Al Agnew

Yup, I just looked at the Kastking models they had on Amazon, and I'd probably choose the Royale Legend at $73.99 or the Crixus ArmorX at $89.99. The ArmorX is under 7 ounces. I can't remember the model I have since I'm out in Montana and most of my bass reels are still in Missouri...I don't think it is any of the models that are on Amazon, but those two look to be what I'd be looking for.

Yup, the BPS reels I mentioned back then were changed very soon afterward, the new models were pretty much junk. I hesitate to say this, and would certainly understand if people don't want to buy Chinese products, but the cheapest reels I've found that will do the job pretty well once you get them dialed in are the KastKing models you can get on Ebay for around $60. They don't have good quality control, and you're more likely to get a lemon than if you bought a brand name reel, but if you get a good one it will handle light lures quite well. The Lews Mach I, the white reel you can often find for around $100 or a bit more, is pretty decent at handling light lures. Other than that, just about any of the lightweight reels you can get from Diawa, Shimano, Lews, Garcia, for $120-180 will handle light lures with the correct rod.

Tan Vat or Baptist Camp to Cedargrove will have some traffic and probably plenty of trout fishermen. Cedargrove to Akers will be crowded. Akers to Round Spring will be an absolute zoo. You won't avoid the crowds by going higher on Current River. Round Spring to Two Rivers will have both the floating crowd, though not as many as above, and a whole bunch of jetboaters. It's all floatable just about all the time, except that above Akers you might have a few riffles that will put some scratches in the bottom of your boat--Welch Spring comes in just above Akers and adds enough water that the river is easily floatable year-round from there down.

I think it's one of the great mysteries of fishing. I also suspect that it doesn't have just one answer; in fact, it probably has a bunch of answers, including some that make perfect sense and some that are completely mysterious. We know that changes in water level can cause it. On riverine lakes, opening up a couple floodgates can make more of a current, and turn the bass and other predatory fish on. Most of us have probably experienced the big flurry of activity right before a strong front comes through...and plenty of other times when the front comes and it DOESN'T happen. I've had plenty of days fly fishing on the Yellowstone when it was a partly cloudy day, and as soon as the sun would go behind a cloud the river would just come alive with trout rising...and then the sun would come back out and the rising would shut off completely, even though the bugs were still floating down the river. And yes, I've experienced it with smallmouth on rivers plenty of times. There have been a lot of times on rivers like the Meramec that have all three species that one or two species would be active and the other one would be so inactive that you would go the whole day without catching one, and then the next day you'd be on the same stretch and catch a pile of that species. There was a three year period on Big River and the Meramec that had the same pattern over most of the summer; the mornings would be exceedingly slow for smallmouth, and then sometime between noon and 2 PM all of a sudden the smallies would just be going crazy. Then after that three year period, the next year the smallmouth were almost always going nuts from daylight to 10 AM and then would slow down to almost nothing for the rest of the day. After that, I never again experienced a pattern like that where it held true all summer long and stayed the same day after day. It was just weird.

Yup, and yup.

Current River in that section is fairly big water, which means you're going to be rather limited in what you can fish by walking the bank or wading. Doable, but plan to probably be a little frustrated with the fishing...plenty of good looking spots that you just can't wade out close enough to cast to.

That "bottom one" isn't a pure redear, looks to be a hybrid, probably bluegill/redear hybrid.

It was originally a private tiff company bridge, and they didn't put much effort into making it last. It's been like that for more than 20 years.

As I graduated high school with no real notion of what I wanted to do with my life, let alone what I wanted to major in college, and since I hated math, I wanted to take as little math as necessary. I'd graduated third in my class in high school without ever studying, so most schoolwork was obviously easy for me, but not math. Because I'd graduated so high, my counselor got me into a special summer school at Mineral Area (Junior) College for gifted math students, somehow. If I could pass the courses in that, I'd have all my college math out of the way. So I showed up, and immediately realized that I was in way over my head. After about three weeks, the head instructor called me into his office, and asked me why I was struggling so much. "Maybe," I said, " it's because I never took anything more advanced than Algebra II in high school?" "What? This class is supposed to only be for students who aced the most advanced Calculus and such courses they could take in high school! No wonder you're having trouble. You don't have a clue what we're doing in class." "That's for sure." "Well, I hate for you to fail this course, but unless you can figure things out I don't see anything else happening...Tell you what--if you can somehow pass the final, I'll give you a C for the course. Or you can just drop out." How hard could it be, I thought. I'd always been able to figure out anything having to do with schoolwork without half trying. Surely I could figure this crap out if I really worked at it. I basically spent every free moment I had during the rest of that 8 week course trying to understand all that stuff well enough to pass a test. Worked about 50 times as hard as I'd ever worked on "homework". And ended up BARELY passing the final. It was the only C on my entire college transcript. But I didn't have to take any more math. And I don't remember one single thing I supposedly learned in that course.

