be a complicated question. A lot depends upon time of year, water temp, type of tackle used, size of fish, the health of the fish, what it's been doing lately, the part of the body or mouth where it's hooked. And what fighting characteristics do you consider more important? Speed? Strength? Leaping ability? I'm going to assume average sized healthy fish for its species, caught in optimum water conditions, fair-hooked on tackle that matches the size of the fish. I've caught just about every species of North American freshwater game fish except hybrid stripers, so here goes... Strength 1. carp 2. flathead catfish 3. striped bass 4. bluegill 5. smallmouth Speed 1. silver salmon 2. rainbow trout 3. smallmouth 4. spotted bass 5. white bass Leaping ability 1. rainbow trout 2. longnose gar! 3. smallmouth 4. spotted bass 5. largemouth bass Keep in mind that I'm talking wild stream bred rainbow trout here. A lot of trout caught in the Ozarks are nowhere close to being the fighters that wild western or Alaskan rainbows are. And although brown trout aren't the fighters that rainbows are, I like them better, can't really explain why. Although the smallmouth is my favorite fish, I have no illusions that it rates at the top in any fighting category. However, it has a nice mix of characteristics, ranking fairly high in all three. And it's such a pugnacious predator and so susceptible to surface lures, and lives in such really neat places, that it has to rank way up there overall. For pure character, you gotta like muskies and pike and even chain pickerel. Ozark walleye are great just because they are a challenge to catch. Of course, they are also good to eat, but I wish we as Ozark anglers could get past that. The fact that most Ozark walleye are killed to eat is probably the only real factor that is keeping the Ozarks from producing the next world record. As a fighter they are mediocre. You guys must be catching different goggle-eye than I am. I love the little critters, but great fighters they ain't, after the first five seconds.

Chief, there are so many drawbacks to Ram-X that it's ONLY good point is that it is cheap! It's heavy. It's flimsy, which is why most of the Colemans and such have internal aluminum bracing...the material isn't stiff enough to hold it's own shape. You're also right that it isn't easily repairable. And it cannot be formed into efficient paddling designs. Fiberglass--it really isn't as bad a material for Ozark streams as some would expect. I've owned a fiberglass solo for many years. I don't use it a lot, just a few times a year, but I don't baby it at all. The stems are pretty worn, gel coat is gone there and it's well down into the fiberglass weave, but the thing still floats. And you're right that fiberglass is repairable. As far as pure durability on Ozark streams goes, fiberglass is a little less durable than Royalex, but not much...unless, as Ness noted, you wrap the thing around a rock or log, then it's totally destroyed, while Royalex will pop back into shape. Also, it you drop it on a rock, it'll punch a hole with a spiderweb of cracks around it on fiberglass, while it'll just dent Royalex. The thing I like least about fiberglass as a fishing platform is that it is noisy. But I owned another fiberglass tandem at one time, and it was okay for Ozark streams as well. Royalex is also my material of choice. It IS repairable. You can get Royalex repair kits, but I usually just repair mine with a good two part epoxy. What will usually happen is that you'll wear the outer vinyl coat off at the stems. Royalex is a five layer sandwich--Vinyl color coat on outside, then ABS plastic, then a foamy material in the middle, then ABS, then vinyl. As long as the foamy material in the middle isn't exposed you're usually okay, although the ABS substrate is somewhat susceptible to UV damage, and you want to cover it up if a large area is exposed. I use JB weld, which is a little ugly but covers and protects. All you have to do is rough up the area a bit with sandpaper and then slather on the epoxy, and before it's fully cured you can take a wet cloth and smooth it out. It isn't permanent but it will last a year or more before needing to be redone. You can also just put skid plates on the stems, which IS a permanent repair and protection but adds some weight and affects paddling performance. About Buffalo canoes...they are a bit heavier than some of the other Royalex canoes, but apparently also very durable--the heavier the Royalex layup, the more durable it is. The only other thing I don't like about the Buffalo canoes is that their ends stick up pretty high, so they'd be a little worse in the wind. They are pretty all-purpose in hull shape, not real good at anything but not real bad at anything, either. So if you just love fiberglass you're not totally wrong in choosing it. But I think Royalex is better. The Old Town poly or crosslink or whatever is similar to Royalex, but somewhat more difficult to repair and considerably heavier--but it's cheaper. For a tandem canoe--first choice for me is the Old Town Penobscot 16. Mohawk Nova 16 is pretty good. Wenonah Spirit II is good. If you're interested in a solo, you absolutely can't go wrong with the Wenonah Vagabond.

Okay, guys, Shoal Creek it is. Let me know where to meet you...I'll leave for Springfield Friday afternoon and get there in the evening. Can meet you around 9 AM Saturday. I'll just bring my solo canoe, but will have a vehicle that can carry two canoes for the shuttle if necessary. FishinSW, I'm PMing you with my cell phone number.