Al Agnew

I'm always on the lookout for old books and magazines having to do with Ozark outdoor pursuits, and the other day I obtained a copy of the 1934 book, "Ozark Outdoors, Hunting and Fishing Stories of the Ozarks" by Vance Randolph and Guy W. Von Schriltz. I immediately started reading the fishing stories, and came across one entitled "An Ozark Mystery". It starts out: "As long as I can remember, the jack-salmon of the Ozarks has been a prize fish. It was rarely taken, it was a ferocious fighter, and it was, when landed, preserved, and photographed, a subject for conversation for months afterward." "Jack-salmon" is, of course, the traditional Ozark term for walleye. And you have to question the "ferocious fighter" part. The story goes on: "...Throughout the many years I have fished the Ozark streams, I had, up to February, 1932, seen just two jack-salmon. One of these, that weighed some three and one-half pounds, was caught by our boatman, Bill Brennon, of Galena, one noon on the Niangua in June, 1921, near where the Tunnel Dam is now located ont that stream. The other, a nice one that I estimate must have been 26 inches long, struck my lure near Hitch Rock on the Jackson's Holler float of the James River below Cape Fair, Missouri. That was back about 1926, and I was sick with disappointment when after a battle royal down through one-eighth mile of rough water, that eight-pounder contorted my single hook out of its big bony mouth not four feet from the boat and got away." Again, the "battle royal"...I've caught a lot of walleye, and while the bigger ones are pretty strong fish, you can't compare their fight to that of the smallmouth the angler was used to catching. However, this passage has such bittersweet connotations to me, because it mentioned a stretch of the James River that is lost to those of us who love rivers, buried under Table Rock Lake. The story continues: "I am not alone in my experience with jack-salmon. Many able fishermen whom I know, who float our Ozark rivers often, and who bring back many bass, both large-mouth and small-mouth, frankly admit that they have never seen a jack. Others have seen one or two, or perhaps have caught a single one or a pair (they seem to be taken in pairs, at times), but few--very few--of them, have taken more than two. About four old-time fishermen in these parts, as far as I know, have landed as many as five, and they were mostly taken back in the dim and misty past when kodaks were not a common part of a fishing pack and, therefore, few photographs survive... "Imagine our surprise to read in our paper one morning in the fall of 1931, there there was a run of jack-salmon in an Ozark river and that they were piling up below the dam at Osceola, Missouri, by the hundreds of thousands. That thousands and tens of thousands of them were being taken each day!" The author goes on to say that he visited the Osage at Osceola in February of 1932 to check out the story... "Imagine a placid little town of one thousand population, suddenly overrun by another thousand people, each and every one of whom clamored for baits and boats, for bed and board, for fishing lines and fishing licenses! That was Osceola, Missouri, when we got there on February 13, 1932. "Imagine the furor in the grocery stores, in the cafes, at the filling stations. Imagine the minnow markets that materialized from nowhere, the boat building that bustled, and tourist cabins that sprang up over night! "Imagine everybody for miles around coming down to the river to fish. Imagine anglers from New York, from New England and from California, attracted by the astonishing news, as well as steady streams of Kansas Cityans and sportsmen from the far South coming and going every day. "And they all caught fish. I saw six people with thirty fish, the limit, in one boat many a time. Five-year-old boys fishing with sticks four feet long. Old gray-bearded granddads with cane poles as long as from Charleston to Chicago, nearly; immense placid women in the bloom of their "middle-aged spread"; girls, young, pretty, vivacious; young sports in balloon pants and spats; comely young married couples in olive drab outdoors attire... "...One had to be dreadfully dumb, I decided that first evening, fishing in that bitter, biting blast, with my hands red, raw, and half-frozen, if he couldn't catch his limit of five longer than eleven inches before his boat hire cost him more than six and one-fourth cents--four in one boat at twenty five cents per hour being the usual load I noticed... "The actual fishing, save for the psychology of the screeching, hysterical mob that surrounded me, was anything but exciting. I fished with a twelve-pound line on a bait-casting reel, and a five-foot bamboo bait-casting rod. A heavy sinker is attached to the end of the line. A snelled hook, about a No. 20 Cincinnati bass hook, is attached in such a manner that when the sinker rests on the bottom the minnow dangles a foot or so above it. The tug of the fish tells you when to pull. Tells you soon and often. "Live minnows were used, but they were invariably threaded on the hooks and dead ones would probably have done just as well. "I caught my limit of five in exactly forty minutes, and threw back six others. They varied from eleven to fifteen inches in length. They were there by the millions. The fishing was done below the dam where the ascending fish piled up... "One preacher caught one hundred and twenty-nine in one day from eight o'clock A. M. to three o'clock P. M. Of course, he kept only his legal limit of five. Others caught fifty, seventy-five or one hundred each day, returning the surplus to the water, but every boatload of four people took home twenty jack-salmon every night, the twenty largest taken, which in time counts up into an incredible number of fish. "I have heard several theories as to where the Osage River jack-salmon have come from. None of them seemed plausible to me. Of course, the fish have spawned somewhere below and are so plentiful at Osceola because they cannot get over the dam. "It is all a mystery. When should hundreds of thousands of a rarely-seen, seldom-caught species of fish suddenly appear in a stream where heretofore it has been a rarity? Nobody knows. That is the fascination of the thing. Perhaps the new Lake of the Ozarks, a short distance downstream from Osceola, is the long-needed perfect spawning spot for the jack-salmon. Maybe the tributary streams will have them in quantities now. Let us hope so, but, I regret to add, this seems hopeless unless more stringent measures are made for protecting them...What sport fishermen might enjoy in two, three, or more seasons from now, were even an appreciable portion of these vast numbers of jack-salmon saved!" The author went on to recommend the season be closed at Osceola for a year, the length limit raised to fifteen inches, and anglers required to quit fishing after taking their limits. And he also recommended that no fishing should be permitted within two hundred feet of any dam. He mentions: "Captain J. W. Farrell, of Weir, Kansas, tells me that the year after the dam was built across Spring River at Baxter Springs, Kansas, some forty years ago, there was just such a run of jack-salmon below the dam. That the people flocked in, caught them all, and there have been very few jacks in Spring River since." He finishes by saying: "Let's hope the Missouri Legislature will pass such emergency measures that the Fish and Game Deparment will be able to do what is needed in this instance, and do it promptly, and that down through the years we may tie into one of those long cherished famous fighting "jacks" on our Ozark floats now and then." When I finished reading this, I wished I could find a follow-up to see what happened to the fishing at Osceola in the next few years. I have a collection of the "Official Publication of the Conservation Federation of Missouri" that begins in August, 1938, and in the first issue there is a story about a proposed survey of fish in Lake of the Ozarks that doesn't even mention walleye, but there is also a picture of an angler with "a big 10-pound jack salmon he caught recently in the Niangua Arm of the Lake of the Ozarks. Ten-pound jack are none too common in Missouri waters." In December of that year, there was photo of three channel catfish, four largemouth bass, and a big walleye that had been gigged, that went along with an article that mentioned the problems with whether to regulate gigging or not. I looked through the next couple of years of those magazines, finding no other mention of walleye. The mystery of where those fish came from is at least partially answered by the fact that Lake of the Ozarks was newly built. While the fish were for certain native, river-spawning walleye, the new lake apparently furnished perfect habitat for that year class to survive and thrive. Probably most of those fish were juvenile males making their first spawning run. If I'm not mistaken, the females from the same year class would have still been too small and young to spawn, but by the next year they would have been making the same run and showing up at the dam a little later, late February to early March. I wonder if, in the next few years, there was any kind of run of the bigger females up to that dam. I suspect that the fish were pretty well wiped out in that first year, and maybe the next year, and after that the fishing at Osceola would have been so mediocre that it was not notable. I often wonder what the Osage River was like before Lake of the Ozarks. Was it, as the author said, "an Ozark stream", given that it was a pretty big river that came out of flat country in Kansas before coursing through the hills of that edge of the Ozarks? Did it have smallmouths? Apparently it had a decent population of walleye, nevertheless. My own experiences with Ozark walleye started when I was a kid in the 1960s. My mom, dad, and I fished Wappapello Lake just about every Sunday of the year, and driving down to the lake, we often stopped at a little restaurant and resort that was along Highway 67 just north of Greenville. The St. Francis River, at that point just a few miles above the lake, flowed behind the restaurant, and the old guy who owned the place had been one of the best "jack" fishermen on the St. Francis. Hanging on the wall of the restaurant were two walleye heads that each came from 18 pound fish, the two biggest he'd ever caught. At that time, the state record walleye, a fish of 20 pounds, had come from the St. Francis. The official record said that it came from below Wappapello Dam, but I later learned, from the guy who had actually caught it, that it came from a hole on the river far above the lake...he just didn't want anybody else to be fishing his hole so he told a fib about where he caught it. The St. Francis, in the years right after Wappapello was built in the early 1950s, was a tremendous walleye fishery with obviously a lot of big walleye. There were big walleye in the river before the dam was built, in fact. My dad told me he once saw a guy catch one near Jewett that was so long it hung from his belt to his ankles. And there is a story in one of my old Conservationist magazines about a world record class walleye that was hooked several times and also netted and released by the Department employees, at Blue Spring on Wappapello. They estimated the fish's weight at well over 25 pounds, possibly as much as 30 pounds. At any rate, those walleye heads hanging in that restaurant fascinated me. But by that time, the walleye fishery had declined to almost nothing on the St. Francis. The restaurant owner told us he hadn't caught a walleye out of the big hole below his place for several years. Nobody knows for sure what happened to the walleye in the St. Francis. There was known to be a lot of gigging of them on their spawning riffles in the river above the lake. But a lot of the walleye anglers believed that most of the walleye migrated downstream after spawning, and once the lake was built, they migrated right through the lake and through the dam, and were unable to return. Since it was known that a lot of walleye were caught below the dam the first few years after the lake was built, and since the St. Francis below the dam has little or no spawning habitat, there may be some validity to this theory. A few years later, my dad and I got to know some guys who were actually targeting big winter walleye in Black River below Clearwater Dam, and we started seriously walleye fishing in the winter months. At that time, there were two big gravel pits at Keener Spring, each about a mile long and up to 40 feet deep. They were perfect winter walleye habitat, apparently, and that's where we fished. It wasn't easy fishing. First you had to get your bait, which consisted of big live minnows, at least 4 inches long and preferably 5-7 inches. In the winter, that's not easy, and it was made more difficult by the fact that there were so many guys walleye fishing in our area that the creeks had a scarcity of those big minnows. Everybody preferred "slicks", which were stonerollers, and only a few creeks in the area even produced big ones, and those were pretty well seined and trapped out by mid-winter. But we found some "secret" little creeks that still had big minnows of various species, including creek chubs and hornyhead chubs, and we usually had enough minnows to go fishing. We'd drive down to Keener (at that time you could drive into the old gravel workings on the east bank, or pay to go in at the resort on the west bank at the spring) and fish from the bank most of the time. What we learned to look for were the points left from the gravel dredging. The dredging was done with big drag-lines, anchored to a few spots along the east bank. They would move the lines from one spot to another on the west bank and drag all the way across the pool. Those pools had originally been dredged out to be as much as 5-8 times as wide as the normal river channel. When the west bank anchoring spots were moved, the space along that bank in between the anchoring points didn't get dredged, and the points were formed. The walleye would move onto those