Al Agnew

I started out a long time ago with the goal of catching a smallmouth in every state that had smallmouth. Later, that goal morphed into fishing a river for SOMETHING in every state. Now, I've just given up on the goal and just want to fish as many different rivers as I can before I die. But, I've caught smallmouth in the following states: Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Maine. That gets me to 21 states. Then I've caught other species of bass in the following states in addition: Arizona, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, getting me up to 25 states. I've caught trout in rivers in the following states in addition to some of the others: Alaska, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, reaching 30 states, and other species of fish in two more states, South Carolina and Maryland, so up to 32 states in which I've caught fish. Besides those states, I've fished in Ontario Canada, Zimbabwe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Gotta wonder if more lampreys feed on bass than bass that feed upon lampreys!

The chestnut lamprey, the only parasitic lamprey in Ozark streams, is a native fish that needs reasonably clean water to live. We catch a lot of bass on the Meramec with lampreys in the winter, when the bass are more congregated and also probably slower and easier for the lampreys to attach themselves to. I've only caught a handful of bass with lampreys attached during warmer weather periods. However, their life cycle would indicate that they also parasitize fish during the summer...lampreys start out as larvae that are a bit like aquatic earthworms, living in quiet backwaters buried in the muck on the stream bottom and feeding on organic matter. They live this way for several years, before in late fall transforming into the adult form with a rasping, sucking mouth. But they don't start attaching themselves to fish until the next spring. They feed on fish all that next summer, fall, and winter, but are not yet sexually mature. By sometime in the year afterward, they get sexually mature, while continuing to feed all through the next winter. Then the spring after that they migrate into smaller tributaries to spawn, and then die. By the way, the lamprey stays attached to the fish for several days before dropping off, and later finding another fish to feed upon. They don't kill the fish, but they leave sores that can get infected.

My experience might not be too helpful to you...I have been using baitcasters for 60 years, and when I started, all baitcasters had the reel handle on the right side. So, being right-handed, I started out casting with my right hand and then switching hands to reel. But by the time I was a teenager, I'd realized that wasn't the most efficient way of doing things, so one spring I just decided to see if I could teach myself to cast left-handed. It took about four trips or so of using just my left arm to cast, but by that time I'd mastered it, and never looked back. So all my baitcasting is done with a reel with the handle on the right. However, there are a couple points I'd like to make with this story. One, you can probably get used to using your left arm to twitch these baits even though right now your right arm feels better doing so, and it might be less expensive to use a right hand reel that you already own. But two, unless you usually cast using your left arm instead of casting with your right arm and switching hands to retrieve, you're still not going to be as efficient as you would using a reel with handle on the left. On the other, other hand...I've messed around a lot with reels with the handle on the left; I can still cast perfectly well with my right arm, but reeling with my left hand feels awkward for some reason. I guess you won't know until you try it.

But this is the kind of thing that makes absolutely no sense. At night, there is very little light to penetrate to begin with, and because at night the rods in the fish's eye, which ONLY see monochrome grays, take over. (Same as with us humans, next time there's a good moonlit night, go outside and see if you see ANY color...you won't. And that's with NO water in between you and what you're looking at. With fish, the water would absorb what little light of every wavelength there is.) So color shouldn't matter at all at night; only contrast between the lure and whatever background the fish is viewing it. And you can't tell me that there will be any difference in contrast between tomato red and green pumpkin, for instance.

There is already a lot going on underwater that we anglers seldom realize. For instance, the color red very quickly turns to dark gray in the water, because the water most quickly absorbs the red wavelength. In water that's clear, like 4-5 feet visibility, red pretty much disappears at 2-3 feet. If the water is very clear, like 10 feet or more, red wavelength isn't completely absorbed until about 5-6 feet in depth. But what this should tell anybody is that no matter how much anglers swear by red lures during certain times of the year, the fish aren't seeing that red but just dark gray at the depth a crankbait normally runs. Yellow is the next wavelength (or combination of wavelengths) to be absorbed. So whether or not bass can actually see yellow (or fluorescent yellow), they are not seeing it deeper than 5 or 6 feet, or less, under most conditions. Blue and green are the wavelengths that travel farthest through the water, but the water itself tends to be blueish or greenish at normal levels of clarity, so blue and green tend to blend into the background. Which brings us to the background behind the object the FISH is viewing, not what we are viewing. The fish is viewing any object either against the color of the water itself (if viewing it from the side), or the color of the bottom (if viewing it from above) or the colors of what is above the water surface (if viewing from below). What is the lightest, brightest part of the fish's viewscape? The surface and what is above it. So while we anglers view our white or chartreuse or yellow or fluorescent yellow lures against a background of the water depths, where those colors really contrast with the background, to a fish viewing them against the water surface, they blend in very well. Fluorescent yellow is always a great color in surface and near surface lures in very clear water for this very reason. What this means to the angler...well, I really don't think it means much as far as how bass perceive colors. If they find it difficult to distinguish between white and chartreuse, that doesn't mean that either color is interchangeable, though in many cases they might be. If you think chartreuse is a better choice than white under some circumstances, there certainly isn't any reason for you to chuck all your chartreuse spinnerbaits and start throwing white ones. And no matter what colors bass are seeing, they are seeing the same colors in the background as in your lure. If they can't see a certain color in your lure, they can't see it in the background as well, or in the food they are eating.

