Al Agnew

Lots of stuff to comment on here... Funny how, if some politician you don't like, or from a party you don't like, says something you agree with, they're pandering, following whichever way the wind blows, just saying what that particular audience wants to hear, but if somebody you like says the same thing, they are great guys. Obama agreed with the decision. He's on record as saying so. Whether he's sincere about it or not only time will tell. Experience...yep, it's nice for a President to have experience. But I'd say that no amount of experience outside of being President can duplicate what one would face as President. I think that more important than experience is leadership qualities. I'm not sure of Obama's (or McCain's) leadership qualities. But another important thing, maybe THE most important thing if you want to make a difference, is the ability to inspire. Nope, no President can effect change by himself, but the President is in a unique position to lead and inspire, and thereby get results. The one thing Obama apparently has is the ability to inspire. As for experience, the best thing any President can do is to surround himself with competent people who are experts in their fields, including some who tend to hold dissenting viewpoints, listen to them, and weigh his decisions in light of their advice. Not sure Obama can or would do that. Not sure McCain would, either. Back to guns...I agree there is some precedent, in this country and certainly in others, for there being such a thing as a slippery slope. Anti-gun folks will take all they can get. But it seems to me that the Supreme Court just put some limits upon what they can accomplish. Gun registration, by itself, should be pretty benign, and could accomplish a few good things even though we all know only the law-abiding will register their guns. As long as the SC decision stands (and it should stand a long time--SC decisions pretty much are the final word) it shouldn't put us in danger of the government taking away our guns. Don't get me wrong...I don't think registration is something we NEED. And I don't think it will do much good. I just don't think it's the crack of doom if it happens.

Yeah, but Trav, would any of those countries be ones you'd like to live in?

I read some of the highlights of the decision, and the SC does address the "reasonable restrictions" such as felons owning guns and bans on certain types of firearms. So this may NOT lead to further court cases on those issues. I also read a statement by Obama pretty much applauding the decision.

Depends upon water levels. Your basic choices around Maramec Spring are: Above Hwy. 8 (put in at Cedar Ford or Klein Ford...local canoe rentals will know where)--the river up there is often only about half or less the size it is below the spring, and the fishing is all for smallmouths and other warm water species (good goggle-eye fishing). If the river is low, floating above Hwy. 8 will entail a lot of dragging. Hwy. 8 (Woodson K. Woods Access) to Scotts Ford--the trout section. It also has some smallmouth. For trout, small spinners like Mepps or Rooster Tails catch rainbows, and small crankbaits can sometimes get you a nice brown. No soft plastics allowed in the trout section. Scott Ford to Steelville (several accesses below Scott Ford, depending upon how far you want to float)--bass water. Lots of floaters on weekends, and some jetboats as well. It's the smallmouth special management area (one smallmouth, 15 inch length limit) so the fishing can be good, but you'll need to fish early and late in the day to avoid most of the crowds on weekends.