points to feed. But usually it only happened once or twice a day, usually early in the morning and late in the afternoon when light was low. But you never knew, sometimes they fooled you and moved in during the day. So we'd fish from daylight until after dark. Half the time, you'd only get one chance during all that time as a school moved onto the point, and even then, it was usually for only a few minutes, and it was often after the sun went down and the temperature had dropped to where ice was freezing up your line guides. Since the accepted method was to let the fish run with those big minnows, iced up line guides usually meant the fish felt the resistance and dropped the minnow. Catching a limit of four walleye in one day was an event. But we kept at it because once in a while you'd catch a really BIG fish. The biggest I ever caught was 12.5 pounds, but I saw fish caught in that hole up to 17.5 pounds, and I once hooked one and got it up to the bank before it got off that was eye-popping, it was so huge. I'm not even going to guess at how big it really was, but I dreamed about it for many years afterward. That 12.5 pounder I caught came on the first cast on a bright, sunshiny morning. I and my buddy had driven into the resort, which was on the lower end of the upper big pool, right where Keener Spring (a pretty big spring) comes out. We didn't have a boat so we hiked along the bank, carrying rods and gear and minnows, all the way up to the head of the big hole, a distance of nearly a mile. I went all the way to the riffle at the head of the hole. There was a huge hole dug out on the west bank side where the riffle came in, making a huge, swirling eddy alongside the riffle with a point at the edge of the riffle. The riffle came in and immediately dropped down into 20 feet of water, with the eddy alongside it being up to 40 feet deep. I set up on the point, rigged up my first rod (I was fishing with three rods) with 3.5 inch bleeding shiner, and tossed it out. Then I started rigging my next rod, and before I had it ready I noticed I was getting a bite on my first rod. I grabbed it and set the hook and reeled in that big walleye. It would be the only fish I caught that day. My buddy, fishing a point a couple hundred yards downstream, caught four mediocre fish (mediocre was anywhere from two to five pounds...you didn't catch many fish smaller than two pounds, and it wasn't even worth mentioning if it wasn't over five pounds. It wasn't worth bragging about in the circle of walleye fishermen in our area until it was over ten pounds). We stayed the night at the resort and fished again the next day, which turned out rainy and cold. I got too cold after a couple of hours and had to go back down to the car and warm up, so I fished at the spring that day and caught two small fish. My buddy stuck it out on his point and ended up catching 16 fish, the best day he ever had, although the biggest was only 6 pounds. Those Black River walleye remained mysterious to us, even as we were learning to catch them. Where did they go when they weren't up on those points and feeding? My buddy got the idea one time to tie a line to one after he caught it, tie a balloon to the other end of the line, release the fish, and watch where the balloon went. It went right out into the deep, dredged channel off the point and sat there the rest of the day. He retrieved his fish at the end of the day by casting a big weight and dulled hook at the balloon and snagging the line. We never THOUGHT about releasing a walleye back then. They were to hard to come by and too good to eat. About the mid-1970s, when I had moved to Jackson, MO and started teaching school, I got Bob Todd, the owner and editor of the "River Hills Traveler" magazine, interested in winter walleye fishing. Bob, who at the time also lived in Jackson, and I found some good minnow creeks around Jackson (nobody around there fished for walleye so the creeks had good minnow populations) and started fishing Black River, but Bob was always interested in trying to catch them on lures, and also we started looking for other places to fish for them. Keener was too crowded. There was a newer gravel pit at the Highway 67 bridge north of Poplar Bluff, but it wasn't as good and it was getting pounded, too. Besides, it was well over a 1.5 hour drive to Black River. So we started exploring Castor River. We found that there was a decent walleye population on the lower Castor around Gypsy and Zalma, but there were no real concentrations of walleye like there were on those big gravel pit holes on Black River. We were never able to catch them consistently on Castor. We also tried Saline Creek, a little Mississippi River tributary in Ste. Genevieve County, and caught a few on the lower part of it, but not enough to make fishing it worthwhile. Meanwhile, Bob continued trying to catch them on lures, and finally caught a big one, a bit over 10 pounds, on a Rapala after dark in the riffle between the two Keener holes. One other place I found to fish for them while in Jackson was a big pool below a rip-rap rapid on the Diversion Channel, called the Block Hole. The Diversion Channel was built to divert the waters of Castor and Whitewater rivers away from the bootheel of Missouri, and so I figured it should have walleye in it. The Block Hole was up to 40 feet deep, and the rapid at its head should stop walleye migrations in normal water levels, so it theoretically should be a great place. I was living in Jackson, teaching in Advance, so I would often load my tackle and a cooler full of minnows in the car in the morning, and stop by the Block Hole after school. Once in a while I'd catch a little 14-16 inch walleye, but it wasn't often. Then one day I found a little spit of sand about 5 feet deep right below the rapid, surrounded by the big rocks of the rapid, and took 4 nice walleye from it in less than an hour. I was never able to duplicate that feat, and the Block Hole remained mostly a disappointment. I remember another trip on Black River during that time period of the 1970s. Bob Todd and I drove in at the resort, which at that time was closed, but Bob had gotten to know the people who owned it, and got permission for us to go in there and stay in the rec hall overnight. We fished all day in the hole above, catching a few fish, and after dark we moved back down to fish right at the spring, which came out into the river just above the riffle. The water there was till deep--it rose abruptly from 20-25 feet deep into the riffle, and there was a nice street light right there, so fishing after dark was conveneient, if nothing else. We caught several nice fish in the 4-6 pound class early that night. It was a warm January night, and about midnight lightning started to flash in the distance. By 1 AM, we didn't want to stop fishing because it was so warm and the fishing was still going strong by winter walleye standards, but it started to rain. And it rained. We gave up and went to bed, and listened to heavy rain all night long. We awoke the next morning to find that the river had come up 6 feet, nearly into the parking lot, and if we hadn't thought to tie our boat up it would have floated away. This was on a river controlled by a flood control dam only about30 miles upstream, so all that rise had to have come just from the small tributaries below the dam! Keener finally closed completely, and we moved our fishing to the gravel pits around the Highway 67 bridge. Getting in there was difficult, to say the least. You had to park alongside the highway, and there was no way to get a boat in. We started carrying a canoe down the 50 foot steep hill of loose rock and brush to the river...getting it back up at dark was never any fun. But we learned the big pool below and caught fish. However, one day in the mid-1980s I learned that our methods weren't necessarily the best. By then, you COULD drive into the hole IF you had a good 4WD vehicle, but actually putting a boat in was still problematical. Two of my brothers-in-law and I had put in a canoe, paddled across to our favorite series of points, and were fishing off the bank. It was a clear, cold, windy day and the wind was blowing straight into that bank, so fishing was tough. We couldn't easily get a bait out to where we needed it to be, casting against the wind. About mid-morning, we heard a commotion over on the other side, where you could drive in if you had a Jeep or something, and saw these guys attempting to put in a bass boat. They finally, somehow, got into the water, and started fishing. There was a long underwater ridge that went from the riffle all the way across and down to where we were fishing, which was where the drag line anchorage had been. The ridge was there because they could not anchor the other end of the drag line in the riffle, so that left a gap in their drag-line coverage. The ridge ran from about 8 to 15 feet deep, with depths on both sides ranging from 30 to 50 feet deep, so we knew it should be a good place all along it, but fishing it from a canoe was always tough. We watched the two guys in that boat fish along that ridge all day with, as near as we could tell, marabou jigs, and catch at least 20 walleye. We caught nothing all day long. The biggest walleye I actually saw caught was in that hole in those days. I had gone by myself, put the canoe in, and was paddling across to fish my favorite point when a jetboat came up the river and pulled into the point. I paddled up to the guy just to be sure he was planning on fishing my point, and talked to him a bit before paddling back across and fishing another point. A little while later I heard him yell. The pool there is nearly a quarter mile across, but I could see him waving at me and holding up what was obviously a very big fish even from that distance. So I paddled back across. He had caught a walleye that weighed well over 18 pounds on his De-Liar scales. I gradually got less interested in winter walleye as I got more interested in trout fishing in the winter, and later winter smallmouth fishing. But I still frequented that gravel pit hole and also spent some time fishing right below Clearwater Dam, sometimes with Bob Todd, sometimes by myself. I was never able to catch another walleye over 10 pounds, although I caught some 7-8 pounders. Bob caught one on a jig and curlytail grub on evening that was over 11 pounds. One guy I knew, who was suffering from terminal cancer and didn't have long to live, caught a 16 pounder--it was the last walleye trip he'd ever take. There is a nice fancy boat ramp at the 67 Bridge Hole now, and it gets pounded to death. Keener is mostly a memory. Those huge, deep gravel pits are an impermanent feature on a river like the lower Black, and the gravel gradually filled in the upper Keener Hole until the last time I was there, probably 15 years ago, most of the hole was a big willow-covered gravel flat with a normal river channel running through it. MDC tried restocking the St. Francis in order to renew the walleye fishery on it. They did it right, taking fish from Black River, the next river over. In the past, several Ozark walleye fisheries have been damaged and altered by the stocking of northern, lake-strain walleye. That apparently happened to Greers Ferry in Arkansas. Greers produced several state record walleye back in the 1970s and 1980s, fish that were the remnants of native Little Red walleye and migrated up into the three forks of the Little Red above the lake to spawn. But there just wasn't a whole lot of good spawning habitat above the lake, so Arkansas stocked the lake with northern walleye. The northern fish are lake spawners, and worse, they simply didn't have the same genetics. Ozark river walleye have the genetic potential to grow bigger. They have (or had) the potential of growing larger than any other strain except the walleye originally native to the Tennessee River system, from where the long-time world record came from. And the walleye of the White River system, including the Black, Current, Spring, and Little Red, along with the original St. Francis strain, were the biggest of the Ozark walleye. The lake strain fish outcompeted the native river walleye, which gradually thinned to almost nothing in Greers Ferry, and with them went any real chance of ever breaking the world record, a possibility that many thought to be almost a sure thing back in the heyday of Greers Ferry walleye fishing. Walleye in the White River lakes and their tributaries got some of the same stocking. But there are still more or less pure river strain walleye, as witnessed by the fact that you can catch some pretty big fish below Powersite Dam. But there just isn't enough good spawning habitat left to really maintain a big population of the big river fish. They spawn below Powersite. Perhaps a few spawn in Beaver Creek. Swan Creek and the Little North Fork are probably too small for much spawning to occur. Above Table Rock Dam, Kings River and James River would be big enough for some spawning, but I never hear of many fish being caught from either. The jury is still out on the St. Francis River experiment, but it doesn't look good. You can catch the occasional walleye from the Meramec and Gasconade, but they don't seem to get very big in those two rivers. Apparently lake strain fish were stocked in Lake of the Ozarks at some point, because there aren't really appreciable runs of fish into the tributaries. Osceola Dam is long gone beneath the waters of Truman, as are the spawning grounds on the lower Pomme de Terre and Sac. Stockton produced some huge river run walleyes in the river above in the first decade or so after it was built, but it's mostly smaller lake strain walleye these days. The last stronghold of native Ozark river jack salmon is the undammed streams of the Black River system--Spring, Eleven Point, Current, and Black. These are still the original fish, and they still occasionally grow pretty big. But the huge ones seem to be almost a thing of the past, even on these rivers. Habitat changes, too much fishing pressure, illegal gigging...who knows the exact reasons why. It seems the Ozark walleye is still a mystery fish.

