Al Agnew

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.

There have probably been a million people standing on that ledge (the millennials call it Hawksbill Crag, but the Ozarker name is Whittaker Point) in the last 30 years or so, and it hasn't crumbled yet. I've stood upon it a couple times. It's pretty large and wide. But I guess at some point somebody could be the unlucky one.

Definitely a lot of questions about the group that is suggesting the change. My understanding is that the park and preserve idea would not turn it over to the state, but would give it a different designation. National Preserves USUALLY have fewer restrictions than National Parks or the Buffalo National River now, and speculation is that they are pushing the preserve idea to be able to develop lands along the river. But they are being coy about what their goals actually are, and just saying that they want to start a dialogue or some bureaucrat speak like that. To me, at best it's a solution in search of a problem. The Buffalo is being run pretty well right now as it is, as well as can be expected with the limited funding that politicians in Washington see fit to allocate to it. But given the makeup of the group pushing this, you can bet there is a whole lot of money to be made somewhere in the mix.

I bought my jet boat in 2007...geez, that sounds like a long time ago but seems like yesterday. I've always used mine almost exclusively in colder weather, because that's when the rivers you can easily use one on are uncrowded and better fishing. I've always reserved the warm weather fishing for rivers too small or too low for a lot of jet boat use, because I would rather fish them out of my solo canoe than run big, crowded rivers in the jetboat. Now that I'm living right on a popular jet boat river, it makes me even sadder what's happened to our rivers. Weekends in warmer weather are just plain nuts. A hundred boats a day going past the house. 95% of the people running jet boats on it aren't fishing, just joy riding. Big boats that have 250 HP engines running incessantly up and down the river. Those incredibly stupid little overpowered mini jet boats that nutcases are always posting videos using on western streams that are so small and winding that if there happened to be a fly fisherman standing in the water they'd be dead, and if there was a moose standing in the same place the boater would be dead. Jet skis. I'm just glad that I can spend a good part of the summer out here in Montana on a river where motorized craft are not allowed, and when I'm in Missouri in the winter it's nice to be able to put the boat in close to the house and not worry much about all the idiots, and to fish in comfort and not have to worry about finding a shuttle. And there are still nice stretches of unboatable but floatable if you want to work at it streams nearby when I'm in MO in the summer. I'm old. If I'm lucky I have another 10 or 20 years left that I might be able to be on the rivers. I'm afraid I'm not going to like what my choices are in another 10 years. I saw the rivers before jetboats. Seeing them now saddens me.

My buddies who are big fly fishermen and who used to fish the North Fork (one of them lives on it) all the time say it has never recovered from the record flood of 2017. I found smallmouth fishing above the trout section to be good the last time I floated it, but that was in 2019. I also spent a day fishing for bass while floating within the trout section down to Dawt, and never caught a smallmouth, only a few largemouth. At that time the stripers weren't up in the river much. I'm afraid that the stripers are slowing the recovery of the trout population.

I don't think a single one of my grates is as straight as that. Of course, I've had my motor for 17 years now, and have never tried to bend around on them.

A rudder helps you keep drifting straight when you're fishing while drifting. But in streams it makes maneuvering more difficult. Depends a lot on what kind of water you are fishing and what the hull shape of your boat is. There are always trade-offs. Ideally you would want a rudder that you can deploy or easily lift up out of the water, because you don't want it hanging down into the water if paddling through a shallow riffle. You probably won't want to do this to your kayak, but there was a time when I thought a drag anchor would be great for use with my solo canoe. I rigged up an eyebolt on the stern plate and a cleat on the side of my seat, got a 15 or so inch length of heavy chain, covered it in rubber, tied it onto a good rope, ran the rope through the eyebolt. I could lift it ALMOST out of the water to run riffles...but there was still a few inches dangling in the water at the back of the boat. That few inches of chain in the water made a surprisingly significant difference in how straight the canoe stayed when I was just drifting with the current. I soon tired of the extra weight and inconvenience of using the anchor and ditched it, and a drag anchor can be dangerous in heavy current so I don't really recommend it much for small craft.

Unfortunately, there are few if any jetboatable streams in the Ozarks where you can catch these numbers of fish routinely, or at least that's been my experience. Now that I live on a jetboat friendly section of the Meramec, I've tried fishing it hard in the summer, and I maybe catch 20% of the number of fish on it that I can do on almost any canoeable stream that's too small for easy jetboat use.