Al Agnew

The middle Gasconade really varies a lot in flow from normal spring water to typical late summer water. The losing stretch that Gavin talked about can get so low that you can't float the riffles cleanly in a lightly loaded canoe in low water conditions, while there will be plenty of flow above and below it. Mitch and I once put in at Schlicht Spring with his jetboat, and just barely had enough water, while there was a lot of water down near Jerome. Cwc and I once wrestled his jet boat in at Mitschelle Access, which doesn't have a boat ramp, and had no problems running as far up as we wanted to go, and that was in mid-summer, but the water was up a bit. On the other hand, I've seen the river unrunnable a lot of times above the mouth of the Big Piney. If the flow at the Hazelgreen gauge is over 200 cfs, you MIGHT be able to run as far as the mouth of the Osage Fork, but you'd better have some nerve and not a lot of concern about your boat and motor unless you're very familiar with that stretch. Right now it's at 185 cfs, and I wouldn't chance it.

I'll be heading back to Montana for a few weeks this weekend, and by the time I get back to Missouri the stream bass will be out of their summer patterns and into early to mid-autumn mode. So I knew yesterday would be my last summer smallmouth fishing for 2019. Mary said she'd be happy to shuttle me on one of my favorite Big River floats. So the night before, I loaded up the solo canoe and gear so that I would be ready to go as soon as I got out of bed. I play basketball with some guys from 6 to 7 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the gym is on the way to the river, so I set the alarm for 5:15 so that I could play before heading to the put-in. It's a long float, longer even than I like to do, but there just aren't any good intermediate accesses. So I didn't even bring a rod for fishing the slow on the bottom stuff, just four rods for fishing my favorite fast-moving lures as I drifted. I also brought a take-apart kayak paddle to power my way through some of the long, dead pools, or in case I was running late for the 6 PM rendezvous with Mary. The trip started out frustrating. The first fish came on my homemade crankbait in the first pool, and it was a nice 14 inch smallmouth. But then I went through a period of getting strike after strike and not getting any of them to the canoe, and some were good fish. This same thing would happen a lot on this day...I lost a lot of pretty decent fish, and one real monster largemouth. But I also started catching a lot of fish, with enough good ones to keep me happy. I started out with a walk the dog topwater (naturally) on one rod, a Whopper Plopper on another rod because I'd had such good luck with it on the last trip, down on the Kings River, my homemade shallow running crankbait, and my homemade twin spin. But oddly, I've not had good luck on the twin spin all year, and the last couple years a double willow leaf regular spinnerbait has been good to me, so I soon changed to the regular spinnerbait. It turned out to be the best lure for the day. I didn't see any really big smallmouth. I caught two big largemouth, though, a 19 and a 19.5 incher. A bunch of 12-14 inch spotted bass, and enough over 12 inch smallmouth. My biggest smallmouth was a 17 incher. Total number of bass was an even 100, with 49 smallmouth, 42 spotted bass, and 9 largemouth. There was a distinct pattern...the fish were all hanging tight to the banks in water with some current and depth. The slower middle of the pools seemed devoid of fish. Most of the fish seemed aggressive, often hitting the lure as soon as it hit the water. I caught fish on everything I tried. It was just a good day of steady fishing with decent quality and plenty of numbers. Now it's off to Montana and my other angling identity, fly fisherman for Yellowstone River trout.