There is a lot of truth in that. I'm sure I'm guilty sometimes of coming across as an expert on things that others may know more about, and I continually wrestle with the ethics of giving away what "secrets" I do have on the internet. The internet, without a doubt, makes the learning curve a lot easier for the people who know how to use it, and I'm not sure that's always a good thing. Our fisheries are getting more and more pressure from anglers who are better and better thanks in part to the internet. However, I think that the majority who post on this and the other boards I frequent are careful about giving away specific locations. Some have learned this lesson the hard way, by seeing a message about their favorite stretch and then seeing a bunch of people descend upon it. I have to laugh when I see somebody ask about what brand of rod, reel, line, etc. to use, and see others posting their recommendations as if it was the last word. Take fishing line, for instance. Somebody will say, "I've used brand XYZ for 10 years and just love it." That tells you almost nothing. What you need is comparisons. If they have used brand XYZ almost exclusively during that time, how do they know it is better, or even as good, as a line they HAVEN'T tried. I use McCoys Mean Green. In the past, I've used Maxima, Trilene, P-Line, and Stren. So I can say that I like the McCoys better than I DID those other lines. But maybe they've been improved since I used them. Unless I've tried about every line out there--THIS YEAR--I can't say McCoys is the best, and saying I like it is only, at most, a starting point. I value this site and the others I frequent because they give me a chance to talk about something I love with like-minded people (like-minded when it comes to fishing, not necessarily some other subjects!). I've gotten ideas from it, and that's maybe the best way to use it. Get the ideas from it, and try them out yourself to see what validity they have.

