Al Agnew

Yeah, I've floated those upper end sections. They used to be better than they have been in recent years. If interested in smallmouth, though, the river above Maramec Spring will be fishable. Probably a little iffy below the Spring. Huzzah and Courtois should be in pretty good shape by then. Wading in the trout water will probably be limited due to the high water levels, even if the river is clear enough to fish there. I saw the Ozark Mountain Daredevils at Wildwood last year about this time. Great show. One of my all-time favorite bands. I could listen to them and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and be happy for a long time. Saw the Dirt Band out in Montana this past summer. Wish we were going to the OMD gig this time.

Been a long time since I fished it. It's rough wading. Lots of slick bedrock and slick boulders. Beautiful shut-ins area a couple miles below the Marble Creek campground. I wouldn't say it's a real destination type stream, but worth a shot if you're in the area.

I agree...the springs will come up, and stay up for a while, but will go back down unless we get good rain on a consistent basis. And I think that one explanation for the springs not flowing as much as they once seemed to do might have to do with the amount of development in their watersheds. The more development, the faster water runs off. The faster it runs off, the less it has a chance to sink into the ground and eventually reach the aquifers. So a heavy rain these days brings up the springs fast with the greater amount of water entering the aquifer through major sinkholes and such, but that influx soon subsides and the hills don't continue to feed water into the aquifers after the rain and initial runoff is over.

A lot of paddling ills can be solved with the right double blade paddle, but for a canoe more than 33 inches wide you need a really long kayak paddle, much longer than the normal kayak paddle. And the problem still is that you can't easily get the paddle vertical for some of the useful strokes. For the way I fish as I go down the river, a wide canoe negates being able to use the kind of one-handed strokes I do for slight positioning and course corrections while my fishing rod is in the other hand, and also the useful strokes that require a near vertical paddle in the water. CAN you solo a wide canoe? Sure. CAN you use a tandem canoe from the front seat turned around backwards? Sure, if the thwarts are in the right places. BUT, if you do a lot of solo paddling and FISHING on the streams of the Ozarks, you WILL be much more efficient if you have a narrower canoe and you're sitting near the middle of it. I'll say it again...paddling and fishing from a solo canoe is easy, and thus fun. Paddling and fishing by yourself in a tandem, especially a wide tandem, isn't nearly as easy, and not nearly as much fun. I've floated and fished fairly extensively from 6 or 7 different solo canoes and I've soloed 5 or 6 different tandems, both from center seats and from the front seat backwards. There's no comparison between a canoe that is sized right for you as a solo paddler and a tandem that you can make do.

Siusaluki, the way to minimize the line wrapping around the arms (a common problem with twin spins) is to add a length of straight wire as long or a bit longer than the arms to the line tie, and tie your line to it. The old Shannons had it, and when I first experimented with my version I left that "leader" wire off, and had all kinds of problems with the line wrapping, so I added it and the problem was solved. The wire itself sometimes gets entangled with the arms, but far less often than the line did without it.

Rule of thumb number one...a dedicated solo canoe WILL paddle much easier, turn easier, and be just as fast or faster than any tandem canoe. Paddling a solo is a joy, paddling a tandem solo is work. Rule of thumb number two...at some point, most solos will not take any more weight without losing much of the advantages mentioned in rule of thumb number one. 275 pounds pretty much means you can't go with a small solo, and even a medium sized one if you're carrying a lot of gear. I've paddled my Vagabond many times with my own 170 pounds plus a whole bunch of camping gear, and it actually handles really well under such a load, but all that weight combined probably wouldn't add up to your 275 plus a normal amount of fishing gear. The real problem is that there just aren't many opportunities to paddle various craft before buying. A Wenonah Wilderness might be a good solo for you...much more volume than the Vagabond. You might also like the Wenonah Solo Plus...it would definitely handle your weight as a solo craft. But I couldn't say anything else definitely about either of those two before you tried them. So I'm thinking that ColdWaterFisher might have the best idea...a good 15-16 ft. rec tandem. You don't want anything over about 33 or 34 inches wide, because such a boat is simply too wide to be efficient to paddle from the center seat position. If you don't mind spending the money, Royalex is definitely the way to go, although weight is the only real disadvantage to the polylink discovery type plastic. Actually, I've paddled my Old Town Penobscot 16 solo, and a lot of people like them as solo craft. It's pretty expensive, but might work well for you.