I believe that what MDC found after the first special management stretches had been in effect for a few years is that the size structure of the population, and overall numbers, did improve with a 15 inch, one fish limit. But the improvement wasn't quite as significant as they thought it would be. The White Paper pointed out, rightly or wrongly, that something like 45% of smallmouth in any given age class die each year no matter what angling regs are. That's kinda the background rate of die-offs. On certain waters they found that angling was cropping off fish over and above that 45% figure, and that those areas would benefit from special management...but on some of them they got such resistance from tournament angling clubs that they decided to back off implementing special regs that would curtain bass tournaments. My own experience is that the difference between special management areas and other parts of a given river isn't really big enough to make me want to fish nothing but the special management area. The biggest single factor in the success you have on a given stretch is fishing pressure. Doesn't really matter as much as you'd think whether the fishing being done was catch and kill or catch and release. The harder it's fished, the tougher it is to catch fish from it. That doesn't mean its fine for everybody to kill their limit every time...who knows how bad the stream would get if that was the case? Probably a lot worse than it is now.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, several regional outdoor writers, including as I remember Larry Dablemont as well as a couple Arkansas Game and Fish guys, wrote several articles in regional magazines extolling the virtues of the fishing for big smallmouth on the Kings River, which fired my imagination to no end. I did make it to the Kings sometime around that time period. As I remember, I floated from Trigger Gap to the Hwy. 62 bridge one day, and from the bridge down to the next access the next day. I remember the float above the bridge being somewhat of a disappointment, as there was barely enough water to float and it was quite clear. Back then, I thought that all the best smallmouth waters had to have some color, like the Meramec, Big, and Bourbeuse that I was used to fishing. I don't remember much at all about the lower float, so it must not have been all that great, either. I have a few photos of the upper float, but not many, and I was really into photographing my floats back then and I've always been a sucker for photographing bluffs, so there must not have been that many impressive bluffs on either float. But I had seen some photos of the river farther upstream that looked really cool, and I kept it in the back of my mind that one day I'd do a float from Marble down. I even stopped one time at the Marble Access on the way to somewhere else just to check it out. It was VERY low, just a trickle of water, and there were several filleted remains of...spotted bass? I certainly didn't remember seeing or catching any spots on that float below Trigger Gap...something made me think I caught a few below Hwy. 62, though. Later on, I read from Dablemont or somebody that the big smallmouth had disappeared from the Kings. So the idea of floating the upper river went further onto the back burner. So this summer, when I started thinking about my annual three day solo float, the Kings didn't pop into my mind at first. But my secret creek that used to be so spectacularly good fishing had been a little disappointing the last couple years, and I started entertaining thoughts of floating somewhere else. Somewhere new, maybe? And finally I thought of the upper Kings. I checked the water levels a few weeks back, and was somewhat shocked to see that the only gauge on the Kings was reading 50 cubic feet per second. That's low. I don't consider a stream to be floatable without a lot of dragging and scraping bottom unless it's at least 75 cfs. I checked to see what the exact location of the gauge was, and was even more surprised to see that it's a bit downstream from the river's biggest tributary, Osage Creek. Wow, if it was that low below Osage Creek, how low would it be upstream? I started making backup plans while watching the gauge occasionally. Well, the Kings got a good rise a couple weeks ago, and it seemed to be keeping its level well above normal for this time of year. Looked like the Kings float was still on. In fact, I really like my solo float to be on water that IS a little too low for anybody else to think seriously about floating it, and the gauge was still reading well above 100 cfs. I finally decided that the Kings was my choice. On Tuesday I called Kings River Outfitters at Trigger Gap to arrange a shuttle from Marble down to their place. "There's not enough water to float up there," the guy said. I explained that I was used to floating streams that were too low to float, and expected to have to get out and walk some of the riffles. "Okay, as long as you know what you're getting into," he said. I made the five plus hour drive to the vicinity Wednesday afternoon, staying at a nice little motel in Berryville overnight, and met my shuttle guy at 8 AM Thursday morning. We drove up to the put-in at Marble, and my first good look at the river up there was just about what I expected...fairly clear, and the riffle at the put-in looked to be flowing about 50 cfs. Yep, I was going to be walking some riffles, but I'd probably be able to float most of them at that level, though I'd scrape rocks on most of those I floated. I loaded my two coolers, and two drybags with all my clothing, camping gear, and miscellaneous stuff into the solo canoe. I'd picked up a couple of the more expensive high tech coolers recently, and they were considerably heavier than my old cheap coolers, so the canoe seemed to sit lower in the water. I had plenty of ice in them. One held my food, the other my beverages and water. I started down that first riffle and dragged bottom with the rear of the canoe a lot worse than I thought I would, so I stopped, and reloaded everything to balance my load better. The river looked pretty good for fishing, and I was excited to be fishing new water, but it took a while to catch the first fish, and it was a largemouth. So was the next one, then I caught a couple spotted bass. Finally a smallmouth. I was trying topwater without much success, but my homemade crankbait was catching a few, as was a spinnerbait. But the fishing was disappointingly slow. There were nice looking pools, but a lot of the river was bedrock bottomed, and even the bluff pools were different from what I was used to. The geology was such that the bluffs were layered in thin beds, and the cliffs came right down to the water and then the solid rock sloped off into the middle of the pool. Because of the thin beds of rock, there wasn't much big chunk rock underwater, just solid, flat bedrock with ledges. I just didn't think it looked like great habitat even in the deeper pools. And the low flow meant that there weren't many deep, fast runs, just shallow riffles and bedrock bottomed pools. But the landscape was gorgeous. Some of those bluffs were a hundred feet high, came right down to the water, and the river had undercut the base until you could paddle all the way back under the overhangs. This upper river is, in some ways, pretty civilized, with a lot of cleared land and cattle, but those bluffs were really cool. I planned on floating from Marble to a bit below Marshall Ford the first day, so I kept moving. It's a little over 11 miles between those two accesses, and I hadn't gotten on the river until after 9 AM, but I knew I could float til nearly dark...I don't cook my meals on these hot weather trips, so all I would have to do was set up my tent, which takes about 10 minutes. I was floating over about 75% of the riffles, though almost never without scraping bottom. My biggest early