I don't know why, but it kinda reminds me of something...many years ago, Bass Pro Shops came out with their first bass fishing video game. They used my artwork on the package, so they sent me a free game. This was back when I knew next to nothing about computers...heck, I think it was before Windows. Anyway, I loaded up the game on my computer and messed around with it. You could pick from a bunch of different real lakes to fish, pick your rod and reel combo, pick the lures you used, and then you went fishing. So I was virtually moving around the lake, looking for cover and structure to fish. I'd find a good looking spot, start "casting", and nothing. Eventually, I figured out that the way the game worked, you moved around until you actually could barely see a FISH up against a piece of cover or something, and THEN you casted to it, and you'd hook it every time. That's exactly how the FFS works. Used to be, if you didn't think you could catch fish beating the banks, you'd move around looking at your flasher, finding dropoffs and creek channels and maybe if you were good at figuring out the flasher you might even find some sunken trees or rock piles, and you'd then cast to them to see if they actually had some fish on them. You didn't KNOW there were fish on those places, but they looked good. I even caught fish on some of them. But there were many more that didn't produce anything, whether the fish weren't there, weren't there at that exact moment, or wouldn't bite what you were throwing. You just didn't know. Now, you know. Unless they are crappie or catfish or white bass or carp, anyway. But this is changing bass fishing on reservoirs and lakes in so many different ways, not the least of which is that suddenly the bass in these lakes that were not pressured at all, those pelagic fish that just roam around looking for bait in open water far from the banks, are now getting hammered. Pretty soon they are going to get a lot tougher to get to bite. It's like the last frontier and it's going to be diminished before long. Kinda like I've spent all my long life beating the banks when fishing the rivers, and just in the last decade or so I'm finally figuring out that there are fish out in the middle of the river that I've never really fished for before. Maybe I need FFS on my solo canoe?

I know nothing about setting one up, I let the pros do that. But when I got mine, the first thing I did was take it on a river with plenty of water to run it, and spent some time figuring out how shallow it would run. What I did, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it...I happened upon a slick log that was halfway across the river, and was anywhere from a foot under the water to just above the surface. I ran over that log in several places of different depths, and when I just barely ticked the log going over it I knew how shallow I could run. It's a whole lot different from using a prop motor. The flat bottom of a johnboat is going to skid on sharp turns since the jet doesn't have a skeg. You have to learn to time your turn to use the skidding and then steer into the skid just like driving a car on ice. I spent a lot of time the first day playing with it getting a feel for how sharp I could turn and how to steer into the skid.

It's kind of a pain to slog through the survey to find the Crooked Creek proposed regulation change, but essentially they want to remove the special regulations on it. Their rationale is that their studies have show few smallmouth over 18 inches in the creek, so they are saying that the special regs aren't producing any results. Basically, I told them politely in the survey that they are full of crap. I first said that in my opinion regulations have two goals. The obvious one is to protect or enhance the resource. But the second one is to steer public perception of the resource. In other words, even if the regulations on Crooked Creek were not producing more 18 inch plus smallmouth, they sent a signal to the public that smallmouth, and especially big smallmouth, are valuable resources worthy of protection. Even though few anglers were keeping big smallmouth in Crooked, it could very well be that one reason they weren't keeping them was because the regulations convinced them that the big smallmouth were worth protecting. The second point I made was questioning their sampling methods. I've fished Crooked Creek, and caught 19-20 inch smallmouth in it, even though I've only fished it a couple times and thus know little about it. And I've also participated in electroshocking on Big River, which I know intimately. In a couple electroshocking forays, in a section of Big River that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt had good numbers of big smallmouth, the largest one we shocked up was 17 inches, and only one that size. I am therefore convinced that for whatever reason, electroshocking does not always "find" the bigger smallmouth in a stream. And creel surveys seldom reach a lot of anglers that actually know a lot about catching big smallmouth. I suspect that Crooked Creek has more big smallmouth than what their study showed.