The Middle Gasconade is probably about 2 hours from St. Louis. Problem with it is that it doesn't have many canoe rentals, so getting a shuttle on many sections is problematical, not to mention if you need to rent canoes. The missouricanoe website that Creek Wader mentioned is your best bet for finding canoe rentals anywhere in the Ozarks, but there are a couple on the Gasconade that probably aren't listed in it. The lower Big Piney is one that a lot of people overlook even though it's pretty popular with locals and Fort Leonard Wood residents. There are a couple of canoe rentals around Devils Elbow that run the Piney from the fort down to Devils Elbow. Pretty river, surprisingly remote in appearance, fairly easily floated. The Meramec is the closest really nice water to St. Louis. The stretch from Onondaga Cave to Meramec State Park is the prettiest part of the river, but gets a lot of traffic. It's fairly easy floating. You really don't want to do it from Friday to Sunday, though. Sections farther downstream get less traffic, except for jetboats on the weekends, and are even easier floating, but not as pretty. Still, the lower Meramec could be a good one to "get your feet wet", so to speak. I think there are still a couple of canoe rentals in the St. Clair area. Actually, a really cool little river very close to St. Louis is the Bourbeuse, but it's only served by one canoe rental, Devils Back Canoes and Campground at Noser Mill. It gets little traffic, no jetboats, pretty good fishing. Not real scenic in the classic Ozark sense, and it's usually pretty murky, but it's so slow that it's easy floating and it has a beauty all its own. Big River's biggest drawback is a lack of reliable canoe rentals...getting a shuttle is next to impossible if you can't shuttle yourself. It's easy floating the whole way, and there are some pretty sections between St. Francois State Park and Washington State Park, as well as the section from Washington Park to Browns Ford. But it's VERY ugly below Browns Ford. Huzzah and Courtois Creeks are beautiful, but can be tough fishing for the beginner, and also not easy canoeing. And stay off them on weekends, they can be a zoo. The only other streams that are pretty close to your 2 hour driving time limit are the St. Francis and the upper Black. St. Francis is definitely not a river for beginners. Upper Black is the clearest stream in the Ozarks--although not quite so clear the last couple of years since the Taum Sauk Union Electric Company reservoir collapse--but it's a zoo on weekends and the clear water makes the fishing tough.

