Al Agnew

Looks good, Mitch!

Good point, but it's a good idea at any time of year if you're doing an overnight float. I make it a point to never camp on a bar that doesn't have an escape route to higher ground...no bars that are lower in the back. And I always scout before dark to find the best way to get to higher ground. But mostly, I just don't go if the forecast includes a good chance of rain overnight.

You said you floated Crooked Creek at 80 cfs. Well, how was it? Because the Buffalo will be just about the same floatability at 80 cfs. That's the beauty of using the flow in cfs rather than the height in feet; gage height means something completely different for every gage, but 80 cfs is the same volume of water flowing no matter which stream or which gage it is. The only difference between the Buffalo at 80 cfs and Crooked at 80 cfs is that some of the riffles on the lower portion of the Buffalo will be wider, and thus the same volume of water will be spread out over a wider channel and shallower. I usually use the easy to remember number of 100 cfs as the minimum on any stream in the Ozarks that can get too low to float, for fairly easy floating. I've floated the lower Buffalo at 70 cfs, and had to walk some riffles. Some of the widest riffles were gravelly and very shallow and required walking, and some of the rockiest riffles were impossible to float without hitting and getting hung up on rocks, unless they were VERY narrow. I've floated other streams at 25-35 cfs, and very few riffles were floatable without at least a lot of bottom scraping. But it all depends upon your tolerance for dragging and for scarring up your boat bottom. I do a LOT of floating on streams well under 75 cfs, because I'm willing to do the work and scratch up my boat in order to experience the fishing and solitude. Right now Crooked Creek is flowing at 63.8 cfs at Kelly's Crossing. So remember what it was like at 80 cfs, and it will be a little lower than that. At that flow at Kelly's, it's going to be completely dry not far below Yellville, as lower Crooked is a classic losing stream, its flow sinking underground below Yellville when it's low. I'd call it marginally doable above Kelly's. The Buffalo is better, 141 cfs at the St. Joe gage and 182 cfs at the gage at Highway 14. I would not hesitate to float it anywhere below Gilbert at those flows. But keep in mind that it's a LONG way from Rush to the White River, and the days are short this time of year. If you just like to paddle a lot, you could do that stretch in two days, but I'd really recommend Gilbert to Buffalo Point as a better distance to float if you're not fishing seriously, and if you ARE fishing seriously during the winter, I'd consider doing an overnighter from Maumee to Buffalo Point. The last time I did a late November float on the Buffalo, we did Buffalo Point to the White in 3 days, and had to move too fast to fish effectively.

Many years ago I had a friend who was my dad's age, a sniper in WWII and a true Ozarker from Piedmont, MO. He told the tale of his family moving to Chicago during the Great Depression because they couldn't survive in the Ozark hills, and living all together in a 2nd story apartment. Their only real recreation was exactly this; fishing for rats from their window to the alley below. He was a great storyteller, and I wish I could remember the way he told the tale, but it was hilarious. He worked as a fishing guide on Current River when I knew him, and I helped him and my other friend who ran the guide business one summer. His stories around the campfire at night (usually around Cardareva Bluff, as their usual float was two days from Powdermill to Van Buren) were usually the highlight of the trip. But my most memorable evening with him was when we were running a trip with clients who, I remember, were close relatives of Tammy Wynet, the country singer. Most of the people were okay (I had two teenage girls in the 19 foot square stern canoe both days, and they were a lot of fun to guide), but one woman was annoying, complaining constantly, squeamish about just about everything. We had just set up camp for the night, and my friend was brewing coffee. The woman came up to him and said, "I hope you didn't get the water for that coffee from the river." Actually, he had. But he knew that wouldn't set well with her, so he said, "No, ma'am, that water came straight from town." "Well, it's a good thing...I would never drink water from the river." By this time, he was kinda fed up with her, so he said, "Well, ma'am, I guess it's a good thing I don't live in Neelyville, then." I'm sure she had no idea where Neelyville was, but apparently it was a town that residents of Piedmont looked down upon. She asked, "Why is that?" He just shook his head, and said, "You see, Neelyville gets their water from a well in the middle of town. And they keep an old b**ch dog tied up to that well all the time." "Why in the world would they do that?" "So that, when they get a drink of that water, they can kiss that dog's a** to get the taste out of their mouth." She stalked off in outrage. The rest of us were rolling on the gravel bar laughing.

Well, I've never found that much money...but I did find a $100 bill snagged against the fence at our place in Montana. It's windy in Montana. And about a half mile up the road to the northwest is a house that was suspected of being a major drug dealer place, so I suspect some cash got blown away there during a transaction. I've searched the fence line ever since with no further finds.