Yup...I usually explain what the original "meanmouth" was, and it wasn't a spotted bass/smallmouth hybrid, whenever somebody uses the term. But it's gotten so common in usage these days that I think you and I are fighting a losing battle. And there's no doubt that most anglers don't have a clue about species other than what they commonly catch, and half the time they use the wrong names for the ones they ARE familiar with. If it's a small fish of some kind, they don't care in the least what species it is...when the question is asked, you can expect several people to answer "bait". But those small fish of the various minnow species and others can be some of the most beautiful critters in the river, and have some of the most interesting life histories. I love them all.

Obviously!😜 For what it's worth, there are no pumpkinseeds in MO. The bright orange and blue ones are longear sunfish...pumpkinseeds are a different species that does not live in MO (there have been something like 3 or 4 documented instances of pumpkinseeds in this state, total). And warmouth do live here, but are not often caught on Ozark streams. I've caught a few over the years, but probably no more than a dozen or so. If you want to sound like a real Ozarker, though, the one in the picture is a "black perch", and the other is a "sunperch". Never mind that perch are an entirely different family of fish than sunfish. Ain't local names fun?

What goes "clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, BANG-BANG, clip-clop, clip-clop.... An Amish drive-by shooting.

Not a chance in hell.

I've never been a big fan of the typical Canadian types of fishing...lakes, portages, pike, walleye, lake trout...mosquitoes and other biting critters in vast numbers. I fished a couple lakes in Algonquin Park for lake trout and smallmouth...caught a smallie that was about 18 inches and thick, probably weighed 4 pounds. Didn't think much of it until one of the park rangers was talking to us as we were loading up the car to leave. When I told him about that fish, he said, "You do know the record for the park is only 4 pounds and some ounces, don't ya?" It was one of only a handful of smallies I caught (never did manage to catch a lake trout), so I wasn't too impressed with the fishing. Maybe my most interesting Canadian trip came about because I used to do an art show up in Buckhorn, Ontario, a couple hours north of Toronto. It was a little town out in the middle of nowhere (though that part of Ontario is pretty well populated, with quite a bit of farming country). But it was the only big wildlife art show in Canada, and people flocked to it and bought a LOT of artwork; a couple of the Buckhorn shows were the best art shows by money I made of any I ever did. We got to know Robert Bateman there, and in fact we spent several days in a big cabin he owned on a lake in the area one year, and fished the lake quite a bit after the show. But I'm first and foremost a river fisherman and always have been, so I investigated the river fishing possibilities in that area, and got wind of the Burnt River. So Mary and I and another couple got a float trip set up on a 10 mile section of the river. It was one of the weirdest rivers I've ever floated. It was narrow, maybe averaged 40 feet wide, flowing mostly through heavily wooded lowlands with occasional granite bluffs. And it was dead slow, basically still water the whole way, except for three major rapids. We ran one of them, portaged the other two. It was supposed to be full of smallmouth and harbored some muskies. So I was really wanting to catch a muskie, having never caught one before, but I didn't have any muskie type lures or tackle. So I hoped my bass stuff would produce. We floated about three miles of dead water, catching basically nothing, then came to the first rapid. In the fast water below it I caught my first muskie, about 28 inches or so. Mary caught two, both slightly smaller. No smallmouth. Another couple miles of dead water and dead fishing, and the second rapid produced a couple more of those small muskie. Third rapid was about a mile downstream, and the same thing happened. No smallmouth, just those little muskies, and only in the fast water. Near the end of the float, I decided to try for a bigger muskie. I'd been noticing the occasional weedy, wide backwaters off the main channel that we passed, and had avoided them because they were so weedy, but maybe that's where the big muskies were. So we paddled up into one of them. I had rigged up a Superfluke to fish in the weeds. And those weeds were absolutely full of smallmouth! I caught a bunch of decent ones, 15-17 inchers. It was the last backwater before the end of the trip, but I was sure mad that I hadn't tried any of the others we passed.

I don't expect a whole lot to come of this, but Donald Trump JR. came out against the mine in a tweet, just got notice of it today.

My problem is I like all my watercraft too much...find it very hard to get rid of any of them. I own more boats now by far than I've gotten rid of over 50 years or so. Gotta have a boat for every occasion! So I have 14 different ones right now...have gotten rid of 7 over the years. Of course, of the ones I own now, only one has a motor on it.