I don't know whether the otters decimated the smallie population on the upper Piney or not. I do know that the stretch between Mineral Spring and Boiling Spring was absolutely full of crawdads that were walking around out in the open during the day, which would seem to imply that they didn't have many predators. I saw the same thing a few years ago on the upper Roubidoux...very few smallies and massive numbers of unafraid crawdads. It's a mystery to me, since otters also really eat a lot of crawdads. Either they moved on after wiping out the smallmouth population, or it was something else affecting the smallmouths. I haven't been back to that stretch of the Piney since, so I don't know how it is now. It really does seem that there are a lot more meat fishermen on the Piney, upper Gasconade, and Osage Fork than on the other Ozark streams. (And on Roubidoux...that time I was on it, I talked to a couple of guys who said, "Yeah, we used to take our limits of smallmouth out of this creek every week during the summer, but we can't seem to catch many fish anymore." Duh!

The Akers to Round Spring stretch of the Current is a bit marginal for good smallie fishing...too cold. You'll find better smallmouth fishing from Round Spring to Two Rivers, along with gorgeous scenery and maybe a FEW less people (though if you do anywhere on the Current on a decent spring weekend, you're going to be in crowds). If you want a river that will not be any kind of challenge to float, you might look into the middle Gasconade. Pretty river, big bluffs, long pools, easy riffles, good fishing. First part of May, the water should be warm enough that you can catch smallmouth and goggle-eye on all the usual lures. Something that a lot of anglers overlook that will catch about anything is a simple white marabou jig. Deadly on goggle-eye and sunfish, if you encounter a school of crappie (which is possible on rivers with big pools like the Gasconade) you'll catch them on it, bass like it, and I've even caught channel catfish on them. And they are cheap and easy to fish, just toss them out around cover, let them sink a bit but not all the way to the bottom, and reel them slowly back in. If you want to concentrate more on smallmouths and bigger fish, topwater lures like walk-the-dog and popper types, buzzbaits, spinnerbaits, and crankbaits will all work that time of year.

Gavin, the float through the fort is a bit disappointing in places...very good water between Ross and the beginning of the fort water, but quite a bit of shallow, poor habitat in places within the fort. Still, it is well worth a trip. I don't think you can go far wrong ANYWHERE on the Piney. There are short stretches here and there that are pretty poor habitat, but any float you do on it can be good fishing. The Slabtown to Ross stretch is the most scenic, however--lots of big bluffs and gorgeous water. The only really poor trip I ever had on the Piney was a few years ago when I floated down to Boiling Spring and never caught a single smallmouth. I don't know what was up with that. A couple years earlier I'd done the same float and caught a LOT of fish. In the spring you can usually float anywhere from Dogs Bluff down. The upper river is really pretty. The stretch from Mason Bridge to Slabtown is nice and doesn't get too much pressure, since as far as I know, no canoe renters regularly service that section. And even the lower river below the fort is nice, if a bit civilized in places.

The other problem with enforcement is that the gigging season happens at the same time as all the major hunting seasons. So if the agents are doing their jobs, they've likely spent all day enforcing hunting regs, and then have to go out that night in the cold to check on giggers.

How about MIZZOU'S running game! Temple breaks the Cotton Bowl records...281 yards and 4 TDs. And how many yards did McFadden have? And I didn't think Missouri even brought their real passing game. Some uncharacteristic dropped balls and even a couple of bad throws by Daniel. But Arkansas didn't look anything like they did when I saw them against LSU. Still, you gotta give Mizzou credit for a great run defense today.

Agreed, it's their job. And I'd like to see them work a little harder and put in more manpower in doing it.

Most definitely big fires add CO2 to the atmosphere, and are a significant cause of global warming. The fires in the American West are bad enough, but fires in tropical areas to clear huge swathes of land slash and burn agriculture are much worse. But you're talking another of the issues in which I have great interest, and that's the Western fires. It's an open question whether the current, continuing drought over much of the West is a result of global warming or not. It's a theory that would seem to have some validity that warmer weather, coupled with the drought, is making things worse. But the biggest problem with the fires is partly what Daddy Carp pointed out, too much fire protection, and partly in too much cutting, especially clear-cutting. The fact is that the Western forests were at one time very fire resistant. When they consisted of "old growth", big trees, those trees were either widely spaced with grass beneath them, or if more closely spaced, there was very little growth on the ground. So fires, while frequent in the West, were much more likely to stay on the ground and never spread into the raging crown fires we see today. The lower parts of big western conifers have very little growth and fire-resistant bark. The ground fires did little to affect the overall make-up of the forest. But when European settlers moved in and started cutting the forests, it opened them up and allowed lots of small trees and undergrowth to start. And the fire protection at all costs mindset of the Forest Service allowed the new growth to continue until you had second growth forests, very thick, with enough underbrush to give fires an avenue to the tops of the bigger trees. And now we're stuck in this cycle. Fires, if allowed to burn, are violent enough to kill too many bigger trees, further opening up the ground to more undergrowth. Look at Yellowstone Park now...where the fires were, you now have incredibly thick, low growth young trees, and unless they can survive without fire for the centuries needed to grow big and gradually thin to some semblance of "old growth", they are going to be disastrous fires waiting to happen for a long time. Clear cuts are great for some species of wildlife, especially elk and whitetail deer, but too much cutting is what has really caused the fire problems we have in the West. It's a good thing that the Ozarks remains wet enough and has enough deciduous growth, or we'd have the same problems here, because OUR forests, due to cutting in the past, are also far thicker and lower than they once were.

It happens all over the Ozarks. I really believe that illegal gigging is a major limiting factor on BIG Ozark stream bass. The giggers don't bother sticking little ones, but big ones are just too tempting a target for some. They probably kill some big walleye on some streams, too. And Gavin is exactly right...the technology makes it too easy and convenient. If you want to talk tradition, traditional Ozark gigging was done from a wooden johnboat with a pine knot fire on a platform in the middle of it for light and the gig poles themselves for propulsion. Or you could advance a little in history and take the same johnboat with a little prop motor and a big flashlight or carbide light. Now it's jetboats with stable gigging platforms and banks of halogen lights. And you have lots more accesses with concrete ramps. And you have a longer gigging season than it used to be. We've gone in the wrong direction. The other problem is, it's too difficult to police. You can sit at the accesses and check the giggers as they come in, but you're not going to catch the ones that gig bass and shake them off the gig two miles upstream. Or the ones that use private accesses. I have no tolerance for those who "accidentally" stick game fish, either. It's the same as hunting...if you're not sure of your target, you don't shoot, and you don't gig, period. You can't use that excuse when you shoot the wrong duck. I've done some gigging. It's great fun and suckers are great eating. I wish that all giggers were ethical. I don't see anything happening to change the status quo.