Yeah, but they just don't have the snob factor like your Bell! I fished out of a 15 ft. Grumman for many years. They are certainly serviceable fishing craft, and I agree with you on the durability. As for the noise factor...I was night fishing on Big River out of my aluminum canoe, using a Jitterbug. Made a cast of normal length to the edge of a water willow bed in a big hole, and got one of those toilet flush type strikes...the ones that make you set the hooks instantly with all your might. Missed the fish, and the big Jitterbug came flying through the air to hit against the side of the canoe--WHANG! Sounded like a car wreck. I was reeling in all my slack line, Jitterbug lying in the water beside the canoe, when I heard a little "slurp". Finally got all the slack taken up, lifted up on the rod, and it nearly jerked out of my hand. I'm guessing it was the same fish that hit before--at any rate, it was a 21 inch smallmouth! The noise factor doesn't always mess you up.

Call me as soon as the river gets fishable! I'm about to die from lack of fishing.

Still raining here. Rained all night. My pond is overflowing in a river. The little wet-weather creek behind the house is floatable (class 4 at least). Looking at the river gauges should be interesting.

To tell you the truth, I don't really have a theory on why the twin spin is so good. All I know is that I've proved to my own satisfaction that it's better as a shallow running spinnerbait than any of the tandem spins and single spins I've ever fished. Maybe it's the size of the two little blades...they are smaller than any blade used on a "normal" spinnerbait. Maybe their placement, off to the sides, makes a difference. I've also proved to my own satisfaction that each component is important. I've tried making them with silicone skirt. I've tried making them with bigger blades. Tried small willow leaf blades. Tried using them without the grub trailer. None of those variations work as well as the original. By the way, the blades don't have to be painted. In fact, most of mine have either gold or chrome blades, and I've used copper and black blades. I don't think the blade color makes any difference. One thing about these remakes of old lures...the old luremakers really had a method to their madness. There were reasons why such lures were effective, and the same reasons apply today. With all the tinkering I do, I've been unable to improve upon the original Shannon. When I was growing up all the local river anglers on Big River used Shannons. In fact, the first really huge smallie I ever saw caught was taken on a Shannon. I fished a certain hole with live crawdads all the time. One time I was wading into position to make my first cast when an old guy in a cedar and canvas canoe came drifting around the bend. He asked me if I minded if he made a couple casts into my hole before I started fishing it (he obviously knew it was a good spot). I said to go ahead. It only took one cast. He picked up a steel casting rod and some kind of baitcasting reel with a big natural brown Shannon on the end of it, cast right over my log, and came out with a smallie a good 4 inches longer than anything I'd ever caught out of that hole with live bait. He hung it on his De-liars and it weighed 4 3/4 pounds. Which was the beginning of my conversion from a live bait angler to one who fished with Shannons! At the time, all the Shannon aficionados used a split tail pork rind trailer. When the curly tail grub got popular, I was the first one I knew in the area that tried it as a Shannon trailer, and it worked. So I've been using either the Shannon or my variations of it since about 1968. And who knows how many fish I've caught on it.

Ain't that big, Wrench, quarter-ounce head, little blades, arms spread about two inches wide. Add a 3 or 4 inch curly tail grub and the whole thing is maybe 5-6 inches. Nope, don't pour my own, just buy quarter ounce spinnerbait heads/frames. Bend the wire to make the eyelet and cut off the excess, add the wire for the arms, add the length of wire in the front to tie to, tie on the bucktail, add swivels and blades. (Well actually I tie on the bucktail right after bending the wire and cutting off the excess.) Eric...not much of a real evolution. This is pretty much like the old Shannon Twin Spin, same size more or less as their quarter ounce model. That lure was produced up until about 20 years ago. For a while I did pour mine using a mold I made from a Shannon, but decided it was easier to just use spinnerbait heads. Trickiest part has always been to make the spinner arms, especially to make the ends that the swivel attaches to so that the swivel, split ring, and blade didn't get all tangled up around the end of the wire. The original Shannons didn't have that problem because they soldered the eyelets at the end of the wires, so it was a clean loop with nothing to hang on. Later Shannons just bent the wire into a double loop, which did allow the stuff to tangle occasionally. I never figured out a way to solder stainless steel wire, so experimented with different loop configurations until I came up with my current design.