Yeah, I read quite a bit about the permafrost mammoths and mastodons and other critters, and yes, somebody tried eating the flesh. As I remember, they didn't have anything good to say about the taste or texture. The ultimate "freezer burn".

I'm with Wrench on this one. While the occasional spotted bass might make it above the dam, it keeps them from really colonizing the river upstream. If they ever get above Bennett Spring in any numbers, the river upstream is great spotted bass habitat and it will be a disaster for the smallmouth up there.

Well, that makes sense. I won't feel so bad about forgetting my mono tippet next time.

Nobody fished for catfish. The patriarch of the family lives just up the hill from the lake, and he always went down to the dock and fed the catfish every day...loved to watch them come up and eat pellets, and after five years they were pretty big. Oddly, the bullheads never showed up when he fed the catfish; maybe they were afraid to. But everybody that fished the lake fished for bass.

Well...I fished fluoro tippet for everything for several years, but I went back to mono for dry flies as an experiment, and found that with mono I did not need to apply floatant to the fly nearly as often. I did not THINK that fluoro made much if any difference while I was fishing it, but now I'm back to fishing mono. So while I do think you're right, I'm just relating why I switched back to mono.

A friend's family built a "big" lake (over 100 acres, 70 feet deep at the dam) in a big hollow draining only woodland, no ponds anywhere in the watershed above it. The creek they dammed up was dry except for small pools that usually dried up by mid-summer. They stocked it with the usual bass, bluegill, and channel catfish. About 5 years after it was built, they had MDC come in and electroshock to sample the fish population and give them recommendations on how to better manage it. I was along with the guys shocking it. They shocked THOUSANDS of bullheads. Now I suppose there could have been bullheads in those little pools on the creek, most of them about bathtub size, and maybe those bullheads dug down into the gravel when the pools went dry. But it was sure a surprise to see them in that lake.

Well, I fish docks about once every two years, if that; if I had to fish Lake of the Ozarks all the time I'd maybe take up golf...nah, not even that would make me take up golf. But maybe pickle ball. The older I get, the simpler I like to keep things. I've used McCoys Mean Green copoly line like forever, seems like. Is it the best line out there? Who knows...I doubt if any of us has tried them all in a scientific setting. But I know how McCoys works (better, by the way, for my purposes than the Maxima I used to use, so at least I know that much). I know its strengths and its limitations, and work within them. As long as they don't change the formula I'll keep using 8-14 pound McCoys on every baitcast reel I own. And since I haven't even thrown a spinning outfit in at least a couple years, I don't have to worry about braid and leaders and such...but if I did, I'd still be using Power Pro braid with no leader (not because I love Power Pro or braid in general--I don't--but because braid is the best way to avoid the complications that come with the inevitable line twist with spinning reels (which is still a big part of the reason I stopped using spinning reels--but getting back to the dock fishing, if I had to fish docks I'd still be using spinning outfits, because it's so much easier to skip stuff under docks with it). My fly fishing tippet is fluorocarbon except for dry flies. Not because I'm concerned about visibility but because fluoro does seem to be more abrasion resistant and I have fewer break-offs with fluoro. Of course, I don't use it with dry flies because it sinks, and pulls the fly down. And I've already discussed the knots I use. I don't care if they are the best knots to use; they are easy to tie, strong enough, and I know their limitations as well, and work within those limitations. Now if somebody actually shows me a way to do something that is demonstrably better AND just about as easy, I'll consider switching. But I'd rather play around with lures and lure modifications to improve my fishing...it's more fun.

Yeah, but I've seen ponds full of them that nobody would have been fishing for catfish.

I don't know...but I do know that green sunfish will somehow get into places that you'd think there would be no way they could reach, like farm ponds, and who would purposely stock them? And bullhead catfish? Those things have to be able to crawl on wet grass.

