Al Agnew

A lot of times the really big ones just aren't going to commit. A lot of the 20 plus inch smallies I've caught were with others that were of comparable size, and competition made them take it. I can remember a lot of times when I did catch (or at least hook) the biggest of the pod of big fish approaching my lure, but a whole lot of times even in that scenario, one of the smaller ones got there first...and I'm convinced that if the biggest one wanted it bad enough, it would run off the smaller ones and take it. And one of the two biggest Ozark stream smallies I ever caught tried to take the lure away from an 18 incher I had already hooked, got hooked itself, and then the smaller one got off. And one of the three or four biggest I ever saw was following my partner's fish around trying to take the lure away from it, and when I cast to it, it struck but didn't get hooked. I suspect that neither of those fish would have taken the lure first itself. It is always a good idea for the partner in the boat to have a rod ready with a fluke or some other slow-sinking bait, to cast to fish following a hooked bass.

Didn't see how they got it out. Don't think the string trick would work with two hook points buried; it would have been no problem with just one point buried in that spot (as long as you had a partner...doable if you're alone but not as easy. Fishing a lot of two and three treble hook lures, I've always been very careful about lipping bass, but usually manage to do so with no problem. Trick is to not be tentative...see the opportunity to grab that lower lip and do it quickly and as hard as you can grip. But sometimes it just isn't possible to do it safely. I never have carried a net in the canoe, but will be buying one for the jetboat and I might start carrying it in the canoe as well. On the North Country trip that CWC and I did last summer, where we were catching a lot of big, hot smallmouth, I finally gave up on using my walk the dog topwaters because those fish were just too hot and too strong to handle safely, and we didn't have a net.

Here ya go, Scott. My pond is still frozen so I can't try it out in the water, yet. Edit...Found a corner of the pond that was open. It works but needs some tweaking and a bit bigger blade. Not quite as noisy as a WP.

I spent a pleasant couple hours this afternoon before the Mizzou game (wish I hadn't watched it) making a prototype wooden lure based loosely on a Whopper Plopper. Basement garage door open, southwest sun shining in, really nice.

That's a very good point. I don't have a problem with people drinking in moderation, getting mildly buzzed in social situations (as long as they don't drive home). But getting sloppy drunk anytime is just plain stupid in my book. Getting drunk enough that you MIGHT do something stupid or embarrassing that you wouldn't ordinarily do is going too far (you can't fix stupid but you should be able to fix stupid drunk). Of course, the responsibility comes BEFORE you take the first drink. I used to drink two beers after playing basketball, and one beer or a small amount of sipping scotch about three or four nights a week while sitting at home. All the guys I drank beer with after b-ball quit playing (dang, it's heck getting old but at least I'm still trying) so I don't even drink those two anymore. Even though I like the taste of some beers and good scotch whiskey (hate any expensive wine, though), I can probably count on the fingers of both hands the times I've actually been drunk. I'm drinking a Corona with half a lemon squeezed into it as I type this...my one drink of the night. I live a boring life but I like it.

Glad you liked it enough to hang it on your wall!

It's always a gamble whether or not the river will wash away the buffer zone between the excavations and the channel with every flood. If the buffer zone stays intact and the river doesn't decide to take over the excavation, the impacts to the actual river are fairly small. But nevertheless there are possible bad things that can happen. The river needs an intact connection to an intact flood plain to be at its healthiest. I've seen these types of excavations where they built a dirt levee to keep the river out of the big hole they were digging, and that cuts off the river from its flood plain, not to mention totally messing up the floodplain itself. Most of the ones I'm familiar with, eventually they actually have a narrow channel connecting the river to the excavation. If they are still working at that point, it means a lot of silt coming into the river, not to mention the motor oil and other chemicals incidental to mining. But seems to me the biggest problem is the impact on people living in the area. I don't blame everybody for being so against this when they'll have to put up with what is basically an industrial complex in their back yard and the tremendous impacts on infrastructure in the area. I suppose this is better than simply digging in the river channel and widening it the way things used to be done. Yes, it made for some nice wintering pools, but it wiped out a LOT of summertime habitat (gamefish don't like big, dead, deep pools in the summer...not enough food), and it had a tremendous impact on the river far upstream and downstream from the actual digging. Upstream, headcutting often caused a lot of erosion of the banks, and downstream, there was a lot of siltation from the operations and a lot warmer water in the summer from those wide, dead pools exposed to the sun.

I've never blown into the device, so I have no idea what my blood alcohol is after two beers. But from what I've heard, it should be a little under the current limit. All I know is that as near as I can tell, two beers in about an hour doesn't impair me, but one more in that hour does, so I never drink more than two before driving, and I almost always stop after two and give it an hour or so before actually getting behind the wheel. I assume that, if this goes into effect, the two beers will be a thing of the past. I'm not a big beer drinker anyway, so it wouldn't particularly bother me, but I do think it's getting a little ridiculous. Taking a cab or Uber sounds good, but it ain't happening in most rural areas.