problem was a private, torn up low water bridge that I had to portage over, and portaging required almost completely unloading the canoe. Then I came to a stretch where I was having to get out and walk nearly every riffle. I wondered if this was a losing reach, a geological term where part or all the flow of a stream sinks underground to emerge again farther downstream. This went on for about a mile and then there seemed to be more water again, though I didn't notice any inflow. I finally caught a very nice largemouth, about 17 inches, on a walk the dog topwater, and a few decent smallmouth, 13-14 inchers. I think I ended up with about 40 bass for the day, almost evenly divided between the three species. The spotted bass were fat and as good as any of the bass I caught that day, and since they are native to these streams I was happy to catch them. In mid-afternoon I passed three guys in kayaks, and I wondered if they were the reason the fishing was slow, but after I passed them it didn't get any better; in fact, it got worse for a while. Then it picked up a bit, then finally just about died by the time I came to the second low water bridge that required portaging. At least this one had been furnished with ramps on both sides that appeared to be specifically for portaging canoes over it, but I still had to unload the boat again. There was a big sign saying "Marshall Ford, 1 mile downstream". I figured that some people would be confused and think they had come to the take-out, even though Marshall Ford has been a high bridge for a while now. There had been no lack of good camping gravel bars until I passed under the bridge, and then it took more than a mile farther before I found a usable bar that didn't have a lane coming onto it or a cabin next to it. I finally picked a small, narrow bar with barely enough flat area to pitch the tent, a half hour before dark. It was a picturesque spot, though, with a smooth, colorful sandstone cliff opposite the bar. I'd noted that the geology had changed in the last couple miles, with the bluffs floored with that smooth sandstone instead of the shelving, undercut limestone, and there was more chunk rock in the pools. I set up the tent in nearly the last light, and brought out my smoked chicken leg quarters, potato salad, and cole slaw out of the cooler, with a cold sweet tea, and ate as the stars began to appear. A single mosquito buzzed around my ear for a bit. It was warm, so when I went into the tent I lay atop the sleeping bag, reading a Kindle book on my cell phone until my eyelids drooped. I was up at daylight, and quickly broke down the tent, loaded the canoe, and started my day of fishing. And as the morning went along the fishing got better. I hate to admit this...I've never been a big fan of the Whopper Plopper, but for some reason I decided to try one, and for the first time, it was almost magic. The water had gotten clearer...yesterday it had about 3-4 feet visibility, but it was 5 feet or better by the time I'd gotten to camp last night. The walk the dog topwater was producing a few fish, but the Whopper Plopper was doing better by far. Lots of smallmouth, almost none of the other two species. By the end of this day I had caught 113 bass, with only one spotted bass and two largemouth. Most, however, were small, under 12 inches. When I would get a strike from a 13-14 incher on the Plopper it was vicious, and often I thought it was a big one until I had it on long enough to get a good look. I remember one 14-incher that really shocked me. A couple weeks ago I'd damaged a tendon in my left arm, my casting arm. I could cast okay backhanded, but I had to use two hands on a forehand or overhand cast, and my elbow was still sore and weak. This fish clobbered the lure as it neared the canoe, and then drove toward the rear of the canoe so hard that it nearly jerked the rod out of my hand and really HURT my arm. In late afternoon, the best fish of the trip blew up on the Plopper, coming completely out of the water and knocking the lure three feet. I twitched it once and the big smallmouth came back and got it. It measured 18 1/4th inches. I got strikes from a couple others that missed that might have been that big or bigger, but given the way I'd overestimated some of those 14 inchers when they hit, I can't say that for certain. It's 16 miles from Marshall Ford to Rockhouse, the next access, and the bluffs, while different, are even more impressive in some ways than those undercut cliffs upstream. Some of them are over 200 feet high. I had planned to stop for the evening a mile or so above Rockhouse, but again there just wasn't the perfect gravel bar, so I kept fishing and passed the access, going nearly two more miles downstream before picking out a huge, high bar adjacent to a wooded bluff. I'd covered more than 16 miles. But one reason I'd floated so many miles is that the habitat was getting worse. There were longer stretches of shallow water with very little cover between the good pools. Some stretches were bedrock bottomed, others were wide, gravelly bottomed pools that looked good from upstream but turned out to be a foot deep when you got into them. So I'd paddle through those long unproductive stretches to fish the good water. I passed a creek called Dry Creek, which actually wasn't very well named, because it was flowing enough water to increase the flow of the river by a good 25%. Now the riffles were all floatable--except I soon began to come to very wide, gravel riffles that were two inches deep all the way across. I later passed another creek that was flowing fairly well, but not enough to make a lot of difference. The second night I ate smoked pork chops, bothered a bit by no-see-um gnats in the hour or so before dark. Since I'd floated so far the second day, I only had about 5-6 miles to go. And the habitat was no better. The sheer bluffs had disappeared, too, and the scenery was less interesting, plus the very wide, inches deep riffles became very common. I only caught about 20 smallmouth, biggest about 16 inches, mostly again on the Whopper Plopper. I'd noticed a pattern the day before and it continued on this day. There would be a few fish at the head of a decent pool, but the larger fish seemed to be near the tail of the pool. Some of the pools were really nice and deep with big rocks in their upper portions, but would shallow out about halfway down. Those pools had few fish willing to bite. But if a pool stayed fairly deep toward the lower end there would often be a couple bigger fish in the lower portion. And while there were some nice logs here and there, I caught basically nothing on wood, every fish came from those chunk rock areas. I reached the old, breached low water bridge at Trigger Gap early in the afternoon, and floated over the gap in it, then downstream a half mile to the Kings River Outfitters access. All in all, it had been a very interesting trip. But I have to say I was disappointed in the overall habitat. And often, I noticed a pretty bad smell...I think there are a lot of industrial chicken farms near the river. I was actually surprised that the water quality seemed as good as it did. I also wonder if the habitat was a lot better back when Dablemont and the others were touting the Kings, because it didn't really look like the kind of water that produce huge numbers of big fish. But it had been a good solo trip, with perfect weather, great scenery, and sometimes good fishing. The wildlife was kinda lacking...I saw two deer, and a white goat standing on a rock watching me go by, the whole trip, along with a bunch of vultures. I also noted a lot of huge redhorse suckers, something I've seen on other Arkansas rivers. Do these rivers not get gigged much? You never see big redhorse in any numbers on Missouri streams. All in all a good trip, though I'm not sure I'll do it again any time soon. This post has been promoted to an article