Had to meet somebody in West Yellowstone day before yesterday, and like a dope I didn't bring my flyfishing stuff along. The Madison looked good. So yesterday I went back to fish. It's been said that only about 20% of the anglers who try the Madison inside the park are actually able to catch a fish. I'd fished it a couple of times and caught a few fish, but I do consider it tough. Yesterday it was 6 inches or so higher than normal (up into the grass a bit), brownish colored, and visibility about 2.5 feet. I just decided to use big streamers all day and see if I could catch a big brown. First cast with one of my "Bunnyboos", I hooked a nice brown, maybe 15 inches...and broke the tippet. I had two left of that color. Tied on the second one, and caught 3 browns 10-13 inches in about a half-hour before I lost it to a tree somewhere in back of me on my backcast. Tied on the last one. Caught a couple more small browns, then noticed that I was gathering a crowd of people. Couldn't be me...looked at where they were looking and there was a cinnamon colored black bear on the opposite bank. My artist persona took over and I ran back to the car to get the good camera gear. Spent a good half hour or more photographing the bear, surrounded by dozens of people. Once the bear finally disappeared and they all left, I went back to fishing but couldn't catch any more at that spot. So I drove downriver to the next unoccupied parking spot where the river looked good. Caught a few more smallish browns, one maybe 14 inches. I was fishing in a spot where there was only a few feet between the river and the road, and on the other side of the road there was a steep mountainside. I happened to look downstream and there were a dozen huge bison bulls heading my way. Some of them were on the road stopping traffic, the others were taking the narrow strip of land between river and road and heading right for me. Problem was, my car was between me and them. So I hurried down to the car, arriving at it just as the first bull got within 20 feet of it. Threw the rod in the car, jumped in after it, and watched as the bulls all plodded past me. After the excitement was over, I went back to fishing. But I almost immediately snagged my last Bunnyboo on a road sign (!) and snapped it off. I think a car ran over it and picked it up on their tire. So I dug into the box and got out a crayfish imitation I'd tied for smallmouth fishing...what the heck, I bet the fish hadn't seen THAT fly before! Sure enough, I caught 5 or 6 more browns of the standard size before having to pack it in and make the two hour drive to Bozeman to meet my wife. Sure was nice to get in some river fishing. The Yellowstone is a foot over flood stage and every other stream around here is just as bad. My former guide friend out here has a business on the island in the middle of Livingston. There is (was) only one small bridge leading to the island, which also has about 30 houses on it. The bridge started sagging at one pillar last week, and they had to evacuate everyone off the island and close it down. He was working and had to be escorted across the bridge on foot, leaving his wife's car at the office. They are putting up a military style temporary bridge, which won't be finished installing until the end of this week.

Gotta love those "inside sources". Look...I could claim inside sources too...I've been up there and talked to a couple of the workers. Question is, if it was true that there is so much more oil up there than what anybody is telling, what would be the point of keeping quiet about it? The biggest reason the oil companies want access to ANWR and offshore and everywhere else they aren't being allowed to drill now? Quite simply, the more oil reserves they have the rights to drill, the more valuable their stock is. Price of oil company stock is partially dependent upon how much oil they can potentially drill. That right there is pretty much enough to convince me that they wouldn't allow it to remain secret about vast pools of oil. Now...even if it WAS true, would that do anything to alleviate the present problems? It might, possibly, slow the speculation down that is partially the cause of the short term rise in the price of oil. But it wouldn't do that much because of a number or factors. First factor...the Alaska pipeline has about reached the end of its life--it wasn't even designed to last THIS long. Developing another way to get the oil from there to here is going to be expensive. So is just getting the oil out in the first place...North Slope crude is pretty expensive oil. And of course you have that pesky problem that it would take years for all the infrastructure to be developed, all the exploration to be done, and finally to start production. And...there are other reasons to wean ourselves off oil. Every time someone comes up with some pie in the sky "solution" that involves, basically, business as usual, it gives us an excuse to not worry about conservation or alternative energy sources, just as we did in the 1970s when we SHOULD have started seriously developing those alternative sources. Every possible source of new oil comes with a price tag, and if it had been cheap and easy to get it would have already been gotten. And in the present climate, one almost of desperation to hang on to business as usual for just a little longer, I'm afraid the the environment will end up getting the short stick. "Hey, if it's going to cost too much and take too long to do it right and protect the environment, well, we need it now!"

Agreed that not nearly enough attention has been given to the mine near Lake Illiamna, that's going to be a disaster. I was unable to get the video to play, so could somebody give me a synopsis of the important points?

Trav, I've talked to two other guys in the last few years that were just as sure as you are that they saw a big black cat. But what I said before is the reason that "scientific" people don't believe it. Personally, I have no idea what the explanation is but I do know that there are quite a few people who are pretty calm and reliable that claim to have seen them, so I ain't disbelieving!

Mine looks pretty much like Gavin's, and I mainly use it the same way, except in the winter when I'm fishing pretty slow water anyway, it will stop the canoe and hold it in one place. But I just find it to be too much trouble most of the time during summer low water levels. I don't like carrying it around and attaching it to the canoe. I can pretty much hold the canoe on a line to fish with the paddle, using eddies, shallows, and obstacles, and don't find the anchor all that useful to me...but that's just me.