You know you have a good marriage if... She tells you you oughta go fishing today. She gets up and fixes your lunch for your day of fishing. The two of you get along together in a tandem canoe. She offers to paddle while you fish. She suggests buying the Simms waders instead of the cheaper ones you were looking at. You don't mind showing her the receipt from your trip to Bass Pro Shops. She suggests that instead of the obligatory Christmas family get-together, you and she make reservations for a cabin at Montauk. She doesn't mind shuttling you for solo float trips. And yes, my wife does all of the above. I'm a very lucky man.

Here ya go, Eric... This is my homemade twin spin. I fish it in everything from extremely clear to moderately murky water, anytime I think the fish will be looking up. Most retrieves are fast and close to the surface. If I want to fish a spinnerbait slower and deeper, I go with a "regular" safety pin type spinnerbait, usually tandem spin with smallish willow leaf blades, but I also will fish Indiana blade single spins. I always use a trailer--curly tail grub. To solve the problem of the trailer grub sliding down the hook, I don't thread it on the hook, instead I nose hook it. I also always use a trailer hook on the twin spin, even though probably 95% of the fish are hooked on the main hook. Color--I'll usually go with chartreuse, white, or a chartreuse/white combination on the twin spin. I'll stick with light colors on any bait that the fish will be looking up at, unless the water is very murky, then I'll use black. For spinnerbaits with a deeper retrieve, I'll use browns, black, or some I tie myself with green, gray, and white bucktail.

There are two big drawbacks to aluminum that make it far inferior to the polylink or to Royalex, the other good plastic canoe material. One, as eric said, is noise. The other, even more important to me, is that aluminum grabs everything, while the plastics glide over everything. Logs, gravel, rocks...the plastics slide over these materials so much better than aluminum. The ONLY real advantage to aluminum is that it is well-nigh indestructible as long as you don't wrap it around something in fast water.

Only thing I'd change about those last ones is to shorten the bucktail to where it only sticks out a little bit behind the hook bend. Otherwise, I think you've got it. You may be a little disappointed in their "weedlessness", though. I think most hang-ups are not the hook point burying in something but the head wedging between two rocks. That pointy head might make that worse, not better. Supposedly football type jigheads are better for avoiding wedging...but I haven't found any head shape that won't wedge if you're in chunk rock. However, I like the texas-rigged idea for fishing in wood...those should be plenty snag-free in wood cover, lots better than wire or fiber weedguards.

Weather people are supposedly meteorologists, not biologists... They ARE Japanese beetles, an invasive species that have made native ladybug populations decline. I think I read that they were intentionally imported to help "control" aphid populations--the native ladybugs do that, but were just not abundant enough for the big time horticulturalists, so they imported a species that is known to reproduce in large numbers. Can you say "willful ignorance" here? I hate the things. They stink. They bite. They love to show up in large numbers in houses this time of year.