Nah, I don't think humans have an extraterrestrial origin, although it's an interesting theory. Our DNA is too close to too many other organisms on this planet. What I think is that the mutations that gave us this ability to invent technology, while certainly advantageous in the short run (and yes, a few hundred thousand years is a "short run", considering the dinosaurs lasted a hundred million years or so), may end up being detrimental to us as well as a lot of other species in the longer run. But who knows...maybe the next big asteroid strike, or the next supervolcanic eruption, is just a few years away, and if it doesn't completely wipe us out, maybe those who are left will learn from past mistakes. I just finished reading an interesting book, "The World Without Us". It describes all the ways we've modified the landscape and natural systems, all the things we've done and built, and how long they would last if mankind suddenly disappeared. Lots of the stuff we consider our greatest achievements would disappear pretty rapidly, and lots of the things we should be least proud of will last a LONG time (like all the nuclear waste we've produced).

Okay...as one of the resident agnostics around here, I get a little uneasy whenever somebody mentions running something by Biblical principles, but that's just me, and is of little relevance to this whole idea. There is ample precedent for an organization doing something like this. The Nature Conservancy, of which I'm a sustaining member, has been buying land of natural significance for many years. They either hold it and run it under strict conservation principles, or they buy it and then resell it to government agencies who will protect it. And they have very good lawyers, so the land goes under very strict covenants which preclude it ever being developed in unwise ways. Their goal is strictly conservation, not providing hunting and fishing and access opportunities, although most of their bigger holdings are open to some public use. The problem I see with this whole idea is the possibility that it will become a playground for the members of the organization only. Buying it to protect it from development is a noble cause, but if you're buying public land and closing it to the general public you're going to make enemies. At the same time, buying it and opening it or keeping it open to the general public has its own set of problems with policing, liability, and providing infrastructure. The simple truth is that it's easiest to either buy it and close it to the public, or buy it and hold it until you can get a government agency to run it. I think it really is a noble idea, but the devil is in the details. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm just saying it has to be transparent, there has to be serious consideration given to putting restrictions in perpetuity into the deeds, and you have to decide exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish--are you buying it to conserve it, or buying it to have places for the organization to use?

Yep, there is much there that I agree with, too. As for "trophy" regulations...it's an interesting question. How much of the whole catch and release, very restrictive regs mindset is wanting better fishing and bigger fish, and how much is simply trying to maintain the fishing we have now? While the total numbers of anglers as measured by license sales seem to be stable or dropping, the numbers of SERIOUS anglers, in my opinion, have never been higher. And the knowledge and technology is light years ahead of what it was 30-40 years ago. The fishing I'm most familiar with, stream bass fishing, has changed greatly during that time period, and not for the better overall. The more pressure you have on the resource, the more restrictions you have to put on it. But the restrictive regs, such as those in the smallmouth special management areas, do tend to foster the expectation of much better fishing and bigger fish. And as you said, when you spend the money for all those boats and gear and tackle, you want a good return on investment. Fishing becomes a single-minded quest for the biggest and the most, instead of being a joyful and beautiful experience in the great outdoors. I've had to tell myself that sometimes when the fishing on an Ozark stream has been poor--hey, I'm on a gorgeous river, so I should take the time to enjoy the experience instead of staying so zoned in on catching fish. Because in the end, being on the river is more important than catching X number of fish.

I would agree with much of what you're saying. However, I'd like to point out that the theories on "the coming ice age" surfaced in the 1970s (considerably longer than a decade or so) and were never embraced by the majority of climatologists. The media made a bigger deal of it than the scientific community did. And the theory was pretty well scrapped in just a few years. So the difference between it and the present global warming concern is in the much greater number of scientists who agree with it, and the fact that the theory has been around for going on two decades now. Another difference is the abundant evidence that global warming is already happening. Thinning of Arctic ice and shrinking of the Arctic ice cap. Shrinkage of Antarctic ice. Melting of permafrost in Alaska and Canada. Greater movement of Greenland's ice due to greater precipitation (snow) on top of it, and lubrication from greater melting near the sea. Shrinkage of glaciers all over the world. Extension of the growing season in the mid-latitudes. Spread of tropical diseases like dengue and yellow fever outside their traditional areas. And while scientists are often accused of jumping on the bandwagon to chase grant money, to see this as an indication that global warming doesn't have any validity, you'd have to believe that the vast majority of scientists on the "global warming side" are intellectually and professionally dishonest, while the much smaller number on the other side are lily white. I agree that humanity, due to sheer numbers and to irresponsible technology, is the greatest "pollutant" on the planet. We are the ultimate invasive species, and even without global warming, we are on the verge of single-handedly causing the greatest mass extinction of species since the last big asteroid strike. Nature has ways of limiting the numbers of her creatures, but we've been able to circumvent her so far through technology. Whether that will remain so is an open question. Whether we can get smart enough with our technology to not only save ourselves but also preserve enough of natural systems to matter, is another open question. In the whole scheme of things, earth abides, and won't miss us if we go. But on human terms as well as the terms of the species we currently share the planet with, natural "corrections" wouldn't be any fun at all.

Well, Daddy Carp...I didn't call you any names. I did say you were uninformed. Perhaps you aren't. However, you want me to respond to your assertions? Okay... First, you cite Rush Limbaugh as saying that since we can't do anything about global warming, therefore we can't be causing it. Wow. Next time I break one of my wife's vases, I'll just tell her that since I can't fix it, I obviously didn't break it. And...who, other than Rush, says we can't do anything about it, anyway? We can't flip the giant cosmic air conditioner switch and magically cool things off, just as we didn't turn up the giant cosmic thermostat and get things heated up. But our activities are causing the heat-up, nevertheless, and our activities, if changed, can slow and stop the heating. Then you apparently assert that the warming is being caused by our body heat, or something. That obviously makes no sense. Our numbers are not adding to the global biomass, only replacing other critters, just as our livestock is. Most certainly, we know about urban heat islands...it's warmer in big cities for a number of reasons. But that does not explain planetwide warming, and especially the fact that the areas of the planet that are warming the fastest are the Arctic and Antarctic. Then you bring up the old global warming is natural. That does not take into account the PACE of this global warming. Sure, there are ice ages and warm periods on a particular cycle. This warming doesn't fit the cycle. It is happening too soon, too fast. I'm sure you'll say that we don't KNOW how warm it got in the past, or how quickly. But scientists with no ax to grind on global warming have already been able to come up with scientifically based estimates. And one thing we know for sure, there is more CO2 in the atmosphere now than any of the peaks of former warm periods for several hundred thousand years. We know this from samples taken of the "fossil" air from ice cores from Antarctic glacial ice. 378 ppm right now. 250-300 ppm in every one of the warmest periods in the past. And it's up from 270 ppm at the beginning of the industrial revolution, already well within the warm periods of the past. And CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas. Methane comes from both human and natural sources. It's a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. It's up 145% since the 1880s. The natural sources, like cow farts and termites, can't be the cause...remember that total biomass thing. Only human induced sources can explain much of the rise. So then you talk about the ice storms, apparently using that as proof that global warming isn't occurring. But anybody who knows anything about it knows that one weather event in one spot on the globe is proof of nothing. I could just as easily bring up the warmer than normal January thru March this same year, or any other warm spell. It is the TREND that is important...not the weekly, monthly, or yearly trend, but the trend measured in decades. And over the whole globe. The earth has continued to warm, especially in the last 50 years. 2005 was the warmest year on record. The record had been broken a number of other times...seven other times since 1974. 2006 was a little cooler. All the figures aren't in for 2007. But the 5 year average has gone nothing but up for the last 50 years. And...I wasn't responding to you when I posted about the oil figures. Look, there are always contrarian views in science. It's a good thing. But in the case of global warming, the contrarian views are FAR outweighed by those who are certain that anthropomorphic global warming is real, significant, and something must be done about it. The media, and especially the "conservative" media, want to put the contrarians on at least an equal footing with the much greater number that make up the general scientific consensus. That shouldn't be how science works. You have to go with the consensus and not the contrarians, unless and until those contrarians can come up with convincing evidence. I make no apologies for my views on this subject. They are based upon more than just listening to "liberals". This should not even be a liberal/conservative issue. We're all in it together. We'll all suffer the consequences if we do nothing. We'll all suffer whatever the consequences of our actions are. In fact...I have no children, and I probably won't live to see the worst consequences one way or the other. So in a very real way I may not even have a dog in this hunt. But I figure I have up to 30-40 more years on this earth, and I'd really like to leave it a little better than I found it. That's why I'm proud to call myself an environmentalist.

