Al Agnew

His property line DOES probably end in the middle of the river; that's the case with a lot of riverfront property in Missouri. BUT...in the case of floatable streams, the decision was that the public has what amounts to an easement to use the part of his property that includes stream bottom AND GRAVEL BARS. That was where he was wrong. He had no right to keep you off the gravel bar. If you had walked up a bank onto his field or in his trees you'd have been trespassing. But not walking on a gravel bar. This is what annoys me about a lot of river landowners, especially those that bought the land fairly recently. I own riverfront property in two places in Missouri and one place in Montana. I bought it knowing that I would have to put up with the public being on my gravel bars. It's part of the price of owning land on a float stream, and all landowners should realize that. I can understand the frustration with people littering and doing other obnoxious things, but that's the way it is. The big problem comes when the landowner is rich and influential in county politics, and has the sheriff and county prosecutor in his pocket. There have been several places in Missouri where the landowner successfully kept a lot of people of "his" river because the county officials let him.

I suppose it's possible that the canoe rental places in some areas did that, but I really doubt it. I know for sure that it's the landowners around the bridges that have instigated their closing in many cases, and in others, it's been the county sheriff who did it so that they wouldn't have so many headaches constantly getting calls from local people about partying and drug use and other bad behavior at the bridge crossings. And a lot of these bridge closings are on streams that aren't served by canoe liveries. "High water mark" is NOT a part of the law for float streams in Missouri. Elder v Delcour didn't mention it. What it said, and I'm quoting from the actual case transcript, is "the stream bed, gravel bars and clearly recognizable area over which the stream flows during its normal stages". You can generally figure that gravel bars and weedbeds along the river are okay, but when you climb up the bank at the back of the gravel bar and get into the trees or the farmer's field, or climb up the talus slope under a bluff, you're trespassing. People have all kinds of weird and totally wrong ideas about this. I've seen people say that it's so many feet from the river, or so many feet above water level. Nope. You can be 5 feet from the river on a high bank and be trespassing, or a hundred yards from the river at the back of a big gravel bar and be legal. The crux of the decision in Elder was that if you can float the stream in a normal stage (which means in the spring when the normal flow is at its highest), you have the right to float it. It wouldn't matter if the stream went dry in mid-summer as long as it was floatable in the spring when it was at a stable level. I don't know of many streams in Missouri that would fit that situation...most that go completely dry are only floatable in higher than normal spring levels. But it's part of the gray area surrounding stream access in Missouri...how DO you judge whether a stream is actually floatable at a "normal" level in the spring?

I don't think that federal case was a part of Elder v Delcour, but as a purely legal matter, Elder v Delcour applied only to the stretch of the Meramec in question in the case. As a general matter of law, however, Elder set a precedent (actually more than one precedent), which means that it is presumed to apply in any similar situation. Since the stretch of the Meramec in question was on the far upper Meramec, specifically the Delcour Bridge to Cook Station, the precedent would be that the same legal reasoning would apply to any stream of similar size or larger. However, you are correct that one wouldn't know for SURE whether it applied unless a court case decided it did. This has actually happened in a number of streams of similar size and even slightly smaller over the years. One of note is Indian Creek in Franklin County, which is a bit smaller than the portion of the upper Meramec that was in Elder. The real key to whether a stream applies is whether it is big enough to allow float trips in small boats (canoes, kayaks) in normal water levels during at least part of the year. It should be noted that even though Indian Creek WAS adjudicated to fall under Elder, a couple landowners on it will still give floaters a lot of harassment, and have had to be warned by local law enforcement more than once that they can't do that...but they still do. I'm not sure exactly what law they would be breaking by doing so, or what the penalties for doing so should be, which probably ties the hands of law enforcement in trying to stop them from harassing and intimidating floaters. You're right about bridge crossings, but this is a relatively recent change (well, it seems recent to me because I've been floating these rivers for 55 years or more). Back in the 1970s, most bridges on popular streams had lanes leading to the river or widened informal parking areas along the road shoulder, and it was just accepted that they were okay to use for access. But as rivers got more popular and more people were pinheads about trashing access points and other stupid and obnoxious behavior, landowners either took it upon themselves to block access, or complained enough to local law enforcement and county officials that, to get rid of the headaches, counties began posting accesses at bridge crossings. And although I know of no court case that ever decided that the right of way did not include use by the public, that's become the general interpretation now...that the right of way is for the benefit of the road departments, not for public access.