Just want to note that from about early October to the end of gigging season, you will almost NEVER see a bass in a stream during the daytime that's shallow enough for a heron to reach. Plus, even the most greedy heron wouldn't stab an 18-20 inch smallmouth. So I suspect that fresh wounds on bass during the winter, especially two or three holes in them, can't really be anything but a gig mark.

I agree with all of that, just wanted to correct your statement that the guy was a trespasser in fact. I make it a practice to not stop on bars that show signs of use by the landowner like a picnic table or bbq grill, or are right in front of a cabin or have a road coming onto them. And if ever asked to leave a bar I will; there are plenty of other bars.

Just want to point out that the guy that was shot was most likely drunk but was NOT a trespasser. He had every right to be on a gravel bar on a floatable stream.

You very seldom encounter a logjam or sweeper tree that you can't stop in time to avoid it and walk the boat around it if necessary. Most of the time I have confidence in my ability to paddle around the bad spots. I have run into a few really bad spots over the years, though. Perhaps the worst was on the lower portion of a creek that runs directly into the Mississippi that very few people ever float. I ran into a massive logjam that was bank to bank with ten foot high banks on both sides, and covered a good 75 feet of the channel's course. I was by myself, and had to paddle back upstream for several hundred feet to find a spot to get the canoe up the bank, then drag it through the stinging nettle covered bottomland back down and 50 feet or so past the logjam to find a place to get back into the creek. And then there was another logjam, thankfully shorter and easier to go around, just a quarter mile downstream. It's not unusual to encounter logjams that necessitate dragging the canoe around, but they usually aren't that difficult.