Thanks in large part to stupid tournament setups, you can catch spots all the way up to the Steelville area; a lot of them were caught far downstream, transported to the weigh in, and released right there. But they are still just a small portion of the bass population above Meramec State Park. I'm really surprised that you haven't caught many around Redhorse, though, because they are pretty thick below Sand Ford. I almost always catch more spots than smallmouth from Sand Ford down. Our new house is not far above Redhorse, and anytime I want some fish to eat I just go down below the house and catch a half dozen or so. If I don't want to put the jetboat in, I keep a little canoe back in the woods below the house, and just paddle it a mile or so upstream and fish from there to the house and then on down a half mile or so. I usually catch more spots than smallmouth. Bigger ones are pretty scarce, though; most of them are 10-12 inches. If you want big ones, go below the mouth of the Bourbeuse. They are at least as abundant as smallmouth on Big River all the way up to the Leadwood MDC Access. On the Bourbeuse, they are common over all but the farthest upstream stretches.

I can and do fish both with "bobbers" and without. Both have their place. Where indicator fishing really shines for me is in wading bigger waters. Out on the Yellowstone where the majority of my fly fishing is done, there are a lot of runs and current seams that require a fairly long cast to reach. I don't know how anybody gets a good drift with a nymph without an indicator when you're fishing 30-50 feet away from where you're standing, with no way of wading any closer. Using the indicator, the fly or flies are drifting beneath that indicator, and mending at those distances is easy. Try getting a drag free drift and good mends without using the indicator. I've also started using an indicator when streamer fishing from a drift boat or raft. Summer before last the Yellowstone stayed fairly high and murky through much of the summer, and I was catching good fish on streamers with a nymph dropper. I discovered that I could cast the rig with an indicator on it up close to the bank, twitch it off quickly to the distance from the bank where the water was 3-4 feet deep, and then let it drift for a bit under the indicator, giving the streamer time to reach the bottom, and then twitch it so that the streamer "jumped" off the bottom and back down. The drifting indicator kept the streamer in the strike zone longer as it moved downstream in the current, without the current dragging the streamer as much. I caught fish on both the nymph and the streamer, both drifting and twitching. It was pretty deadly and a different look than what the fish were used to. On the other hand, for fishing smaller waters, I like to nymph without an indicator. You're usually fishing more close in to you, and I can let the nymphs sink naturally at the bottom of a shallow riffle and drop down quickly into the deep water below. I also use more lead than a lot of guys do, I almost "guide" the drift downstream with the split shot ticking along the bottom. I've tried to figure out EXACTLY what the nymphs are doing both under an indicator and without an indicator. I believe that we get far fewer "drag-free" drifts than most of us think. On a typical drift, the surface current where the indicator is will often be faster than the current along the bottom. With the amount of lead I use, the indicator will be dragging the nymphs along as the lead ticks the bottom. I think it all balances out; the indicator is speeding up the drift, while the lead is slowing it down. My top fly, closest to the indicator, is almost always bigger and has a bead head, so it is kind of wallowing along the bottom to the side or maybe even a bit downstream of the lead. My bottom fly will be lighter, no bead head, and it's waving in the current a lot more freely. I think this makes both flies look a little more alive and swimming rather than just dead drifting. It also makes detecting strikes pretty easy; when the lead is dragging along the bottom being pulled by the indicator, you have tight line between indicator and the lead, and when a fish takes the bobber just stops if the current is fairly strong. Of course, there are problems with this; we know a lot of fish take and immediately reject a fly before the take is shown on the indicator. But that's a problem no matter how you fish nymphs. I've just always fished two nymphs ever since my fly fishing guru showed me how to fish. But I think that having two different weights of nymphs makes them a little different in presentation, as well as appearance. Some days most fish hit the top one, other days the bottom one.

The best knot is the one you can tie with cold hands, in the dark, and get it right every single time you tie it...as long as it's fairly strong. To that end, I go with the palomar most often. It isn't easy tying it on big lures with multiple hooks, but I use a snap 100% of the time on such lures anyway. The double pitzen looks like it could replace the trusty palomar on those bigger lures, but I don't really see a reason to switch on snaps and on single hook lures like jigs or soft plastics. I can tie a palomar in my sleep, and I KNOW how strong it is. Honestly, I don't worry too much about knots. When I'm fly fishing, I often use an improved clinch knot with fewer wraps than recommended, often no more than 2 or 3 wraps. That's for small flies where it isn't easy to get the line doubled through the eye; if the eye is big enough I use a palomar on them, too. Never had a problem with it. And in fishing a two nymph rig, I tie on the upper fly with a palomar with a 12 inch long tag end, and then tie the second nymph to the end of that tag end. I know lots of fly guys tie the second fly using a separate piece of tippet tied to the bend of the hook of the first fly, but that isn't a good idea if you're going barbless, and it's tying three knots instead of two. I still catch enough fish to make me happy doing it my way. Interestingly, though, my top nymph is usually bigger than my bottom nymph, and I often tie the top nymph with the palomar and then the bottom, smaller one to the tag end with an improved clinch...and if I snag the bottom fly, the line usually breaks at the top of the tag end, right where it goes into the palomar. Apparently that's a weak point in the palomar for some reason. The good part is that I almost never lose both flies, though I have to retie the top fly.