Nice blog, although I'm not as interested in lake fishing for smallies as I am river fishing. Had to laugh a bit at the yellow jig deal, however. I don't think crayfish change color while lying dormant in the winter. And as for the yellow color, even in a lake as clear as Dale Hollow, not a whole lot of light penetrates to the 30-50 feet he says he's fishing. And yellow is one wavelength of light that fades out fairly quickly underwater. That "bright" yellow jig is actually going to look light, dull gray at those depths. A white one would show up a bit better if that was your goal. And a black one would probably be just as noticeable. In my opinion, fish don't think like us. They don't see that jig and think, "Alright! A faded out crawdad! I think I'll swim over and get it before it gets away!" Instead, there is something in the movement and profile and maybe the color that triggers their instinct to feed and overrides any learned response to lures. It's moving and small enough to eat, therefore it's edible...Besides, I've never seen a crawdad, especially a sluggish winter crawdad, hop up off the bottom unless it was fleeing a predator already, and even then it's a LOT more likely to scoot along the bottom than hop off it. Whatever is triggering the fish to take that yellow jig fished that way, it ain't because it looks like a crawdad!

Well, there's so much totally unscientific and uninformed opinion in Daddy Carp's diatribes I won't even attempt to refute any of them. Poor, frail little humans...we can't fix it so therefore we didn't break it? And while I agree with much of what you say, drew, it simply isn't true that we have enough AVAILABLE domestic oil to wean ourselves from foreign oil. I just researched this a bit for a thread on another website. Last year, we got 78% of our total oil consumption from foreign sources. Good ol' Chavez furnished us with 8% of our oil last year, as did the Saudis...those were the two biggest OPEC producers of our oil. Canada and Mexico were the two countries that furnished the most of our oil. We actually produced more domestically than the 22% we used ourselves...much of the rest of it was Alaskan oil that went to Japan and Singapore, because it's cheaper to buy oil on the open market and ship it to the U.S. than it is to ship Alaskan oil to the nearest lower 48 refineries. Latest estimates of ANWR oil says anywhere from 4 billion to 18 billion barrels could be available...we used well over 6 billion barrels last year alone. Proven U.S. reserves...what we KNOW is there and recoverable...is around 21 billion barrels. Lots more of it in oil shales, but while the technology for getting it from oil shale is gradually coming around, the technology to take care of all the waste and pollution problems associated with getting oil from oil shales is a LONG way down the road. The "simple" way of getting at the shale oil is to dig it all up and do some very complicated stuff to squeeze the oil out (actually it isn't oil until after you get it out and do a lot of stuff to it, it's an oil precurser). All that complicated stuff causes air and water pollution, and the shale left over after you do all that stuff actually expands and ends up being MORE volume of highly toxic stuff than what it was in the ground. And of course, you're also talking about strip mining a whole lot of national forest and even national parks to get at all of it. Shell has a pilot program to get at oil shale oil a different way, by sticking big heaters down into the formation and MELTING the oil out of it. They actually think they can get three times as much energy from the oil as what they put in heating it up. But to protect the groundwater from the byproducts of this melting, they think they can FREEZE the groundwater around it. They didn't say how much energy THAT takes. And oh, by the way, it takes something like 5 barrels of water for every barrel of oil for this whole process to work...and we're talking about the oil shales being in the arid West. I agree, however, that it looks like we're going to see this country and the world desperately seeking every last drop of oil, with all the attendant environmental damage that causes, instead of getting as serious as we need to be RIGHT NOW about energy conservation and alternative energy sources.

Sure, things are pretty loose here...maybe the conservation board would be the better place to start the land topic, and further down there is a topic for "anything" that would be a good place for the fair tax thing. But post new topics anytime you want. The Nature Conservancy is the best organization existing at present for buying land in order to preserve it. I highly recommend working with them. They are pretty active in the Ozarks.

Having GOOD equipment makes the experience a little more pleasurable. I love smooth, lightweight casting reels that will handle 1/8th ounce lures if necessary. I think that a good reel makes me a bit more efficient at fishing. A good fly rod is a whole lot more pleasurable to cast than a cheap one. But at some point, you run up against the law of diminishing returns. Is a $600 reel three times as good as a $200 one? I doubt it. It may be a little better, but not THAT much better. Can I tell a big difference between an $800 Winston rod and a $300 Sage? Not really. As for lures...that's a bit of a different story. A $16 Lucky Craft Pointer does some things differently, and probably a lot better, than a $3 Frenzy whatever their jerkbait is called. And I get a big kick out of the guys that refuse to spend $15 on a lure that would last them several years of use, while not blinking an eye spending the money for soft plastics, even though they will go through a dozen or more bags of their favorites in a season, at $5 a bag. Which kind of lure costs them more? As for boats...most of us don't need the speed difference between a 225 HP on a 20 ft. bass boat and a 70 HP on a nice big aluminum johnboat. We don't NEED the beauty of one over the other, either. And we can set up that johnboat to be just about as comfortable to fish from. But our boat is our most visible fishing possession, no different than our car. And for some, appearances are important.

Yeah, I have an aversion to fiber weedguards. They just look too bulky and ruin the profile of the jig, in my opinion. (Apparently the fish don't care much, but I still don't like them.) You can get some stainless wire and mold a piece, folded in two so you have two prongs, in place of the fiber guards. Make sure it's a light wire so it bends well enough to expose the hook on the bite.