The whole black panther thing is what really intrigues me. I've heard dozens of people say they've seen black panthers in the Ozarks, ever since I was a kid. But what is the explanation for it? The only two species of big cats that "commonly" have a black phase are the African leopard and the South American jaguar. Cougars, the only big cat possibly native to the Ozarks, almost never have a black phase, maybe a one in a million chance that one would be melanistic. Given that there haven't been a million cougars in the Ozarks in the last 500 years, the chances of more than one being black are pretty much nil. It's a long way from the nearest place where jaguars are native, and even then the jaguars of Mexico and the American southwest were almost never black. For there to be enough black leopards around to have people seeing them for the last 100 years, they'd have to have a breeding population that came from escaped or intentionally released ones, and that ain't very likely, either. So...is/was there a species of big black cat unknown to science? Is/was there a population of black cougars, unheard of anywhere else and never documented? Or...could the sightings be of rather dark-colored cougars in poor light? Not likely that all of them were. The skeptic would say that it's a psychological trick of the mind...we've always heard about black panthers, so when we see something we can't quite explain or we're not sure of, imagination makes it into a black panther. Maybe it was a big black dog. Maybe it was a small black cat that our minds made into a big one. Or...you could take the REALLY far out explanation, which I've heard before. Maybe these animals are actually coming from another dimension, showing up in our dimension for a fleeting time and then disappearing. There's a whole "scientific" field of cryptozoology, which is the study of "unknown to science" animals, and that's one explanation of why they are seen.

If you really want to "match the hatch", you gotta catch crawdads in the same places you plan to fish. If you usually fish lakes, but catch your crawdads from a stream, chances are that the ones you catch will be a different species (and a different color) from the ones that live where you fish! Maybe an easier way to do it would be to obtain the book, Crayfish of Missouri, from the MO Conservation Department. It has good color photos of all the MO species, and all you'd have to do would be to look at the descriptions of the range and habitat of each species, and pick the ones that appear to live where you fish.

I've got an anchoring system for my solo canoes, but seldom use it. About the only times it comes in handy is when fishing streams in the winter, where you need to spend a lot of time in one spot. It CAN be dangerous if you try to anchor--or drag the anchor accidentally--in fast water. Mine consists of a wooden plank that I can use bolts and wingnuts to attach to the stern plate of the canoes, with one of those anchor pulleys attached to it. I use a doubled-over length of heavy chain covered with rubber. A length of anchor rope is attached, runs through the pulley, and up to where I'm sitting, so all I have to do is lift up on the rope to let it out, lift up and pull to bring it in. The biggest problem I have with it is that when I pull it in and it's dangling from the pulley, a few inches of it is still dangling in the water. This causes a bit of drag when paddling--but it also acts as a bit of a rudder, which CAN be a good thing.

Here are photos from the other evening on the lake... Looking north Looking south toward Yellowstone Park Looking west over the Gallatins Oops, don't know why that one got in twice!

MOfish...that sounds great. Hope to check the place out! I worked outside around the cabin all day today...got a driveway put in but the dirt and rocks were pretty messy, so I got a start on landscaping. I was going to knock off about 5 PM and check out the local lake, but about that time a storm rolled in. Didn't rain but a few drops, but lots of wind. By the time it was over it was 7:30, but the lake is only 4 miles away, so I loaded up the canoe and went. There were caddis flitting above the water surface, with the occasional trout chasing them, but most of the lake had enough of a chop you couldn't really see the rises. I decided to try slow-stripping a small, light olive woolybugger, something which slightly imitates a damsel fly nymph. Almost immediately hooked a nice rainbow, but it released itself a little prematurely. Then I caught a big yellow perch. Then the sun was setting and the lake got pretty quiet, and the rises started getting more numerous. I hooked another trout that nearly jerked the rod out of my hands when it hit the bugger. Lost it too. Caught a couple more yellow perch. Hooked a third trout, really big if the swirl at the surface was any indication, lost it as well. And then it was too dark to see. Actually, by the time the rises started getting reasonably regular, it was dark enough I really couldn't see what they were taking, or I'd have tried a dry fly. The lake was beautiful in the sunset, and I took some pictures, but for some reason my computer isn't reading the memory card, so I can't post them at this point.