There has probably been bait bucket stocking of spotted bass here and there. The spotted bass in the Osage river system first appeared in Lake of the Ozarks in the 1940s; prior to that time they had apparently never been anywhere in the Osage, and there is no record of them ever being stocked there, so chances are somebody released some into some body of water connected to the lake. And then MDC had the brilliant idea of stocking them in some streams north of the Ozarks in the 1960s. The spots in the Gasconade river system may have come from MDC stocking them in the Loutre River, which flows into the Missouri from the north very close to the mouth of the Gasconade. Or they could have come down the Osage and Missouri to the mouth of the Gasconade. But the Meramec River spots almost certainly came up the Mississippi, because records (and my own experience) show that they appeared in sequence from the streams running into the Mississippi close to Cape Girardeau, then one by one in streams farther and farther upstream until they reached the Meramec. When I was living in the Cape Girardeau area going to college and then teaching in the mid-1970s, spots were in Apple Creek, the farthest creek running into the Mississippi farthest downstream, but only up to the Appleton mill dam; there were no spots above the dam. And there were no spots anywhere in Saline Creek and River Aux Vases, the next upstream creeks of significant size. By the early 1980s they were common in Saline and River Aux Vases, but not yet in Joachim Creek, the next big creek upstream. By the mid-1980s they were in Joachim Creek and the lower end of the Meramec. By the late 1980s, they were showing up in the lower middle Meramec and were common in the lower portions of Big River, up to the last intact mill dam, and in Bourbeuse River below the Goodes Mill dam. (Interestingly, there were apparently a few adventurous spots that pioneered these streams, as I caught two smallmouth/spot hybrids in lower Big River in the late 1970s. But I fished Big River and the middle Meramec about as much as anybody during this whole period, and until the late 1980s, I'd never caught a spotted bass in any of these rivers.)

Yup. Or unintended consequences. Take something close to home; spotted bass invading the Meramec river system. A classic invasive species. And it probably got there "naturally", by extending its range from the streams running into the "Bootheel", up the Mississippi River and into the Meramec (as well as all the small streams between the Meramec and Cape Girardeau, where spotted bass were not native as well). But why did spots suddenly, after many thousands of years since the last ice age, NOW decide to travel up the Mississippi? Well, the theory is that three things, all human caused, all combined to open the way up the Mississippi. First, the Diversion Channel was built back in the early 1900s, cutting off Castor River and directing it into the Mississippi far upstream of where the Castor used to enter the big river, thus shortening the distance the spots had to travel. Second, the big lakes on the upper Missouri were built. The Missouri River was always a VERY silty river, and made the Mississippi from St. Louis down very silty as well, probably so silty that spotted bass didn't travel it. But the big lakes shortstopped a lot of the silt, and the Missouri and Mississippi got less silty. And third, the Clean Water Act was passed, and began to take effect in the early 1970s. It was a GOOD thing, but it may have reduced pollution in the Mississippi below St. Louis to the point that spotted bass had no trouble traveling it. And spotted bass being great migrators in floods, they took advantage of all three things and next thing you know they are thriving in the lower Meramec.

Sigh...I don't agree with everything MDC does, or every way they spend their money. But having spent time in a bunch of other states and living half the year in Montana, MDC compares very favorably with those other states. You don't know how good you have it. And if you spend $40,000 a year on things that are subject to sales tax, you are "donating" a whole $50 a year to MDC, plus whatever licenses you buy and a small amount of money when you buy certain hunting and fishing equipment that goes to the feds and then to MDC. And Wrench is correct. The entire state expenditures, a lot of it on things you danged sure don't agree with, is $51.8 billion. MDC spends $266 MILLION.

True, but it's not an easy area to patrol. Lots of people at least pretend like they don't know the rules for the Buffalo, and take jetboats up it from the White fairly often.