Al Agnew

I think the splitters are going a little overboard on this. It takes sophisticated DNA analysis to confidently differentiate between some of these bass, which were once races or at most subspecies but are now considered different species. Neosho bass and smallmouth are a good example. Neoshos readily and without any problems hybridize with smallmouth. They have the same habitat requirements, the same spawning habits, and it's questionable whether even an experienced angler can differentiate between the two by appearance; the variations in individuals are greater than the variations between the two "species". So it would seem that the only way to say whether one is a smallmouth or a Neosho is by arbitrarily calling it one or the other because of where it was caught. But then we know that smallmouth were stocked all over the Ozarks, including in streams where supposedly Neoshos were historically. So are there really any "pure" Neoshos? And WERE there ever any pure Neoshos? Neoshos are found in the streams that all collect into the Elk and Spring river systems, which eventually all reach the Arkansas River. But there are a lot of other streams that also enter the Arkansas, just a little farther downstream. So there were no natural barriers to separate Neoshos from the smallmouth in those other streams like the Illinois River, Big Piney Creek or the Mulberry River. Were the "Neoshos" almost but not quite the same genetically as the Mulberry, Big Piney, and Illinois? And were the smallmouth in those streams different enough genetically from, say Meramec River smallmouth (because of the really wide separation as far as river corridors go) to warrant being a different species or subspecies? Heck, anybody who has fished up North knows that the smallmouth in Minnesota appear to be more different from the smallmouth in the Ozarks than the smallmouth in the Meramec are different from the smallmouth in the Elk. It's getting to the point where when it comes to bass, a world record will be considered different for almost every river system. The redeye bass is a great example of that. There are now, what, like seven or eight different species of what were once called redeye bass, with slight differences in appearance depending upon where they were caught.

Good points. The truth is that it's impossible for us to get into the brain of a fish to understand their reaction to much of anything. We can only observe how they react, not why. Another big question: why do they attack lures? No lure on earth is a perfect, or even a really good, imitation of what they eat. And some lures are NOTHING like anything they eat. Yet there is something about any good lure that triggers an attack reaction--sometimes. Maybe that something is not some slight resemblance to something edible, but a stimulus that we aren't even thinking about.

One question might be, does this creek connect to waters that do hold smallmouth? In other words, can a smallmouth easily get from this stream to one that holds smallmouth? If not, that could be the answer. Other possibilities are that perhaps at some point in its history, something happened to the creek that killed all bass in it, and they simply have never recolonized it. Or there is something about the water chemistry that is inimical to bass. There is a creek close to where I grew up in the old lead mining district of southeast MO. When I was a kid, I spent thousands of hours playing in this creek, fishing it, seining it for bait, etc. Never once did I ever see a bass in it. But 40 years later, after the lead mine tailings that continually eroded into it were stabilized, it became a pretty decent bass stream with a good population of both smallmouth and spotted bass.

Ever since the big flood, North Fork has had a problem with high water temps in the lower part of the trout stretch. It scoured most of the trees off the banks that once shaded the river. You are definitely wise to go as high as possible in the trout section in mid-summer.

Mitch has put a lot of thought into every lure he's ever designed. They are designed to catch fish, not fishermen. I don't think you can give higher praise than that.