If it's in April I won't be there...I'll be in Montana. March or May I'd be there for sure.

Bad ending to the game for Mizzou. That's the second down to the wire game they've lost. People want to blame it on Geist and the lack of a point guard, but neither game was Geist's fault if you take the time to watch replays. The Florida game, the last play was designed to get Robertson open, and it worked to perfection. His man was 10 feet away from him when Geist made the pass. But Chiozza took a huge gamble, coming off Barnett, who had been shooting lights out, and covering 15 feet to get to the ball. That was at least 90% just a fantastic defensive play. Then today...the play was supposed to be Barnett setting a screen, then either rolling or popping out to take the pass from Geist. But the guy guarding Geist on the screen took out Barnett's legs and dumped him on the floor. Meanwhile Robertson was supposed to be coming to the ball in case Geist couldn't pass to Barnett, but he was being held the whole way. No call on either of those things. Left Geist to shoot a contested three because he had no other option. And it almost went in. Hate to blame it on the refs. You can expect them to swallow their whistles in the last seconds of a tight game. But once again, way too many ticky tack fouls called on Mizzou's big men throughout the game. The last charging call on Porter, the Arkie guy flopped when he wasn't even touched. Took away two points (Porter made the shot), a foul that should have been called on the other guy guarding Porter, so it should have been a 3 point play, and Porter was called for his fourth foul. And the screen that Tilmon set near the end that he was whistled for an illegal screen, replay showed it was a perfect screen, but the Arkie kid bounced off Tilmon and the refs called it. Announcer thought it was an okay call until he saw the replay, then tried to say that Tilmon dropped his shoulder. Bull. Tilmon got penalized for being a big man when the little guy runs into you. That was after the Florida game, when both Porter and Tilmon somehow fouled out with a total of maybe five fouls between them. There were horrible calls in that game, this game wasn't quite so bad.

Yeah, that stretch gets enough jet boat fishermen that, like nearly all the jetboatable stretches, the fish get a little sophisticated. I've had a few good days and a few mediocre ones on it. Haven't fished it all that much. I like to wait until the Piney is low enough that most of the jet guys won't run up it.

Harps, you're getting your Boiling Springs mixed up. I think he's talking about the one on the Gasconade a couple miles below the mouth of the Piney, not the one a long way up the Piney.

Spawn can start in early April, and can go on until early June. Mostly depends upon water conditions...seems they will spawn as soon as they can, so if the water is warm enough in early April to get them going they will. If it stays too cool, as it does sometimes in cold spring weather, they still feel the pressure to spawn, and if it hasn't warmed up enough by early May they'll go ahead and spawn anyway. But they don't all spawn at the same time, and if there is a lot of high water making spawning difficult, seems like some keep trying up into June. I've seen spawning activity by the first or second week of April, and seen them still spawning in June. So I wouldn't call May "pre-spawn". On the rivers I fish, pre-spawn is late March/early April.

Okay, I'm gonna say this one more time...carp are fun to fish for and fight very well. I have absolutely NO problem with people fishing for them. The more people fishing for them the better...as long as the agencies don't start managing them to the detriment of other fish, especially native fish, because so many people are fishing for them. And I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. Right now, most places they simply AREN'T managed, either for the good of carp or to the detriment of carp, and they are doing just fine. If I wanted to, I could catch a pile of them on the Ozark streams I fish, and if you really want to catch carp until you're tired of catching them, Wappapello Lake is chock full of them. Or you can go to the lower sections of every creek running directly into the Mississippi south of St. Louis and wear yourself out on them. I highly doubt if many people are gigging, spearing, or shooting them in most of those places. I haven't been to Bismarck Lake in a while, but the last time I was there the carp were spawning in the shallows and there were huge ones everywhere. Heck, there's a lake less than an hour from where our house is in Montana that is about 20 acres, surrounded by spectacular mountain scenery, and has so many carp they keep the lake muddy. There is no shortage of good carp fishing places. So have at it.

Great story, but the scuttlebutt is that the kid was head and shoulders better than Hurts even back in the spring game, as well as all through practice in the fall, but Saban was still loyal to the upperclassman. Probably will be a different story next year.

The spring creeks are cheap this time of year...$40. $125 a day in the summer. I don't fish them in the summer! If you have a family that wants to get into winter sports, a winter vacation in Montana will get you plenty of skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, snowmobiling...and you can sneak off and fish the spring creeks.