But the real question is...will Twinkies ever biodegrade? I was walking along the highway that runs alongside our land the other day, and came across a package of Twinkies that had been flattened by a car, apparently, but without the bag tearing open. Have no idea how long it had been there but the lettering on the bag was faded, but other than being flat, the Twinkies inside looked just like you see on the shelf. If the dyes in the bag lettering fade before the food, that probably isn't good. But that wasn't my most interesting find that day. I saw a plastic garbage bag, brittle and torn, with the corner of a box sticking out of it. I checked it out. The box was a cheap keepsake chest, with a combination lock on it. Curious, I tried to open the lock. Figuring that people might not change the combination that it had when they bought it, I went to 0-0-0. Click, the latch flicked open. Inside was... --a set of handcuffs --a dildo --condoms And several other even more unmentionable items, though I'm not really sure what a couple of them were. The burning question is...why would they toss it out?

I don't even want to know what's in Sugar Frosted Flakes. That's my go-to cereal snack and has been for my whole life. Hasn't killed me yet.

I've never heard of really good fishing on Big Sugar. I haven't fished it myself, but I try to watch out for any reports of fishing streams I may want to fish sometime. I do know it's gravelly, very clear, crowded on warm weather weekends, and gets too low to float. But...it has been my experience in fishing all over the Ozarks that there are no streams that are MUCH better fishing than the rest, and very few that are much WORSE than the rest. On a good day, you can catch a bunch of fish on just about any of them. So, half the fun is in going and trying it. After all, you'll be on an Ozark stream, and that's a good thing in itself. Sometimes the fishing is a bonus.

Whippoorwills have kept me awake a few times on overnight floats. It's when they are close enough that you hear the tiny "chock" sound before the "whip poor WILL" that it seems to vibrate the tent. And no, yelling at them seldom works. One night I made the mistake of camping on a bar that had a big, dead backwater behind it. Had the double whammy of a whippoorwill and about a hundred mating frogs in the backwater having an orgy. Luckily it was a really big gravel bar, and I carried the already set up tent with some of my stuff in it a hundred yards to the other end of the gravel bar to escape the racket about midnight.

Yup, cheap artist's easel, worth approximately nothing at this point.

See, that's where you go wrong. I'm not offended by any god. I get bored with PEOPLE who credit their god with everything good that happens in their life. Makes me wonder who they blame for the bad things. If some tournament angler is always saying "thank you, Jesus" whenever he catches a keeper, what happens on the days he can't buy a fish? If a hundred people are killed in a hurricane, and they interview some survivor on TV and he credits God with saving him, I always wonder what the families of those who were just as devout and died anyway think about that.

Ah, you should know I'm mostly kidding...and the rest of it is just that I like to be different sometimes. I know the Ned Rig works. It's just that I think I use lures that work just as well or better, and I see no reason to add the rig to my tackle boxes...they are already full of stuff that works. I did play around with it when it first came out. I tried it on a couple of my favorite wading size creeks which ALWAYS produce plenty of fish for me, and I wasn't impressed with the results. Plus I found it boring...but then I find most of the stuff that so many anglers use in the warm weather months to be boring.

I have yet to have a bad fishing day when I might have thought a Nerd Rig would have done any better. There are a bunch of lures that I'd bet would work as well or better on any given day.

My point is, if you think something as trivial as you catching more fish than a bunch of other guys in a tournament is worthy of God's attention, while apparently that kid dying of cancer isn't...that seems to me to be selfish, delusional, and thoughtless.

You guys all know that I'd quit fishing and take up horseshoes if I had to fish a Nerd Rig. I guess maybe that's my brand! Well, that and making fish bite the fast moving stuff I like to fish. I did like Wrench's description of "brands", though. Iaconelli may be the most obnoxious, but the God botherers are a pretty close second. Something just a little off about somebody crediting their good fortune in catching a few stupid fish to Jesus, while not far away there's a little kid dying of cancer. The amazing thing about the whole bass fishing industry is that there IS still some innovation here and there. There have been some pretty nice developments in lures in recent years, for instance. Pretty sure most of them started out like Mitch's craw, figured out by some actual, thinking angler, who marketed it until it was successful and then got bought out by the big guys. Who half the time let it fade into obscurity if it's not a top seller. Don't even get me started about my favorite wading shoes, dropped by Adidas after they bought out the company that invented them. But some of it can be blamed on us angers, too. Too many of us demand "new and better" all the time. Which really irks somebody like me who, when we find something that works, we want to keep buying it instead of the new and probably worse...but it's discontinued.

The St. Francis walleye have the genetics to grow big, since they were stocked from fish hatched from eggs taken from Black River walleye. If you want big walleye, though, you're going to have to change the mentality of all the walleye anglers who think it's their God-given duty to kill every legal one they catch.