We drove up into the park yesterday. The Yellowstone below Yellowstone Lake looked gorgeous...high but very clear. Of course, fishing season doesn't open on that stretch of the Yellowstone until July 15! The river still looked marginally fishable at the bridge below the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (the loose volcanics and rotten thermal rock in the canyon erodes into the river in high water and muddies it). But the Lamar was dumping a big load of muddy water into the river. Once the Lamar settles down the river should get fishable below the park. Weather is supposed to be in the 80s and sunny the next five days, so a lot of snow should melt. We saw wolves in the Lamar Valley, just on the other side of the river from the road, and a black one crossed the road above the confluence with Soda Butte Creek (Soda Butte Creek was pretty clear, by the way). Saw a grizzly but it was a long way off. Watched a pair of peregrine falcons dive-bombing a bald eagle--cool! The eagle probably didn't think so. Lots of bison with babies. The tourist hordes were not too much in evidence yet. I think I'll go flyfishing on a local lake this evening. Possible hatches just before dark. I know there are BIG rainbows in it, along with some walleye.

It's something to think about. I didn't think to be worried about the one MO black bear I've seen, which was on the Jacks Fork while on a solo three day float trip, but maybe I should have worried a bit about it!

last night we had a nice sunset and I took some pictures... This is the view of Imigrant Peak off our front porch. From the front porch, if you look down Paradise Valley to the north, you get a good view of the Absaroka-Beartooth Range. There's a creek with brown and cutthroat trout in it in the near trees. If you look a little farther to the left, you can see the Livingston Canyon gap where the Yellowstone emerges from Paradise Valley, with the Crazy Mountains about 40 miles away but visible through the gap, but I didn't take a picture of that last night. Looking across the valley from in back of the cabin, you see the Gallatin Range.

My wife is taking a class in Bozeman that will allow her to be a Yoga instructor, so we drove out to our cabin (an hour away from Bozeman) last weekend, and we'll be here for several weeks. I knew that it was the wrong time for flyfishing, since the Yellowstone and other rivers were going to be high and muddy from snowmelt. So I planned on working around the cabin and getting some paintings done until the rivers got into shape. We arrived late Monday night to typical weather...cool and clear. Tuesday started out nice, sunny and warm. But Tuesday afternoon a storm system rolled in, and the temp dropped into the 40s. By Tuesday night it was snowing. Our cabin sits in the valley, at about 5300 ft. elevation. Weather forecast called for snow to be accumulating down to 5000 ft. It didn't quite stick at the cabin, but the mountains a thousand or so feet higher turned white. It snowed hard much of the day Wednesday, turned to rain Wednesday night, and rained all night with temps in the high 30s. Yesterday the rain turned to snow again in the morning before finally ending. Today it's a bit closer to normal weather for this time of year out here, temps in the 60s and somewhat windy. A far cry from what it's been doing in Missouri! Our friends out here say this is the strangest weather they've ever seen. It stayed cold with rain and snow much of May--in fact, since early May the area has gotten nearly its entirely yearly quota of precipitation. The Yellowstone is high and muddy already, and Yellowstone Park has been getting hammered with new snow, so if the weather turns very warm (which is pretty likely) and that snow all melts at once we could be looking at big floods on the Yellowstone and other area rivers. I have to say I kinda hope it DOES all melt quickly, or else I won't be fishing the Yellowstone at all while I'm out here this summer. There are a few places I can fish. Some lakes. The Bighorn is 2-3 hours away and it is dam-controlled and almost always fishable. I could pay to fish the spring creeks, which is what all the tourist anglers here now are doing. The lower Madison was marginally fishable Wednesday when I drove out and looked at it. The Boulder is high but fairly clear. If I get to missing bass fishing, I've found a cluster of ponds that are reputed to be full of largemouths. The lower Bighorn is supposed to have smallmouths. And the Flathead, three or four hours away, is apparently a great smallie fishery. I'll report from time to time on my adventures out here. There were grizzly tracks in the lane leading up to the cabin.