Yup...really the only question that holds real relevance to anglers is how do the fish react to these sounds, as you said. Look, there is absolutely no doubt that the fish hear your sonar sounds, your trolling motor sounds, any sound you make moving around in your boat, from distances equal to the length of your casts at least. For stream anglers, they hear the splash of your paddle strokes, and may even feel, with their lateral line, the water displacement from your paddle strokes, as well as any noise you make that is transmitted through your canoe or kayak bottom. And if you're wading on Ozark streams, they definitely hear the crunch of gravel you do with every step. And yet we still catch a lot of fish. So apparently a lot of fish don't associate all these sounds with danger. Maybe it's proximity...they don't much fear a sound that is coming from a cast length away, but that same sound 10 feet away from them spells danger. Maybe with some of the mechanical sounds it's just outside their experience and evolutionary history and it makes no impression on them. But they CAN learn. And since there is so much catch and release fishing, a huge percentage of bass have been caught more than once. Maybe they can learn to associate all kinds of sounds with danger after hearing those sounds and then being snagged with a hook. Maybe that's just one more layer of handicap when it comes to trying to catch the larger, older fish. I'm cognizant of the sounds I make. When wading I make a lot of long casts, and if it's a small creek I often stand at the foot of a riffle while wading upstream and make casts starting at the bottom of the pool above and continuing up the pool for as far as I can cast, before wading up the riffle; I'm hoping the riffle noise masks any sound I make. I almost never get out and wade to fish while floating in a canoe, because I'm sure I'm making less noise in the canoe than I would be wading. But when it comes to fishing from the jetboat, especially during the winter, seems like my sonar is always on, and I'm on the trolling motor all the time. Which brings up a slightly different question...the way I've always used the trolling motor is to keep it at a fairly high power and use it intermittently whenever I need to make the boat move. Some anglers tend to keep the trolling motor on lower speeds and stay on it steadily. I wonder which, if either, is more noticeable to the fish.

Only one I ever lost that way...when I was a teenager I went on a vacation trip with the family of a good friend. The plan was to go to Wappapello Dam and fish below the dam for a couple days, then relocate to Clearwater Lake. While we were fishing at Wappapello, I snagged a rod. It was one of those old Snoopy Zebco rod and reel combos. I cleaned it up and discovered it still worked, and I could cast about 40 feet or so. So when we moved to Clearwater, we took out the boat and went up to the head of the Black River arm and parked on a gravel bar to fish for catfish and carp. I baited up the little Zebco with some corn and tossed it out the regulation 40 feet and propped it on a stick...and a minute or so later it went flying out into the lake, never to be seen again (carp are notorious for that). Easy come, easy go!

I'll be the first to admit that in my fishing I don't feel the need for FFS or other fancy electronics, and I also have some reservations about where the electronics are taking us. But so what? It's a worthy topic for discussion, and I suspect that anybody who fishes reservoirs should benefit from your posts even if they don't like FFS. I've never understood getting so butt-hurt about what people hiding behind their keyboards say to you...I've had some pretty nasty stuff said to me over the years and I just either laugh it off, ignore it, or try to tell them why I think they are wrong. But if it raises your blood pressure and gives you ulcers, then do whatever you have to do. Personally, I don't like to let the (insert derogatory curse word here) win.

It would be interesting to see what your plans are exactly; that way we'd know what part of Montana would be easiest to reach from where you are in the other states, and perhaps what you could do in one state that would be different from what you find in another. If interested in Yellowstone cutthroats as part of your cut-slam, I can give you some can't miss options.

Maybe...but what if it lays its eggs in YOU? Well, you could at least be like RFK Jr. and run for president with a worm in your brain.

Yeah, that was a great story, and it was great to hear it from Norm. Great guy! I wonder how Nimitz handled that kind of thing. Was he protective of his image or authority? The only thing remotely like that which I ever experienced was, not too long after the first Gulf War, I was the featured artist at a big art show, and for whatever reason they had General Norman Schwarzkopf there to give some kind of keynote speech. I met him, and talked rather briefly to him. But at one point during the proceedings, the show people had hired some quite beautiful and scantily clad ladies to parade around, photographer in tow, and generally provide some eye candy. They latched onto General Schwarzkopf and draped themselves all over him, the photographer snapping photos. Schwarzkopf immediately pushed them away, his security detail went bananas, and the photographer's film was confiscated. Whether or not Schwarzkopf enjoyed having the ladies all over him, he had an image to protect at all costs. I suspect some heads rolled among the security people. And by the way, I found him to be quite gracious and personable.

Good enough. It got up a couple feet with some reasonably warm rain. It's still flowing enough to allow fairly easy fish passage.