I wasn't on here for a few days so missed your original question...don't know if you were able to find a shuttle for the Huzzah, but here is what I would have told you: The river gage on the Huzzah is at the Hwy. 8 bridge. That is just barely below the mouth of Dry Creek, which adds a significant amount of water to the Huzzah. So the gage reading is basically useful for the lower Huzzah below Hwy. 8, and not for above Hwy. 8. 60 cfs is, as I said in that earlier thread that tjm linked, below my benchmark figure of 75 cfs. That means that the Huzzah is basically too low to float easily even below Hwy. 8, and definitely too low upstream. I've talked about this use of cfs and the benchmark cfs figures in many places. And if it's a paddling group or forum and not a fishing site, I use the figure of 100 cfs, not 75 cfs, as the minimum flow for floating without a lot of dragging and scraping. We anglers are more tolerant of lower flows. But 100 cfs is an easy number to remember. To dive down a little deeper (no pun intended) into these figures...25 cfs and below will mean you will not float any riffle cleanly and will have to walk any really rocky or really wide riffle, or any split channel. 25-50 cfs will mean you'll have to walk almost as many riffles as below 25 cfs, but if it's a narrow riffle without big rocks, you might float it cleanly. 50-75 cfs, you'll float maybe half the riffles cleanly, but still have to walk split channels and wider than average riffles. 75-100 cfs, you'll float 3/4th of the riffles cleanly as long as you are good at picking lines and maneuvering, and will seldom have to walk a riffle. 100-150 cfs, you'll float nearly all riffles cleanly as long as you read the water well.

That 4th and 17 play was a thing of beauty. O-line gave Cook time, Burden found a small open spot in the zone, and Cook put the ball EXACTLY where it had to be, and Burden made sure he caught it. Probably the most clutch play Cook and the whole offense has ever pulled off. It just seemed to deflate Florida, like they knew Mizzou was going to beat them at that point.

Naturally, Mizzou will probably end up ranked in the top ten, the year BEFORE they go to a 12 team playoff. They completely dominated Tennessee. Like everybody else, I was figuring it to be pretty close game. I think we can now say that Mizzou is good. If they could have cut down on mistakes in previous games they could be undefeated at this point.

This is one dam that might be better to remain. I suspect that if it was removed, spotted bass would invade the next 15 miles or so of the Niangua in large numbers.

Skeeter said he folds under pressure, and you dismissed the interception by saying that he threw it into the lineman's belly button. But if you go on the Mizzou groups on Facebook, there are a ton of people who are blaming the loss entirely on Cook and saying he's good but he'll never win a big game, and that they need to get a better quarterback. Which, I suppose, is better than what they were saying earlier in the season, when they were saying he wasn't an SEC quarterback or even a D-1 quarterback. Everybody blames the quarterback far too much for losses and praises them far too much for wins.

Point of fact, Wrench...it actually IS rather seriously low. If you used the USGS graph for flow, at that gage it's flowing 193 cfs right now, and the normal for this time of year, which is about the time of the year when the river is lowest, is 278 cfs. And by the way, 278 cfs equals about 4.57 feet on the gage, and right now it's at 4.28 feet. So it's about 4 inches lower than it normally would be this time of year. On the low end of the scale, 4 inches makes a significant difference.

Those railing on Cook for throwing the first interception (the one that really mattered) need to go back and look at the replay with the camera behind Cook. When I saw the play live I thought he'd just made an incredibly stupid mistake, and the replay with the same camera angle didn't change that. But when you look at the replay from behind him, you'll see that he had the tight end somewhat open behind the GA lineman who intercepted the pass, and he was trying to loft the ball over that lineman. But another Georgia player on Cook's right reached a long way in and actually hit Cook's elbow when he was in his throwing motion. Pretty sure that's why the pass went like a dying duck into the lineman's breadbasket. The best college quarterbacks make mistakes, sometimes in crucial situations. Elite TEAMS overcome those mistakes. Mizzou certainly could have overcome that first interception when the penalty backed Georgia all the way to their own 20 yard line. There was plenty of time and all it would have taken was a stop somewhere before Georgia got within field goal range. But the Mizzou defense, which had played well except for stupid penalties all game, couldn't get that stop. Georgia kicks the field goal that puts them up by 9, and the game was essentially over.

I've driven all over the West, and drive regularly to southwestern Montana and back. Somebody said that Kansas and Nebraska are just in the way. Make that the eastern 60% or so of Colorado as well. The BEST way to get to the Northwest is to take I-29 up the Missouri River on the western edge of Iowa to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and then I-90 across South Dakota. You can also go on up and hit I-94 across North Dakota but it's a lot longer. South Dakota is a whole lot more interesting than taking I-80 across Nebraska or I-70 across Kansas. You also are in the vicinity of the Black Hills, the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, and Devil's Tower going that way. And the huge statue of Sacajawea that you see just before you cross the Missouri River is worth a stop in itself. Once in Montana, you'll pass the Little Bighorn battlefield just off I-90, then Billings, and past Billings, I'd highly recommend taking the Beartooth Highway and on into Yellowstone Park at the east entrance. From there you have all kinds of roads to take and places to explore as you work your way on into Oregon. On the return, I'd go through Jackson Hole and across Wyoming, taking I-80 across Nebraska, just to see some different country.

It's not a big fish river, though I've caught a 20 and a couple 18s on it in a dozen or so trips. I've had one trip where the numbers were terrific and the fish were decent. That trip the water was air clear, it was hot weather, and the fish were slamming buzzbaits in a way I've seldom seen. It was like they saw the bait coming in midair and positioned themselves under it like a center fielder. Soon as it hit the water they'd slam it. Just one of those days when the fish go nuts.