The Meramec is a little outside Tommy's usual area to guide. Don't know whether he will guide you on the Meramec or not, but he's a knowledgeable angler and guide who could put you in a better situation than you could on your own, no matter what his specific knowledge level of the Meramec is. You might contact Corey Cottrell at Huzzah Valley Resort. He does some guiding on the middle Meramec and is a very knowledgeable Meramec angler.

Great looking table! Ever since I mostly retired from painting, I've made furniture now and then for ourselves. I love working with old barn wood, and made a wall of cabinetry/entertainment center for our home in Montana, along with bookshelves and end tables. I also like working with live edge walnut slabs. Last year I made a walnut coffee table for our Missouri house, and right now I'm working on another walnut table that will go between Mary's and my recliners, big enough for lamp, charging station, and drinks for both of us and shaped to fit perfectly between the recliners.

I've paid well over half that much for a day of guided fishing, without any guarantees that I'd catch anything. But I happily paid it because it was the best way to get on some great fishing water that I was unprepared to do it myself. To me, it was the fishing on that gorgeous water that made it worth it, not the catching. So these guys are spending that to fish private water where they presumably have a better chance of catching a double digit bass than in public lakes. It's always cool to fish private water, but only you can decide whether it's worth $1000. Also, only you can determine how important it is to you to catch a ten plus pound bass. If it WAS guaranteed, it wouldn't be worth it to me. It's not the 10 pound plus bass that I care about, it's being able to figure out how to catch enough big bass that one of them is likely to be a double digit fish. To me, fishing is like a lot of things, it's the striving that's most important. I'd love to catch a 6 pound plus Ozark river smallmouth. But if by some chance there was a private stretch of river that I was guaranteed to catch a six pounder, I wouldn't care to do it. I want the fun of trying, and the satisfaction I'd have if I ever caught one on the same water that every other good fisherman can fish.

You're right, but Arkansas shot 37 free throws to Mizzou's 17. Partly because Mizzou missed the front end of a few one and ones, and partly because Arkansas was fouled going to the rim a lot more while Mizzou was fouled when it wasn't in the act of shooting.

I can't blame Grill for continuing to shoot. They needed the baskets, and he has shown he can hit guarded threes and deep threes. Sometimes the shots don't fall, and when they don't and you're depended upon to provide offense, your team is probably going to lose. It was a couple of shots late that were open ones that he missed that spelled their doom. I'd still want him shooting those shots.

Mizzou lost because they didn't have Gray to be a rim protector and rebounder, Grill went ice cold, they couldn't hit enough free throws, they didn't get to the line enough, and they couldn't stop Arkansas guards driving to the rim without fouling. I also think AR got some home cooking...37 fouls for Mizzou, 17 for AR, and it sure seemed like Mizzou couldn't buy a foul when they took it to the rim while AR got the call just about every time. Road games in the SEC are tough. This loss didn't drop Mizzou much, one spot in the KenPom ranking. But they now have to beat Vandy, Oklahoma, and South Carolina on the road or their resume will put them down in the 6th or 7th seed area in the tournament.

It's driving me nuts. One big reason we still have a place in the Ozarks is so that I can spend much of the winter here and do a lot of winter fishing. But I don't like to fish if the temps are below freezing and water temps in the mid-30s. With Mary getting a knee replacement in mid-January and all this cold weather, I've only fished 3 or 4 times all winter. Long range forecast is for temps in the 50s after this coming week, so maybe I'll finally get in some fishing.

The definitive book to find if you're interested in all the strains of trout in North America is "Trout and Salmon of North America", by Robert J. Behnke. It has range maps and excellent illustrations by Joe Tomelleri, who is almost as good as I am at depicting fish accurately😁. If interested in an entertaining book about one man's quest to catch all the native cutthroat strains by seeking out tiny creeks above major waterfalls where non-native rainbows presumably couldn't reach, find "Native Trout of North America" by Robert H. Smith. He caught just about all of them and took photos, but alas, a lot of his photos are pretty poor.