Excellent info above. To kinda encapsulate all of it... First thing you need to know is where the gages are on the stream. Take the Meramec River, for instance. Most upstream gage is at Cook Station, which is about 20 miles or so above where Maramec Spring enters the river. It's a good indicator of the river above Maramec Spring, only marginally useful for the river below the spring. Second gage is at Steelville. It's a good indicator of what the river is doing between the spring and the mouth of the Huzzah, the first major Meramec tributary. Third gage is near Sullivan--good indicator of the river below the Huzzah down to the mouth of the Bourbeuse, the second major trib. Then there are one or two gages downstream that I never pay attention to, since I don't fish much down there. Some streams aren't as well-served by gages as the Meramec. On those, you have to make some guesses unless the stretch of river you're fishing is near one of the gages. The Bourbeuse only has a gage at the upper end of fishable water, and one at Union, many miles downstream. Now...reading the gages. There are two graphs, one showing river level in feet, the other river flow in cubic feet per second. And there is a table that shows the 20th percentile flow, median flow, mean flow, 80th percentile flow, and record low and high water for that day of the year. Keep in mind that the table is ONLY talking about that particular date. So the record low for today's date, for instance, will be different from the record low for tomorrow's date. There is also one other important piece of info--the years of record for that gage. Some gages have been there for many years, others are pretty new. For instance, the Steelville gage on the Meramec has been there a long time, but the gage at Hwy. 8 on the Huzzah has only been there two or three years. This is important because the longer a gage has been there, the more accurate its median, 20th and 80th percentile flows are. If the gage has only been there for three years, and one of those years there happened to be a huge flood on that day, it's really going to skew the median and percentile flows, but if the gage has been there for 75 years, it will all even out. If you are not familiar with the gage readings already, the river level in feet graph is only useful to you to tell you if the river has risen, and how much it has risen, in the last few days. So go to the flow in cfs graph first. On that graph, look for the little triangles, there should be seven of them, one for each of the last seven days. Those triangles show the median flow for those days. The triangle for today's flow will correspond to the median flow in cfs in the table. The median flow is the flow at which on today's date, 50% of the years of record the river was higher than that, 50% of the years it was lower than that. So median flow is a very good indicator of the "normal" river flow for today's date. Usually, sometime in the last week or so the flow was somewhere close to those triangles--although this month with all the continuing rain it probably wasn't. If it was, however, you can then refer to the level in feet graph, look at the same day on it, and see how the flow in cfs matches a certain river level in feet. If the river has been consistently higher (or lower) than the triangles, look for a stretch of a few days when it was close to being level and not jumping up and down. A level flow usually means stable and fishable water. Sudden jumps mean a rain event and a sudden rise in river level. You can look at the level in feet graph to see how many inches or feet the river rose at that time. A rise of a foot on a larger river like the middle Meramec or Gasconade may mean murky but not muddy water. A rise of two feet or more usually means muddy water and tough fishing. Anything over a two foot rise on most rivers usually blows out the fishing for a few days. But it depends upon size and character of the river. A two foot rise on Current River at Van Buren will usually only make the river off-color. A two foot rise on Huzzah Creek will make for tough fishing that day, but it goes down so quick that the next day it will probably be fishable. But a two foot rise on the Gasconade at Jerome will usually mean muddy water for several days. So the point is, look at the table for 20th and 80th percentile flows. Timinmo told you how they are important. Look at the level in feet graph for a sense of what the river has been doing as far as rises go, and judge fishability according to how much of a rise it has been, how long ago it was, and what you know of the character of the river. Look at the flow in cfs graph to get a sense of how close the river has been to normal for the time period, and whether or not it is too low to float or too high to float. Use all three sources of info to give you the most complete picture possible.

If you wade up or down from Tan Vat in very low, clear water with good light, and really watch for fish, you'll find fish just about everywhere that's more than a foot deep and has some current. So yeah, there are probably fish in the places you're talking about. In lower water levels, the lower parts of the riffles, where the water drops off a bit and gets 18-30 inches deep but is still riffly choppy water, is usually where the actively feeding fish are. I especially like the sudden drop-offs from water that's just a few inches deep into water that's 18 inches or more. Cast a pair of nymphs with decent weight well up onto the shallows, keep your rod tip up and "work" them along the bottom until you get to the drop-off, and let them sink right over the lip of the drop. Somewhere in the next two feet of drift there are usually fish. Basically, in lower water levels, if nymphing I concentrate on water that's fast enough to have a chop on the surface. But in higher water like the last couple of weeks, the fish seem to relate more to current areas that have slowed just enough to get smoother on the surface. With the stronger flow, such water probably has about the same current speed as the choppy riffle water during the lower flows. Current seams--the boundary between much slower water and the fast, choppy water at the base of curving riffles--become much more likely to hold fish than the choppy water itself. The big rainbow I hooked last week was in that smoother surface current well below an actual riffle, about three feet deep. The brown was up in the rock garden above Tan Vat in a smooth tongue of current between two big rocks. If the fish are looking up, I like fishing dry fly and dropper in the long, flat stretches both above and below Tan Vat. But in low light and/or off-color water, I'll usually opt to fish such stretches with streamers unless there is a good hatch. That didn't work last week, though...I fished all the way up the long flats above Tan Vat with just the one little brown about 10 inches. And yes, fishing nymphs with a lot of weight is more chuck and duck than classic casting. But if you aren't fishing a lot of line, and fishing cross-stream drifts (45 degree angle upstream cast, drift past your position to 45 degrees downstream and let it swing to where it's almost straight below you--fish often take it on the swing) you can get into a rhythm where you simply lift the line and weight off the water at the end of the swing and flip it out in front of you to land 45 degrees upstream again...you can just shorten or lengthen your line to make the next drift through a different lane. No false casting. In high off-colored water, you can work close to the fish if you're quiet. I also like Gavin's technique if the water and your casting position lends itself to it.