I like flyfishmaster's advice. However, Colorado is far from my favorite western fishing state. I much prefer Montana. Fewer problems with river access--all the private water in Colorado drives me nuts. Check out some of the national forest campgrounds in the Absarokas south and east of Livingston. Lots of choices in that area, from the Yellowstone River (usually floated in driftboats, but there is quite a bit of water you can reach by wading from the many accesses) to the Boulder River to a number of small creeks that can be sweet. The area gets a lot of fishing pressure, but what area of the West doesn't? You can also go up into Yellowstone Park, but in the summer it's pretty much of a zoo unless you want to backpack and get off the beaten trails, in which case you can still find some great streams and even some solitude. There are several campgrounds up in the mountains off the Paradise Valley of the Yellowstone, south of Livingston, and also some on the upper end of the Boulder south of Big Timber. Beautiful country up there, although I think the better fishing on the Boulder is farther downstream, closer to Big Timber.

Let me expand upon my thoughts a bit... Is there hype and junk science out there? You bet, on both sides. But most of it is MEDIA hype, not science. And the media hype comes from one side seizing upon the slightest questioning of the prevailing scientific view and saying, "See, scientists can't even agree that there is a problem." And the other side (mostly the mainstream media) covering the issue in 30 second sound bytes and NOT covering the real science behind it. For instance, I don't know for sure, but I've been monitoring arguments like this on other web sites, and the "anti-global-warming" crowd, led by the talking heads on radio and cable TV, has come up with similar assertions as those made above that substantial numbers of climate researchers disagree with global warming. What they DON'T say is that they're counting ANY disagreement with ANY facet of the issue. For instance, one climate researcher might question the extent of global warming to be expected under the worst case scenarios. Another might question the percentages of global warming that is truly caused by human activity. A third might question which computer modeling is truly the most valid. A fourth might suggest (with good science behind it) that melting of glaciers on land might actually short-circuit the Gulf Stream and cause a mini ice age in northern Europe. What all but a few do NOT question is that the evidence points toward climate shifts happening, and human activity is a part of the cause. It really is true that the world's climate is incredibly complex and not completely predictable. But human activity IS putting more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and those greenhouse gases WILL have some effect. The political opposition to acknowledging human induced climate change usually couches itself in saying that doing what is "necessary" to combat it would wreck our economy and give the world's developing countries (especially China and India) an economic advantage over us. In my opinion, the choice between economy and the environment is a false one. If this country can develop an atomic bomb almost from scratch in three or four years, and put a man on the moon a decade after watching helplessly as the first Russian satellite drifted by overhead, we can SURELY develop viable alternative energy sources to replace fossil fuels in the nest decade or so...IF we have the will (or if we can wrest control of our energy policy from the oil and coal companies). Doing so would result in winners and losers, but the overall economy would probably benefit from the new technologies. More importantly, it would do what we KNOW (if we have guts enough to acknowledge it) needs to be done. There is a lot more at stake here than simply the world's climate (which sounds like a ridiculous statement, but apparently it IS still questionable that changes in the world's climate is enough of a reason). The economy of this nation, and the world, right now is substantially in the hands of despots and medieval religious idiots who happen to be sitting on top of the majority of the world's oil reserves. We are one supertanker sunk at a strategic place in the Strait of Hormuz away from economic crisis. Or one revolt among Wahhabist radicals in Saudi Arabia. We are looking at a continuing wrestling match with China for foreign oil reserves, and a clear disadvantage against Russia because they have a lot more domestic reserves than we do. We are looking at the choice of risking more and more environmental damage in a desperate quest to develop more domestic oil reserves, which have never been exploited before mainly because they are simply too expensive and difficult to get out of the ground, or else fighting future wars for foreign oil. We are also looking at more and more environmental destruction from continuing to rely upon coal for most of our electricity needs. Right now, for instance, an area the size of one whole county has been destroyed by mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia alone, and the process is accelerating. Mercury in our water supplies, acid rain, torn-up landscapes, streams filled in and aquatic life destroyed by mine drainage, and economies of whole regions decimated because King Coal, the only game in town, is more and more efficient at getting the product out of the ground with fewer and fewer workers. Sure, there are "clean coal" technologies, but they are expensive and they only (partially) solve the pollution problems, not the landscape and economic problems. Continuing to rely upon fossil fuels for more than 90% of our energy needs is a suicide pact. Even if it turned out NOT to be suicide by climate change, it'll still be economic suicide sooner or later. Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now...sorry for the rant.

Didn't intend to argue the existence of global warming, but just CAN'T let some of this stuff go. "Well over HALF of the world's leading CLIMATOLOGISTS"? I gotta call BS on that one. I guess "leading" might be a subjective term. But if you look at the views of ALL climatologists and those in RELATED scientific fields (economics, etc. is not "related") I think you'll find that only about 10% at most disagree substantially with the view that climate change is real, presently happening, and significantly caused by human activities. Which brings me to another assertion I saw above, the mantra the "climate changes, always has, always will". True. But just because it happened in the past from "natural" causes, doesn't mean that it's happening THIS time from natural causes. Common sense would tell you that you can't put around 30% more carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) into the atmosphere than was in it 150 years ago and not have SOME effect upon that atmosphere. Human activity has done that. That's over and above "background" CO2 sources, such as volcanic activity. We as humans are taking huge amounts of the CO2 which may have caused some former climate changes, but which was buried underground (coal and oil, the decayed and altered remains of plant life from some of those former warm periods), and bringing back out into the atmosphere by burning it. Not much burns my toast more than the assertion that us little insignificant humans can't have any effect on something as vast as the atmosphere...that's just ridiculous. And just one time, check Snopes or other factual sources on the old, stupid "Al Gore said he created the internet" story. It ain't true. Bottom line, in my opinion, is that nope, we can't perfectly assess how much global warming is occurring or will occur, nor can we perfectly judge how much of it is caused by human activity. But we DO know, without a shadow of a doubt, that greenhouse gases can cause climate change, we know we're putting a heck of a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and at best we've debarked on a grand climatic experiment and cannot predict the final outcome. And, as John McCain said in a recent speech...if we do all we can to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases and we're WRONG on the causes of climate change, we've STILL bequeathed a cleaner atmosphere to our children and reduced our dependence upon foreign oil. If we're RIGHT about the causes but we just keep on with business as usual, the consequences are pretty dire.

It's gotten to be somewhat of a fad...fishing with supposedly "old style" Wiggle Warts. However, in my opinion the Wiggle Wart DOES have somewhat of a different action than most other crankbaits of the same general size a shape. Their wobble is more pronounced and more erratic, tracking off to one side and then the other. It reminds me a little of the old original Bomber lures, which caught a ton of big bass for me years ago.