I think that the cutthroat stocked in Arkansas come from the state fish hatchery at Mammoth Spring. Like you, I can find nothing about what strain they originally were. Looking at photos, they don't particularly look like any of the distinct strains from various parts of the West. I suspect that these fish are mongrels, coming from brood stock from several different original sources and bred in the hatchery until they are like hatchery rainbows...not any particular strain. It's interesting and perhaps telling that Arkansas Game and Fish doesn't seem to make a big deal out of which strain they came from. I've fished a lot of the West, and have caught several different strains, including coastal, westslope, Snake River fine-spotted, Yellowstone, and Colorado cutthroats. Interestingly, the cutthroat strain that made me a bunch of money and some notoriety, the Lahontan cutthroat, is one I've never caught. I entered and won Nevada's first trout stamp contest with a Lahontan cutthroat, but my reference was some good photos that a friend of mine in MDC procured from somebody he knew in Nevada Fish and Game department.

I don't have my copy in front of me, but I believe that the 200 MSA book didn't cover the Niangua or Elk systems. Chuck was from the St. Louis area, and he just didn't get that far away. Note also that quite a few of the obscure accesses he mentioned in the book are no longer viable, partly BECAUSE of his book--he brought too many people to these access points and the landowners got fed up and shut them off. I agree with Gavin that OnX Hunt is fairly useful. But I use Google Earth Pro and a DeLorme Atlas. Find creeks and bridge crossings on them with the Atlas, then look at the bridge crossings and creeks on Google Earth Pro. I use the Pro version because of its history feature, that shows previous imagery. A lot of times, the most recent imagery might be when the creek is high or when the trees are leafed out and obscuring much of the creek and the area around the bridge crossing, but if you go back through previous imagery you can often find a winter time view with the water low and clear, and you'll see a lot more detail. What I'm looking for is an obvious place near the bridge where people have been parking. A lot of bridges these days are fairly new, without places to park along the road shoulder, and so you can eliminate them. But if you see a bridge with an obvious pull off, then chances are people have been using it with no problems from landowners. However, you won't know for sure until you check it out. If, when you get there, there is purple paint everywhere and no trespassing signs on every tree, try somewhere else. PLEASE...if you find a nice creek with a good access, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT ABOUT IT, and don't take anybody to it that you don't trust completely to keep quiet about it. We use these accesses because the landowners don't mind. Bringing more people to them is not going to make the landowner happy. And it should go without saying to treat the use of the creek as a privilege, so keep a low profile and don't do ANYTHING that might tick off a landowner. I also think it's a good idea to not wear out your welcome. I NEVER fish a single stretch of wading size creek more than three times a year, and most of them no more than once a year; the only ones I might fish up to three times are the ones closest to home, when I can get there in 20 minutes or less and fish for a couple hours.

They not only change colors during the course of a day, they change "colors" in minutes. The reason I put it in quotation marks is because you have to differentiate between pattern or lack of it, shade--dark to light, and overall color cast. Smallmouth and Neoshos do all three. The pattern of dark vertical bars and splotches is actually a sign of stress or excitement; smallies just hanging out in the river are usually almost unmarked. But when you hook one, by the time you get it in those dark bars are beginning to show. Put it on a stringer and they become VERY prominent. (Note that "excitement" includes sexual excitement--spawning fish are usually very heavily marked.) Smallmouth and Neoshos can also change their overall shade from very light to almost totally very dark. This is sometimes a response to light levels in their surroundings, or the darkness or lightness of the bottom. Smallmouth caught in the summer over a bottom covered in dark algae are usually fairly dark overall, while smallmouth caught over a clean gravel bottom (like you see in the winter when the algae dies off) in bright sunlight will usually be very light brassy in shade and color to blend in with the clean, well lit gravel bottom. And finally, they can change color cast overall from very brownish and coppery brass to more olive. They can even fade out these colors and turn almost olive gray. This is always in response to the predominant color of the bottom, and usually takes a little longer to make the change. I've got more than a thousand photos of smallmouth I've caught in various places, which I use in my paintings. The variety of patterns, colors, and shades is amazing.