About rattlesnakes...neither MDC nor anybody else released rattlesnakes in the I-44 area. There WAS a study done of timber rattlers in that area, because it happens to have one of the densest populations of them anywhere in the state, and a lot of them were being killed on I-44. Otters...I've said it before and I'll say it again...armchair quarterbacking. When the otters were being reintroduced, you couldn't have found 10 people in the whole state of Missouri who were against it. When they took hold, everybody was thrilled. Should MDC have foreseen the problems that resulted? Maybe. But with the knowledge they had, there weren't any danger signs. Otters coexist just fine with fish populations just about everywhere they are native. They don't have a lot of natural predators anywhere. And their normal reproductive rate is only about 1/4th the rate it has been in MO since reintroduction. The problem is that reintroducing them turned out to be like introducing a totally new species, in that the species was moving into an ecological niche that had been unexploited before, and the native fish populations had been long enough without otters that they had few real defenses against otter predation. So the otters exploded beyond anybody's expectations. Fact is, when turkeys were reintroduced throughout the Ozarks, the same thing happened in that the turkey population exploded, but of course we didn't mind that! It was nothing to see flocks of 200-400 turkeys in the winter 20-30 years ago. Now, the turkeys have settled into numbers compatible with their habitat, and we often complain that the turkey population is way down. I hope, and I somewhat expect, that otters will eventually do the same thing, settle into numbers compatible with their habitat and food supply. It will probably mean a few less fish, especially on smaller streams with poor habitat, but the fish will eventually develop better natural defenses to otter predation.

Nope, can't figure it that way. I don't know exactly what all the state and county and municipal sales taxes add up to as a percentage of sales. It varies from place to place in MO. But, no matter how many pennies you pay per dollar you spend, only 1/8 of a penny goes to MDC (1/8 of one percent sales tax). So if you bought something for $10, you paid 1 and 1/4 pennies to MDC. Or, if you bought something for $100, 12.5 cents of your sales tax on it goes to MDC (1% of $100 is $1, 1/8th of a dollar is 12.5 cents).

Nope, no trout in Jacks Fork. It should be pretty much of a zoo this weekend down there. Water levels will probably be good, and the weather looks like it will cooperate, so it should be a full-fledged aluminum (and plastic and rubber) hatch. I wouldn't expect the fishing to be very easy.

Hmm...possibly that canoe is made of the poly and not Royalex, which would account for the extra weight. 43 pounds isn't bad--my Vagabond weighs about that much. And other than the weight, the poly is a pretty good material, quiet and durable. Could be a pretty good deal for an entry-level solo.

I much prefer gaging stream smallies by length and not weight, since when you get up to the big fish range, weight can vary as much as a pound during the year, or even if the fish has been eating well or not! It takes an 18 inch smallie to make Master Angler Award status. 20 inches is kinda the mark to really shoot for. Anything 21 inches and over is rare enough that it could be the fish of a lifetime for a lot of anglers. Personally, I keep track of, and usually take photos of, anything over 17 inches. 15-16 inchers are fairly common, but bigger than that it's a notable fish.

About the apparent hybrid bass...largemouths and smallmouths do not hybridize in the wild, although hybrids have been produced in captive, laboratory situations. Smallmouths DO hybridize extensively in some waters with spotted bass. Any hybrid you see in the wild will be smallmouthXspotted bass. Since spotted bass are common in the lower reaches of the James, it's probable that it was a smallmouthXspotted hybrid.

Agreed, good solo canoes are more expensive, but I think well worth it IF you have the money. The apparently poorer stability of solo canoes compared to many kayaks is mainly a function of the higher seat. If you're in water where you NEED greater stability, like when going through rapids with good-sized wave trains (something that isn't all that common on Ozark streams), you can always kneel, putting your center of gravity lower and greatly stabilizing the canoe.