Concerning your original idea...there are three advantages to doing flat bottoms on your "pontoons". First, it would be easier. Second, they would draft an inch or so shallower. Third, they would make your craft a little less susceptible to being blown around by the wind. Other than that, I don't see any particular serious disadvantages to them, but no other advantages, either. If this was going to be a craft for whitewater, then yes, the rounded pontoons would be better...they would make the craft less susceptible to currents going in directions you don't want to go. I've done a LOT of rowing in the last fifteen years or so, since we got the place in Montana. I love rowing, and can handle fairly serious whitewater. But there are still things I don't do as well as the river guides out here in Big Sky country do. Somebody who is really good on the oars can keep a raft the exact same distance from the bank no matter what the current is doing, by manipulating the oars to move the raft sideways without turning it so that the guy in the back is farther from the bank than the guy in the front. I plan on practicing what I'd call draw and pry rowing to get better at that while I'm out here right now.

I wonder why they don't figure the flow in cfs on the Poughkeepsie gauge, it would make it a lot easier to know what the river is like. Without even your little bit of experience with river levels, nobody unfamiliar with the river would have a clue what 1.33 feet is like. But if it said 100 cfs I'd know exactly how much water was in the river. I've not fished it down that far...think maybe I took out there once, but can't remember for sure. It gets extremely low up in the smallmouth water. I've found that in almost all those streams where spotted bass are native, you pass a point where from there on down it's almost all spotted bass. And those lower portions always look very fishy, but you never seem to catch as many spotted bass down in that kind of water as you can smallmouth in the upper portions. There was a time when I thought those lower sections of such streams should have some huge smallmouth, but it's never happened for me.

Okay...I got all the values correct, but added 9+9=18, and multiplied 18X44=792. And I did another of these a while back on Facebook, and the answer depended upon doing that final equation in order of the digits, as I did this time. So I'm calling foul. Unless you put the brackets around the calculator and lightbulbs, as Gavin did to get the "correct" answer, there really IS no correct answer, but some guy on Facebook when I did the last one quoted some math text that said you are supposed to do the calculations in order. So I'm saying I was right!

Like Johnsfolly said, pumpkinseeds are basically non-existent in MO. There have been only a short handful of documented collections of true pumpkinseeds. Although they look superficially like longear, the ear flap is quite different and they have a different, slightly slimmer body shape. I've caught a few of them a lot farther north than this state.

I'm doing it in my head, but I think it's 792.

The hybrid was cool! It's always interesting how many species can hybridize. There's a tiny creek, fed by a small spring so it's permanently flowing but the pools are the size of a bathtub, near my house. It's full of creek chubs and redbellied dace, and the two hybridize. I had one of the hybrids in my aquarium for a couple years, sent photos of it to the MDC biologist I know, and he agreed that was what it was, said he'd never seen that before.

You could micro-fish and catch the next record longear!

There used to be a fish hatchery on a tributary of the upper Meramec, and they raised pike for a while. Apparently some escaped from the hatchery, and showed up in a few collections on the upper portion of the Meramec for a few years. There was never any evidence that they reproduced naturally in the river. There have been occasional records of pike showing up in strange places in the state. Like I said, probably this one, if it is a pike (I'm pretty sure it is) strayed down the Mississippi from farther north. All of us fish nerds are waiting on the new book on the fish of Missouri to come out. The old book has this to say about northern pike in Missouri: "Before Department biologists began stocking northern pike in 1966, occasional specimens were reported by fishermen from widely scattered localities in northern and central Missouri. Most reports were from the lower Osage River, where a small self-sustaining population may have existed. Other records may have been based on individuals that strayed into Missouri from the north along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. In recent years, the number of reports of northern pike from along the Missouri and upper Mississippi rivers has increased, and it is possible that limited reproduction is occurring in these areas. The first stockings of northern pike in MIssouri were of adults into Deer Ridge Lake, Lewis County, and Miller Lake, Carter County, in March 1966. Adults were also placed in ponds at Indian Trail Hatchery, Dent County. The latter fish spawned successfully, and some of the resulting fry may have escaped into the Meramec River. Northern pike were subsequently stocked into Thomas Hill Reservoir in 1967 and Stockton Reservoir in 1970. Stocking of northern pike was discontinued in 1974, and natural reproduction has not been sufficient to maintain populations in any of these lakes. ...Currently, some of the largest natural populations of northern pike in Missouri are in borrow pits and drainage ditches on the flood plain of the Mississippi River in Clark and Marion counties." As for chain pickerel, they apparently are not native to anywhere in the state except the St. Francis and Black river systems (the Black river system includes Current, Eleven Point, and Spring rivers), and waters that connect to the St. Francis River in the Bootheel (this includes Duck Creek). In the "Fishes of Missouri" book, Pflieger says he examined a 24 incher an angler had caught on the lower Big Piney, and received reports of others being caught in that area, but has no idea how they got there, since they have never been collected anywhere else in the state besides the rivers mentioned above.

Ham, look at the shape of the snout on the three photos that moguy1973 posted. The snout on the fish in question matches the highfin carpsucker perfectly. The other two don't have that bump in front of the eye. If you're going by the long first ray of the dorsal fin, it is often broken off on both the highfin and the quillback.