March is just about the worst month other than the depths of winter to try to wade fish Ozark streams. Typically even the normal water flow in March is as high as it will get, which means strong current and a lot of water that's just too deep for safe wading. Couple that with the fact that March is a transition month where the fish are moving from winter holes to spawning banks. If you find them, they are easy to catch, but finding them is hit or miss. You'd be much better off to wait until May for good wade fishing. If the weather has been warmer than normal, a lot of fish will have moved up into tributary streams by late March, and some of those will be more wadeable. However, the thing you have to keep in mind is that streams in MO that are too small to float in a canoe or kayak are basically private. All of us who creek fish know places where we can get on the water because the landowner doesn't care. But you won't find many people sharing those spots, nor should they, because the more people that go to them, the more likely some pinheads will tick off the landowner and ruin it for everybody. The safest wading is on the upper reaches of the streams you'll find in the Paddler's Guide that TJM talked about. Find the highest possible put-in and go check it out...it might be wadeable.

Yup, definitely true that sometimes the fish just aren't going to bite. I relearned this a few years ago while winter fishing one of those spring holes where it's usually like shooting fish in a barrel. The water was low and very clear, but I'd caught fish there before in low, clear, winter water. But this time I fished this one stretch of bank where they should have been for a good hour without a bite, trying several different lures that always work. Finally I gave up, thinking the fish had moved. There was a high mud bank along that little stretch, and I crossed the river and climbed up on that bank to see if there were any fish to be seen. Welp, there were probably 200 smallmouth of all sizes hanging out right where I'd been doing all that fishing. Very few of them were even moving.

The future is going to be interesting. Seems like a whole lot of things are gradually building up that, combined, could result in a lot of changes for the worse in our fisheries. Everything from more and more technology to more and more anglers using that technology to environmental problems affecting the habitat to climate change affecting water temperatures and flood regimes. And while we all like catch and release and think it's good for fish populations, it has always seemed to me that, no matter how much anglers profess to catch and release, the more pressure the harder the fishing gets. I could see how FFS could have a significant effect on crappie. Kinda reminds me of a couple weeks ago, while fishing for winter bass. I found a lone downed tree just off the bank in deep water that had a school of crappie in it. Pretty nice ones, and I love eating crappie. Using jerkbaits, I was catching one on almost every cast, so I started tossing them into the livewell. By the tenth one, I was wondering how long I could keep this up, but then I got to thinking that this was probably the only school of crappie in several miles of river, and I was pretty sure, since it was a well known winter fishing hole, that others had found those crappie before me. Now I have no idea how many there were in that tree, but I decided that ten was enough for a heck of a meal, and it was just being greedy to take any more than that out of that tree. And I really hope that I didn't take some of the last of the school after others had already decimated it. I've always been a little mystified why people who are after fish that are supposedly great eating think that they have to fill their limits every time they go.

Looks like about 4 inches here. Tomorrow I get to have fun on the tractor blading it off our quarter mile super steep lane.

Of those I fish with, a couple are seeing the problems and backing off fishing the tournaments somewhat, while a couple others are adamantly unconvinced. Heck, I might be smart, but not everybody thinks I'm a genius😁...they don't listen to me. Besides, I'm getting too old to fight more battles.

Not every wintering hole is straightforward as to where the fish in it are located at any given time. Sure, some of the holes I fish, the whole pool isn't very big and the fish-holding spots are few and small, or else one little stretch of bank is good and everything else is too shallow to hold fish in normal clear winter water. But there are plenty of them that are a half mile long, deep from bank to bank and from head to tail. These are pools that I might spend a half day just trying to find the fish when you have to fish slowly and carefully in the winter, because they won't be everywhere. It is in these pools, seems to me, that FFS would speed the process up considerably; just cruise it looking for fish, make some casts when you find some to see if they are bass and interested. Successful fishing, whether tournament or not, is all about efficiency. The less time you spend making casts to places where there aren't any fish, the more efficient you are at catching fish. Are these winter river tournaments impacting the populations of bigger fish? Who knows? But seems to me that it's a bit of an arms race. As anglers get more efficient with better equipment and knowledge, they catch a greater PERCENTAGE of the bigger fish. So it could very well be that there are just as many fish being caught now as there were 20 years ago, but those numbers are a greater percentage of a smaller total number of big fish. And as efficiency continues to increase, at some point the numbers of big ones caught will start declining because the available pool of big ones from which to catch them gets too small.

I could certainly see it having an impact on winter fishing on the larger Ozark rivers. Other than that, I don't think it could have much impact on warm weather fishing where the fish are more scattered and easier to find. I'm especially concerned when it comes to the winter tournaments that have cropped up on streams like the Current, Meramec, and Gasconade, where the anglers carry their fish to a weigh in point and release them all there. Moving more and bigger bass out of their wintering habitat and releasing them in a spot where they are going to have to disperse to get back to wintering habitat seems to me to be a recipe for disaster...it's happening already, and FFS will probably make it a lot worse. I really wish that these tournaments would be required to go to a format where the fish are photographed, measured, and released immediately.