Here's a gimme for sure...name this bluff.

How much weight were you using? I've found that a lot of guys just don't use enough lead to get the flies down in high, fast water. Two BB split shot is about the minimum I use nymphing in the high water levels, unless I'm in pretty slow water. I've been meaning to write up a report of my trip last week on the Current, and other places. My fly fishing buddy from Montana was visiting, and he and I and my best MO fly fishing buddy fished the Current last Friday, the 16th. That was just after all the rain we had earlier in the week, and it was a cold, cloudy day. Tom from MO, call him Tom M, started out with nymphs in the first run up from Tan Vat, the one with the tree in the water, and caught 8 nice trout right away, including a 17 inch brown. Tom from MT (Tom C) and I started out with streamers and I caught only one small brown. When we got to fishing nymphs we started catching fish. I was using a Prince nymph take-off I'd found out in MT that had tan instead of white wings and a tannish body with CDC...no idea what it was called. But it was working. Tom M, after the 8 trout right off, never caught another fish all day, but Tom C and I caught fish steadily and ended up with probaby 35 fish between us. Tom C had a beautifully colored, sleek 20 inch brown, and I hooked and lost two big fish right at my feet, one a rainbow, the other a brown, and both in the 18-20 inch class. We were catching them all in pretty fast water, and using lots of weight with a strike indicator above the weight about 4-6 feet. You want the indicator to be moving a little faster than the flies on the drift. You hang up a lot with that much weight, but at least you know the flies are down there. Fast water trout in high water seem to really hug the bottom behind little obstructions and depressions that partially block the strength of the current.

Actually there are a lot of our pharmaceuticals that have been found in our waters. It's getting to be a big problem in the east, with its greater population densities and high class smallmouth and trout rivers. Lots of intersex fish are being found, for instance. Now, we can argue all we want about how much of a given pharmaceutical is being broken down by the body, how much is being passed, how much gets flushed down the toilet, etc., but however it's getting there, we know it's getting there and it's causing problems, and since this stuff doesn't just happen in nature, we know pretty much where it's coming from. There are lots of chemicals that are long-lived in the food chain, but the pharmaceuticals are really starting to show up as problem. I agree with Eric about the other ways we get various pharmas. It's gotten to where I have to close my mind and shut my eyes to buy any kind of meat or poultry at the grocery store. Which is why I'm on a mission to put some deer meat in the freezer this fall. I passed up a doe yesterday because she was so decrepit that I didn't figure she'd be any good to eat. She actually creaked when she walked.

Yeah, just because they were stocked in lots of places doesn't mean that they were not living in the Ozarks prior to when widespread stocking started. They were. Every authority agrees that smallmouth are native to the Ozarks, at least as far as we can know "native", meaning that they were there at the time of European settlement. Like I said before, the fact that the southern Ozarks has its own subspecies of smallie most certainly means they were native to the Ozarks. That subspecies didn't come from somewhere else. The Lamine River may be the closest stream to KC that has both spots and smallies.

Bummer, Joe, glad you weren't seriously hurt. Bobber, I was known to do some wild creeks in my younger days. And a couple of rivers at flood stage, just for fun. Found out though that the rivers in flood are easy, just stay in the middle and ride...but the price of a mistake is so high that it's a really, really stupid thing to do. As for the creeks, I made it down them. One of these days I'm gonna do the Hailstone stretch of the Buffalo, though.

Yeah, I like using snaps so much that I make my own spinnerbaits and buzzbaits with closed line ties instead of the R bends. Can't use them on R bend line ties.

Naw, that's Elephant Head Bluff on the lower Buffalo, about 4 miles above the White River. Here's another view of the same bluff.