Get a DeLorme Atlas. Look at it first, looking for any bridge crossing any creek that looks like it might be big enough to hold fish. Then, instead of Google Maps, use Google Earth. Use the latest Google Earth imagery to check out the bridge crossings...what you're looking for is a lane leading off the road to the river next to the bridge, or a widened area in the road or an obvious spot to park. That's far from foolproof, but sometimes the parking spot is obvious. The reason to use Google Earth, though, is to check out the stream itself. Use the history feature to find imagery that shows the creek when it's low and clear, and it will show you if there are deeper pools...the latest imagery might have been taken when the creek was higher or murkier and if so it won't give you as good information.

Mary and I were sitting in the hot tub this morning when she asked me what the weather was going to be. I'd watched the long range forecast all last week, and it kept saying that this week there was a good chance of thunderstorms every day, so I'd kinda stopped looking. I pulled up the weather on the phone, and it looked like no rain today until late this evening. "Dang," I said, "I oughta go fishing." Mary said she had a lot of stuff going on today but she'd be done by 5:30 or so and could come and pick me up if I wanted to float Big River. So I took her up on it, and planned a good day's float with her picking me up at 6:30, figuring that I'd get off the river well before the rain. Then I happened to look at the river gauges. There had been a rise of about a foot up at the Irondale gauge, but it hadn't gotten down to where I was going to float. I told her I was headed for the river, but there was a chance it might be too muddy to fish if that rise had made it down that far. When I got to the river at the put-in, it looked like the rise was just getting there, but the water clarity was still okay, about 2.5 feet of visibility. I'd rather it be clearer this time of year, but in the past I'd always loved that clarity on the Big for fishing crankbaits. It was after 9:30 AM by the time I got on the water, and this was a bit longer float than I'd like for 9 hours. Plus, I wasn't sure how well I was going to handle it; a couple weeks ago I tore a tendon in my left elbow, and since I cast left-handed, I was a bit afraid that I was going to be hurting after a while. I thought I could paddle okay, but it was possible I'd be doing as much drifting and paddling as fishing. I quickly found that I could make backhanded casts okay, but the only way I could make a forehand cast was to tuck my elbow against my ribs and use just my wrist. But it was working okay. And as I expected, paddling was no problem because you can easily lock your elbows in paddling. I do most of my one-handed correction and positioning strokes with my right arm, so I was handling the solo canoe just fine. The first pool always produces a fish or two, but I fished down the length of it without a strike, using my homemade crankbait. I thought that wasn't a good sign. Then at the very bottom of the pool, I made a cast into a little pocket in the water willows, right up against the bank, and caught a nice 14 inch largemouth. Maybe things were going to be okay. Then I fished the next two pools with only a couple small spotted bass to show for it. Not good. By the time I'd covered the first couple of miles, from which I'd expect to catch 15 or so at least on a decent day, I'd caught 6. None were very big. I'd tried spinnerbaits and topwaters besides the crank, and none of them were working any better than the rest. I passed a guy in a kayak, throwing a cast net. Well, maybe that was part of the problem...maybe he was catching my fish. Maybe it would get better after I passed him. Nope. The fishing remained slow, although I finally caught an 18 inch largemouth on the crankbait. I was fishing carefully, making a lot of short casts in the murky water. The arm wasn't perfect but I was doing okay, though not as accurate as I usually am. The fish just weren't cooperating. I caught a couple nice spotted bass, 15 inchers, and one more largemouth about the same size. The smallmouth were all small, and not many of them. When I stopped for lunch, I realized that I was well behind schedule, but I kept fishing the water thoroughly afterwards. A couple more hours passed, and two things happened almost at once. I sudenly realized I had well over six miles to go and only 3 hours of so to get there, and I was going to have to pick up the pace considerably. And then...I heard the first rumble of thunder. Surely it was a jet. Very distant, very faint. I grabbed my phone and checked the radar. All of Missouri west of me had been clear when I'd checked it this morning, the closest rain, other than a few showers in the St. Louis area, being out around Topeka, Kansas. But now there was a big glop of thunderstorms about one county away and headed my way. Dang it. I put the radar forecast in motion, and it looked like the storms would reach me around 6 PM. It was 3:30 PM. Now not only was I going to have to cover more than 6 more miles, but I was also going to get stormed on before I reached the take-out. But I had a back-up plan. I texted Mary and told her it would be good if she could pick me up at 5:30 at an access that was only a couple miles downstream. She was busy and couldn't answer me right away, so I kept fishing. A half hour passed. There was a bit louder rumble of thunder. I glanced back upstream, to the west. Dark clouds were gathering. Then Mary texted me back, and said she couldn't pick me up until at least 6 PM. It was obvious the storm was going to hit me a LOT sooner than that. So, back-up plan number two...I called my brother to see if he could pick me up at another access, just a half mile downstream. He didn't answer. Things weren't looking good. I kept fishing. Then he called me back and I told him my problem. "Yep," he said. "It looks like you're gonna get dumped on in a bout 15 minutes. I'll be there as soon as I can." I quit fishing and paddled the last half mile. Took me 10 minutes. The sky was dark, the wind was picking up, and the thunder was a lot louder. I got to the access, which requires a long walk up the embankment to the road. I dragged the canoe up it. My brother wasn't there yet. The sky was black. The first drops hit me, and I could see a squall approaching. Would Donnie get there in time? Nope. A sold sheet of rain hit me, carried on a gust of wind that almost scooted the canoe out into the road. I'd brought a raincoat, and had put it on, but no rain pants. The upwind side of my shorts was soaked instantly. In five minutes there were two inches of water in the canoe. Then my brother arrived at the height of the storm. We got the canoe loaded, both of us soaked as we climbed into his truck to go back to the put-in and pick up mine. Did I say I'm tired of rain? So...I ended up with about 40 bass, with only the few decent spotted bass and the one good largemouth. My fly fishing buddy out in Montana and I have come up with terminology for describing the fish we catch. If it's 12 inches or a bit more, it's a "nice-un". 15 inches or so, it's a "good-un". 18 inches or better, "big-un". So one big-un, and maybe three "good-uns". That is not very good for this stretch, maybe a bit below average on numbers and well below average on size. Oh well, it was a nice day anyway...until it wasn't.