Not too bad here in Franklin County. Had about 3-4 inches of snow over an inch of mostly sleet with a little freezing rain. Not enough freezing rain to form icicles on the tree limbs, just enough to put a bit of a coating on the twigs. So no broken down trees and the power was fine. I got out this morning on the tractor and cleared our quarter mile long lane to the highway. Took several hours, because that icy sleet underneath didn't want to be removed. We have to get to St. Louis tomorrow morning, so I had to get it done; our lane is VERY steep in places. Got the steep parts down to bare gravel, so should be good.

Jim Owen was somewhat of a huckster. When the dam was first beginning to be constructed, he cried crocodile tears about the loss of the river to the dam in advertisements to get more people to float with his company, and created the myth of the guy who loved the river and was so saddened by its loss. But as that letter showed, he was really seeing the dam as another way to make some money, and was perfectly willing to sacrifice the White and James to do so. Can't blame him for that; it was inevitable that the dam would go in. But from the letter he helped make sure it went in.

Looking forward to reading the book. I've done a lot of research over the years about the history of float fishing. I watched the PBS interview with the authors, and they didn't say anything in it that I didn't already know. Table Rock and Bull Shoals put an end to the classic Ozark float trips, from Galena to Taneycomo and from Taneycomo to Cotter. I've seen old photos of the White River that was buried by those dams, and it never fails to sadden me that I was born too late to experience the White when it was the quintessential Ozark smallmouth river. Geez, it was beautiful. I'm not sure the fishing was all that great, though. Some of the stringers of fish being proudly held up in those old photos were not as impressive as the fish that any good Ozark river angler could amass today. Too many people subsistence fishing, too many things messing up the rivers, like the big log and tie rafts, burning the hillsides every spring, etc. In many of those old photos the trees in the background were sparse and scraggly, because all the good timber had been logged off and the second growth was just beginning to grow. One of my favorite books for reading about the way things were back then is actually just a book about bass fishing in general..."Freshwater Bass", by Ray Bergman, who was the long time fishing editor for Outdoor Life magazine back in the 40s and 50s. The White River was one of his favorite places to fish, even though he lived in New York, and parts of several chapters describe trips on the White. But one whole chapter was dedicated to Ozark float fishing. It started out with he and his wife coming to Branson, and finding the White blown out from heavy rains. Jim Owen, who he always used for his floats, called around all over the area to try to find fishable water (probably an adventure itself considering the phone service in those days), and finally found that the Buffalo River was low and clear. None of Jim's guides had ever floated the Buffalo, but they loaded up the boats and headed south. Bergman didn't say the stretch they floated, but it included the section below Woolum. Because, he describes coming upon a stretch of several miles where the river was nearly dry, and the stretch from just below Woolum to Margaret White Spring does dry up in dry summers; it's a losing reach. So they got to that stretch, which he described as not having enough water to "float an axe chip", and there they were with fully loaded 20 foot wooden johnboats. But they luckily found a farmer there that had a team of mules, and the mules dragged those boats down that four mile reach! He described the river as being extremely clear, and the fish very spooky. He finally started catching them on his fly rod with extremely light leader (not monofilament in those days), until he hooked and broke off a four pounder. He also described the river as the most beautiful he'd ever seen--one of many people to say that.

Love all the weird saltwater fish, even though I have no interest whatsoever in saltwater fish! Let's see...I fished two new stretches of river in the Ozarks this past year. Both on four day trips. I'd fished parts of both stretches in the distant past, but so long ago they were almost new water, and other parts WERE new water. Don't remember catching any new lifer species. Probably fewer days fishing in 2024 than in 2023. Probably about an average year of catching. Started off the new year right today...fished with a buddy and we ran some skinny water to get to a good winter hole that's nearly two miles long. Only found smallmouth in two spots on it and only caught two, though I hooked a couple more. But largemouth were scattered along the banks and we caught around 10, all over 16 inches, but the biggest was about 18 inches. Oddly, no spotted bass even though this stretch is usually loaded with them.