I'm at a loss. Seems he wanted and expected everybody here to give everybody else on here the exact spots where they catch fish, I guess. And then nitpicked my vocabulary. I don't remember peeing in his Wheaties, but maybe I did at some point. I too would like to hear why there are apparently people who think the so-called St. Louis clique (and I think that's the way it's spelled, not "click") are such bassholes. I know Chief likes to stir the pot about us hating on illegal gigging, but other than that and that Whitesnoop character ragging on me for not carrying a bump board, I haven't seen too many complaints. Inquiring minds want to know.

The forecast for the day for livingston Montana wasn't great. It was going to be windy. So what else is new. Livingston is known for wind, though also for warmer winter weather than you'd think for Montana. But there had been a lot of subzero temps, and now it had finally moderated, and this would be my only chance to go fishing while we were out here. The river still had shelf ice, but the snow was melting and DePuys Spring Creek had rods open. And maybe it wouldn't be so windy up in the valley. So I drove the 15 minutes from the house to the spring creek, and there wasn't much wind. Just a cloudy day. That's streamer weather! I tied on one of my rabbit hair streamers and walked up to a slack pool that I knew held fish that would eat a streamer. It didn't take long: That was the first fish of 2018 for me. I hooked several more, both rainbows and browns, and in the next three hours I caught 8 or 9. None were huge but all were nice fish, 14-17 inchers. Then the sun came out: That was pretty much the end of the streamer fishing. I walked back to the truck, which was parked next to one of the little huts with wood stoves that the owners thoughtfully provide for cold anglers. I wasn't cold, but the wind had come up and was blowing about 25 mph, and it was nice to get out of it while I ate a late lunch. Afterwards, I tried nymphing a couple runs, but got nothing. Seemed the fishing was done for the day, so I gave it up and headed for home. Not bad for Montana in January.

You know, this really ticks me off. I don't think any of the so-called clique have been all that disrespectful to others in explaining why we don't post exact locations. And even more importantly, I think we have been quite forthcoming about lures and methods. Like I said before, I've given out most, if not all, the stuff I know about lures, methods, locating wintering pools, boat and canoe handling over the years I've been on here. Holy moly, I just spent an hour a few days ago telling much of what I know about Montana trout fishing, including, in general, where to go. So Griz and Trout Addict, sorry if you feel the way you do, but you're wrong in my opinion. And Trout Addict, you're gonna be missing a lot of valuable info in the future by taking your ball and going home. I can also remember Smalliebigs telling people on here EXACTLY where to try fishing the lower Meramec not all that long ago. And here's the thing...among us in the "clique", we fish the Meramec from Maramec Spring to St. Louis County. Some fish one section more than others, but we've probably all caught a lot of fish throughout that entire length of the river, along with a good part of the Gasconade, Big, and Bourbeuse. YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW exactly where somebody caught a big one last month, because chances are the next big one will be caught somewhere completely different. You don't even need to know the 10 mile stretch. Come to the next Smallmouth Alliance meeting in St. Louis. I'm giving a little talk on the lures I use and when, why, and how I use them. I won't tell any exact locations there, either, but I won't purposely keep any secrets about lures and tactics. Of course, good ol' Whitesnoop or whatever his handle is will probably come on here next and say I don't know anything and lie about the size of the fish I catch. So take whatever I say for what it's worth

Already explained why we are a little careful about specific spots. But consider this. If your friend showed you his three best winter holes for smallmouth, would you go back there with somebody else a couple days later, and in the meantime tell (face to face) 12 more people exactly where those spots were? Don't you think that MIGHT tick your friend off just a bit? Especially if he told you to keep it quiet, or just thought you KNEW to keep it quiet. What makes this different? (Other than the fact that you're posting it for EVERYBODY to see, including a whole lot of people you don't know at all.) Hog Wally and Mitch have shown me a bunch of excellent spots on the Meramec and Gasconade that I didn't know about, right down to the exact living room size piece of the pool where the fish were most likely to be concentrated. I've probably showed them a few as well. And we all know each other well enough to trust that none of us will spill the beans. It's expected that we might take somebody else to those places and show them those fish, but it's also expected that the somebody will also not broadcast the exact places. I also have to say that I'm just about completely open about the general areas where we fish, and I'm darned sure open, as is Hog Wally and Smalliebigs and Mitch and whoever else is in our "clique", about what we caught fish on and how we fish it. I've even spent quite a few words on here talking about what to look for in a wintering hole. For crying out loud, where is the rule that everybody on the internet has the right to be led by the hand to an exact spot and shown the perfect cast to make to catch a fish at that spot? You can't be so lazy or clueless that you can't spend some time finding your own honey holes. Sure, there's an element of selfishness involved. I don't want to pull up to one of my best wintering pools and find three other boats already fishing it. That might sometimes happen anyway, but it won't be because I or one of my friends pointed it out on the internet. And keep in mind that good wintering holes aren't everywhere on the river. On a ten mile stretch that I fish a lot, I've caught big fish in exactly five pools in the winter. Two of those pools have produced the vast majority of the big fish I've caught in that ten-mile stretch. So on a given winter day, I'm pretty much limited to those five pools, and more than half the day will be spent on the two best ones. And I've spent a lot of time trying other pools and catching the occasional mediocre fish over the years, so it isn't like I'm skipping a lot of water that is likely to hold big ones. So...if five other anglers are fishing the same stretch that day and they've all seen on the internet where I catch my fish, I'm gonna be waiting in line to fish those five spots. Not to mention that the fish in those spots are going to be seeing a lot of pressure. Funny thing is, in that ten-mile stretch, there have only been a couple of times when another angler was on the water and fishing my spots. Guess what? I like it that way.