Yep, one of my heroes for sure. Everybody who loves the Meramec owes a debt of gratitude to Jerry.

Obviously this annoys the heck out of the bass fishermen on the Meramec. We just had a very good winter and early spring season for big smallmouth on the Meramec, almost certainly because the river was seldom in shape to gig last fall and winter. Extending the season just gives the pinheads more chances to kill some big smallmouth. I simply do not understand MDC's love affair with gigging. I've given up on getting the season reduced, getting better enforcement of it, getting just a few sections (besides the trout water) closed to gigging for a few years to see what that does to the population of big smallmouth...but geez, let's add on to the season.

Hi Jordan, I responded to a couple of your posts of FB. You've got the Ozark stream bug for sure. I wouldn't say topwaters and cranks are a LOT more effective. If you are used to fishing tubes and jigs you'll catch a lot of fish on them and probably more than you would on the other stuff. But I fish topwaters, cranks, and spinnerbaits 95% or more of the time in the summer and do just fine with them.

I guess I just love rivers, and want to see a whole river, see the changes as you go downstream, see what kind of fishing water there is. See if there are any surprises in the fishing. A friend and I did most of the Meramec in one trip many years ago, from Short Bend (Hwy. 19, not that far from Salem) to Times Beach, 163 miles in 12 days. It was a terrific trip, and it was so interesting to see the river change from a small, clear, barely floatable creek to a large, murky river. And back then the fishing was pretty darned good over the whole river--we caught some nice smallmouth even getting close to the end. I didn't fish any farther downstream until a couple years ago, when I was writing a book on the Meramec River system and took the jetboat on several trips to see the rest of the river. I only had one trip where I didn't catch a few bass at least, as well as quite a few drum...on that one the only fish I caught was a 10 pound buffalo. I floated lower Big River from Morse Mill to Cedar Hill before the spotted bass invasion--I had floated everything above there many times. It was actually excellent smallmouth fishing, with a couple of 18 inchers thrown in. Later, after spotted bass took over the lower river, I floated the last 20 miles from Cedar Hill to the mouth in a daylight to dark marathon float with my brother-in-law. We caught a LOT of small spotted bass, but he also caught his personal best Ozark river smallmouth, a 20.5 incher. There are some rivers that are simply really good throughout. The Big Piney is pretty darned sweet from Dogs Bluff to the Gasconade. The St. Francis is endlessly interesting and if you hit it right, any stretch of it can be excellent fishing. Other rivers, like the Bourbeuse, get pretty sorry by the time you reach the lower end. The Gasconade, though, would be nice until the last few miles (and it's got 250 plus miles of floatable water) if it wasn't for the proliferation of jetboats from Jerome down. I guess the last day's float on the Current, below Doniphan, is pretty boring compared to the rest of the river, but if you didn't already know what the rest of the river was like you'd probably be okay with it.