Maybe it's the weather, with temperatures jumping up and down like a 8 year old who has just eaten a whole bag of marshmallows on a trampoline. Or maybe the fish know that sooner or later the periodic cicadas are going to show up. But I've had a really strange spring of fishing. Seems like every time one of my friends goes out he catches a bunch of big fish. But when I go out, even with him, we catch very little (though I did pull out 19 incher the other day fishing with one of my friends, while he caught nothing of any size). So after a few more days of cold weather (at night at least), I got the chance to float a stretch of river that is becoming one of my favorites. I've already caught a couple 19 inch class smallies and a couple 6 pound plus largemouth from it (last year). I had no idea what to expect today, though. I started out in the cold of the early morning, trying first a spinnerbait (nothing), my shallow running crankbait (a couple little spotted bass), a walk the dog topwater (a couple more little spotted bass), and a plopper (a couple more little spotted bass and a decent largemouth). By the time I'd gone two hours and, really concentrating on fishing different types of water, less than two miles, my score was 14 spotted bass, 3 largemouth, and 4 smallmouth, none over 14 inches. I had NOTHING figured out except that nothing was in fast water. And then I came to a nice bluff pool, one of many on this river. I was using the crankbait, and as soon as I came through the riffle and the current slowed, I started catching smallmouth along this rocky bank. I caught a half dozen or so, all good fish 14-16 inches. So, curious, I picked of the dog lure. And the smallies proceeded to go absolutely nuts. I was getting a strike on almost every cast. The wind was blowing downstream so I was working to keep the canoe from drifting into the water I wanted to fish. And these were really good fish. In a 50 yard stretch of rocky bank, I caught 20 smallmouth, with at least 8 of them 17-18 inches, capped by a heavy, thick 19 incher. And I lost several more, including one that was about the same size as the 19 incher I'd just caught. These fish were chasing the lure from 10 or more feet away. If one missed, I'd make a few more twitches and it would whack it again. Once I got past that stretch of rocky bank, I was out of the fish. I fished through the rest of the pool, almost dead water, with nothing but a couple more spotted bass. So, maybe the pattern was rocky banks in the upper portion of bluff pools? I hurried down to the next bluff pool. It was shorter, with a shorter section of good looking bank, but the fish were doing the same thing. I caught 12 good smallies off that little stretch of bank, and lost a 20 inch class fish at the canoe. And it was obvious when I got to the end of the good water...nothing. Okay...I paddled through the next stretch of riffles and mud bank pools, heading for the next bluff pool. I just knew the next one would really produce a big fish, because it's one of the prettiest in this stretch... I caught one small spotted bass from it. And in fact...for the rest of the day, I didn't catch another smallmouth! All I caught was a spotted bass here and there. And there were plenty of pools just as good as those two pools where I'd caught all those fish. So...ten miles of river, 10 hours of fishing, and I caught 32 smallies from just 75 yards of bank, and only four other smallmouth the whole float. The weirdness continues.

A lot of the mortality studies were done with tournament caught fish, because that's the easiest way to collect and study a bunch of fish. Tournament caught fish are kept in live wells, wrestled around to catch them to put them in the weigh in bag, carted off to the scales crowded together in the bag, weighed, held up for hero shots, and finally, hopefully, released into the area of the weigh-in instead of where they were living. It's a wonder as many survive as they do...not to mention the guys who are fishing around the weigh in site from the last couple tournaments trying to catch the same fish. I highly doubt that I'm killing more than 5% of the bass I catch. I've seen them survive bleeding gills and torn esophagus. (I know they did and know that it was long term survival because I'd caught them in my pond several times over a period of a year or more). I just caught a big flathead while bass fishing that had a big worm hook crossways in its gullet (I ate it). But I do try to handle the bass as carefully as possible and I don't use a lot of lures that I might deep-hook fish. If I had to guess (and yes, it's almost a WAG), I say the average of catch and immediately released fish mortality is somewhere around 5% in cold water and 10% in warm water. The key question remains; is catch and release fishing depressing fish populations? Is it having a significant impact upon size structure? In other words, is the delayed and immediate mortality of these fish making fishing worse?