I guess I'm the guy Hog Wally fishes with. I use rabbit almost exclusively for my hair jigs. But...it's not so much because I think it's better than anything else, but that it's easier and quicker for me to tie than most anything else. I can get a three color crosscut rabbit jig tied in about 10 minutes, and that's without a whole lot of practice. To be honest, I suspect that it doesn't really matter all that much what material you use in a hair jig in the winter, it's where and how you fish it. Having said all that, I gotta admit that I just don't like the looks of bucktail in a hair jig. If I'm not using all rabbit, I'm using marabou. I know some guys use slightly more exotic hair, but I do just fine with the rabbit so I'll stick with it.

I like those Australian hats...been using Barmah Canvas Drovers for several years now. Nice wide brim and mesh sides so it's really cool in the summer. The mesh might not be a great idea if you're bald, though; I suppose some sun comes through it. I went to the website and they have an extra wide brim Drover...think it might be my next hat. I've got sun damage to my skin, but so far nothing serious. My dermatologist told me I was one of the lucky ones that wasn't very likely to get serious skin cancers, but that didn't mean I could be stupid for the rest of my life. I spent enough time in the sun with nothing on by a ball cap and a pair of shorts most of the summer when I was a lot younger, to have done a lot of damage. I can't stand using sunscreen, hence the wide brimmed hats, long sleeve shirts, and long pants when fishing these days.

This is the iconic Paradise Valley view today at Mallard's Rest. this is about 12 miles upstream from Livingston, in a slower, winding section of the river. There is an ice dam somewhere downstream, and it has backed up this huge ice flow. If you can see closely in the bottomland on the right, and in the trees on the left, there is water flowing in both places. So the water level underneath the ice is probably a good 6 or 7 feet above normal, backed up from the ice dam. The ice is up into the trees and rubbing the trunks...in the summer, you'll see trees along the edge of the river that have much of the bark chewed off the trunks from this happening in the winter. Upstream a few miles, the river is flowing, though between ice shelves, and is at the normal level. Downstream a few miles where we saw the river today, it's flowing well with slushy ice. Down at our house below Livingston, it's flowing normally between ice shelves, with all the side channels frozen over. It was a little warmer today, up close to 20 degrees, after being below zero overnight.

In the second picture of my latest post, looking south out our living room window, the river is barely visible but throwing off enough steam that it looked like there were hot springs. We're fortunate to have our place be just downstream from Livingston, which is downstream from two big spring creeks, a lot of fast water, and a small hot spring. So our stretch of river never quite freezes over solid, and is an attraction for eagles in the winter. There were three eagles perched in the trees on the other side of the river in that photo. The mountains are the northwest end of the Absaroka range. The first picture is looking east, with Sheep Mountain the big butte in the background.

Fshndoug, we haven't made our plans yet for when we'll be out there next year, but usually are there in late September and most or all of October. Will let you know. I spend a lot of time in the park photographing animals, but really don't fish in the park much. The places you can park and fish get pounded. You have to hike a bit to get into better fishing. Slough Creek and Lamar River have excellent cutthroat angling once you hike a half hour off the road. But I have to admit I'm always a little uneasy in the park, watching over my shoulder for grizzlies, when I'm away from the crowds. The grizzlies are beginning to be a real problem in some areas. There are maulings in or around the park every year these days, though most of them are hunters. The latest mauling was when a woman shot an elk right before dark, and they decided to skin and butcher it in the dark. She was holding a flashlight while her guide was doing the skinning, when a bear decided to take the carcass away from them. Mauled her first, then him, then dragged the carcass over his body and off into the woods. If I'm in the park fishing, I'm going to have two cannisters of bear spray, both hooked to the strap of my sling pack, and I've practiced flicking the safety feature off and spraying, but I'll practice some more before fishing in the park off the roads. Outside the park, there are a few places where you might run afoul of bears, but most of the streams are in territory that's a little too populated for much bear activity.