Of course, I have my favorite river stretches, but every year I try to do something new. Sometimes it turns out well, other times it's not so good. Back when Bob Todd published the "River Hills Traveler", he and I always did a couple new stretches of river for both of us each year so he could write about them. We once did Dry Creek, which runs from Westover Spring to Huzzah Creek at Huzzah Valley. Hoped to catch escapee trout, and did catch a few, but it was a really brushy creek and it took us a long day to cover 6 miles. Then one time we put in on Pickle Creek in the middle of Hawn State Park, dragged the canoe down to River Aux Vases, and floated it down to the next bridge. That was an adventure! Maybe the worst trip we did was on the lower end of the Bourbeuse, from the Union Access to the Chouteau Claim Access at the mouth. It was mid-July and blazing hot, the river was low but very murky (as it usually is), that float is well over 14 miles, and the lower end of the Bourbeuse is SLOW! There was one long pool above the mill dam that was nearly three miles long back then. The fishing sucked, and the water was even too hot to cool us off much when we jumped in. But at least it allowed me to say I'd done all the supposedly floatable length of the river.

I got back to Missouri yesterday, and if the thunderstorms will ever give me a three day window where I'm not gonna get electrocuted, I'm going to do a solo three day float on one of the relatively few stretches of rivers in the Ozarks that I haven't already done--Kings River. I was doing some preliminary planning, and got to thinking about all the streams I've done in their entirety at one time or another. I've done my home river, Big River, multiple times from all the way up at Belgrade, far above what's usually considered floatable, to the mouth. That's somewhere around 120 miles of river. I've been on the Meramec from Short Bend to the mouth...195 miles. I've floated the Bourbeuse from where the paddling guide says is the highest possible put-in to the mouth, plus another stretch above there...about 118 miles. Mineral Fork from above where it starts (put in on one of the two tributaries that come together to form it) to where it ends, about 17 miles. Indian Creek (Franklin County), but not as high up as I think I could put in. Huzzah from Dillard Mill down, 30 miles. Courtois from above where the paddling guide says is the highest put-in, 28 miles. Haven't done all the Gasconade yet. Have done all the Big Piney, 85 miles. All the Little Piney, 20 miles. Not quite all the Osage Fork. Not quite all the Niangua. Missing a few sections of the James. Missing all of Flat Creek. Gotta get down there and do it one of these days. Have done all of Beaver Creek. Not quite all of the North Fork and Bryant Creek. Missing the last short stretch of the Eleven Point in Missouri. Have done the entire Current River in MO, 138 miles, and Jacks Fork from the Prongs, 45 miles. All of Black River to Poplar Bluff, starting at Sutton Bluff on the West Fork, 42 miles above Clearwater, 45 miles. All the St. Francis above Wappapello, including a stretch that nobody hardly floats on the upper upper end, 86 miles. And all the Little St. Francis and Big Creek, 15 miles and 20 miles. All the floatable water on Castor River and Whitewater River, and since they aren't in the paddling guide I don't know how many miles that is offhand. In Arkansas, I've done the Buffalo from Ponca down, pretty much all the Strawberry...but not the entirety of any other river. Just those alone add up to something like 1500 different miles of Ozark stream. When you add in all the other streams, including several that are not in the guidebooks, that I've floated, it probably comes to close to 1700 miles. On a related note, I once tried to count the total number of miles I've put in paddling a canoe or other non-motorized watercraft since my first float trip at about age 7 or 8, nearly 60 years ago. At the time, it came to 15,000 miles. And that was many years ago. I suspect it's well over 25,000 miles by now. And I never get tired of it!

I fish some pretty cold rivers out in Montana, but from the first of June until sometime in September, I wet wade. There aren't many streams, even in the mountains, that are so cold that you need waders when the air temps are in the 70s or above. I see clients of the guides out there fishing from drift boats in July with waders on. That simply doesn't make sense. But Ness is right, a good set of breathable stocking foot waders and good lightweight wading boots are comfortable enough to have on all day and do some hiking in.