I was never completely out for my first one more than 20 years ago. I could hear the doctor and nurse talking, but couldn't move or feel anything, or say anything. It was weird. Second one, at age 60, I was completely out and was surprised when I woke up that I was completely out. Third one, at age 70 (last year), I knew what to expect. However, in waiting for the anesthesiologist to show up to knock me out, lying all hooked up to the monitors, my occasional irregular heartbeat took that time to make an appearance, showing up on the monitor for the first time after a half dozen tests and examinations. It didn't concern anybody, as I'd been told before, so it was kinda nice to have it more or less confirmed. So I go in last year, after the colonoscopy, to my regular doctor, and he's looking over my charts on his computer. He says, "Oh, yes, I see you got your colonoscopy and everything was fine. Well, that will probably be the last one you'll get." We had been talking about my age, and I must have looked a little startled, because I was thinking, "Is he saying I'm gonna die before I need another one in 10 years?" He hastily added, "Oh, I mean we usually don't recommend having one after age 75...I didn't mean you were gonna die in the next 10 years!"

I've thought a lot about this as well, and my thoughts align fairly closely with those of the author of the article. We really ARE playing with our food. We really ARE causing a lot of stress on the critters we catch for no good reason other than our own pleasure. And the better the angler, the more fish he's killing by "accident". All the studies show that delayed mortality after being caught runs somewhere between 5 and 15%. Even if you are as careful as possible, if you have a day where you catch 50 bass, you're killing somewhere between 2 and 8 of them even if you release every one. Heck, I have the occasional 100 fish day, and even though I don't think I'm badly injuring many of them, I'm probably killing at least as many of them as my daily limit would be anyway. But there is always a difference between consideration for individual fish, and consideration for the POPULATION of the fish you seek. Worry too much about the lives and comfort of each individual fish and you go the way of the animal rights folks. I prefer to consider the population of bass in the streams I fish as a resource. I do what I can to protect that resource, and don't worry about the individual fish I catch except to handle them as carefully as possible if I plan to release them...because the point of releasing them is to keep them in the population, so it behooves us to give them the best chance to stay healthy. To that end, I think that the ethical angler learns as much as he can about the population of the fish he seeks in the waters he seeks. The beginning of ethics is to follow the regulations, but it's not the be-all. Most regulations are one size fits all, and most waters are not the same. It might very well be that some fish need to be culled in some waters, up to the legal limit, while in other waters if everybody kept a legal limit the fishery would soon be horrible. I love to eat freshwater fish. And I eat them about every other week, and several at a sitting. In one way, the invasion of spotted bass in my home rivers has been great; I can kill a dozen spotted bass whenever I want a great meal or two. I haven't eaten a smallmouth or largemouth from any of these waters in more years than I can remember, but I've sure eaten a pile of spotted bass. I also eat smaller bass from ponds that need thinning, and a few crappie and bluegill meals whenever I get the chance.

I've lived long enough and have been aware for long enough about when things bloom that I can tell you that redbuds have almost always started to show color the first week of April around where I live. This spring they were at least THREE weeks early. The dogwoods are always blooming by about a week and a half after the redbuds are in full bloom but before they start to show green leaves. So far I haven't seen any sign of dogwoods blooming; probably the mostly cooler than normal weather the last week or so has slowed them. You can easily check to see how low the rivers are compared to what they normally are this time of year by comparing present flow in cfs to the median flow. You can also compare the flows to the record low flow for today's date. Here are some highlights from checking just now: Niangua above Tunnel Dam: today 257 cfs, median 1040 cfs. That's a record for the date, previous record low flow was 316 cfs. Gasconade at Hazelgreen: 336 cfs, median 986 cfs. That's way above the record low flow for this date of 90.6 cfs. Meramec at Sullivan: 466 cfs, median 1409 cfs. Record low flow is 287 cfs. Black above Annapolis: 258 cfs, median 641 cfs. Record low is 157 cfs. Current at Van Buren: 1050 cfs, median 2260 cfs. Record is 620 cfs. James near Boaz: 173 cfs, median 1170 cfs. Record is 110 cfs. While only the Niangua is showing a record low, ALL those streams are below the 25th percentile, which means that they are lower today than they've been over more than 75% of the years on record. So yup, they are definitely a lot lower than normal.

Partly because I just love the streams in the Ozarks, partly because I grew up here and have lived here all my life, partly because I know how to catch fish here better than anywhere else. There are other places with bigger fish, more spectacular scenery, etc. But the Ozarks is a great combination of fun but easy floating and fishing and nice scenery.

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?