Bootleg is pretty much always a creek. You can float from there down in good springtime water levels (heck, you can float from Belgrade down--I've done it), but by early summer it's strictly wading water. The river just about doubles in size where Cedar Creek comes in.

Trout don't need deep holes, except in the coldest part of the winter. There are lots of trout in those smaller western trout streams that lie in fast water that is less than 2 feet deep. Rainbows especially like water like that, but browns and brook trout can be found in that kind of water, too. Although there are lots of western waters that hold brook trout, they are less common than rainbows and browns (none of those species are native to Colorado, by the way--the only native trout there are cutthroats. Brook trout tend to be less desirable in most of the West because they tend to outcompete cutthroat.)

That's about right. Missouri doesn't have a river "law". Public access has been determined by a MO Supreme Court decision back in the 1950s, Elder v Delcour, which basically says that if it is POSSIBLE to float the stream in a small watercraft, the public has an easement to float it, wade it, and camp on gravel bars. The problem is that there is no definitive list of stream sections that qualify, so sometimes on smaller, marginally floatable streams you'll run afoul of landowners, and occasionally some idiot will try to chase you off a gravel bar even on a popular float stream. And...sometimes the local county sheriff and prosecutor are on their side, and you get ticketed and fined, and would have to fight it in a higher court to get the decision overturned. So as you can see, it's all kinda fuzzy sometimes. And as for streams too small to float, they are private, though on some the landowners are apparently okay with anglers. Since it is difficult to find all the landowners along even a short section of stream, getting permission is problematical.

It's another reason, though far from the most important one, that I love fishing rivers. You aren't at the mercy of the barometer and tidal phase and weather fronts and light conditions. The fish bite when they want to bite, and they usually bite a good part of the day, if not the whole day. They don't pay nearly as much attention to light conditions--in fact, I've caught a ton more fish in the middle of bright sunny days than I have on cloudy days. Cold front? They don't care most of the time. And while they like shadows to hide in, they'll come out into bright sunlight to take a topwater lure at noon. And forget about fishing deep water, that ain't where feeding fish are because there just ain't much food in deep water in a river.

In my opinion, you don't really need a heavy rod for Missouri type streamer fishing. I dislike using rods heavier than a 7 weight, and really prefer a 6 weight for streamers. I fish a lot out here in Montana on big rivers where the wind is very often a factor, and my streamer rod is a 6 weight Ross Essence 9 footer. I do use a sink tip line when I'm fishing a big river like the Yellowstone...it just gets the streamer down in heavy current better. But in Missouri I don't think it's necessary or even desirable, unless you plan to fish the White River tailwaters. I have a Winstone Ibis (I think that's their cheapest grade) 7 weight in Missouri for bass fishing, but I don't really like to use it all that much. I won it in a raffle, and I have to say it just doesn't really fit my casting style all that well, but it does the job good enough, no more than I fly fish for bass.

When I was a kid my buddies and I would do overnight fishing trips on upper Big River, hoping to catch catfish, even though upper Big is not much of a catfish river. We generally caught about 50 bullheads for every channel of flathead we caught; in fact, most nights if we caught one channel cat it was a better than average night. A friend has a lake that's over 100 acres and 70 feet deep at the dam, that his family (who owned a heavy construction company) built on a small wet weather creek. You wouldn't have thought there were any fish in this creek, which was mostly dry except for occasional pools that were not much bigger than a bathtub. They stocked it with the usual, including channel catfish. A few years passed, and they had MDC come out and electroshock the lake to see what they needed to do to better manage it. Nobody fished for catfish in the lake, and the owners just fed the channel cats around the dock all the time. I was there when the MDC people came to shock it and helped them do it. What they shocked up more than anything else were bullheads. By the thousands. Nobody had a clue they were there, nor how they got there.

I suspect there are "smart" bass and dumb bass. I put "smart" in parentheses because we know they can't reason things out. But they can learn, it's been proven, and at least some of them can learn to avoid certain lures, or perhaps most lures. How else do you explain how fisheries with a lot more pressure have bass that are more difficult to catch? The dumb ones get caught over and over until at some point somebody kills them, while the "smart" ones learn fairly quickly to avoid many lures, and become more difficult to catch. Perhaps some learn to avoid things that look edible but that have lines running from them. Perhaps some learn not to eat when they hear a trolling motor that's too close, associating the motor noise with danger. Or there could be many other negative cues that we anglers give off that the "smart" ones learn to avoid. Meanwhile the dummies happily keep eating anything that looks edible whenever they feel like it.