tjm

Well, yes the limit is now 4. But the fish are not the Park when it comes to talking about upkeep or improvement, the number of vehicles and the number of people dumping trash or using the toilets etc. would affect Park maintenance expense and need for personnel, but those would be on the DNR. Some days at RRSP the dog walkers and hikers have outnumbered the anglers and they have no qualms about dragging their dogs and leashes through the fishing areas. None of those users buy tags but they all cause park wear and tear. Hatchery maintenance, improvement and fish quality, on the other hand are MDC's responsibility and expense. I'm confused about what your complaints target, are you disappointed in the fish or in the park management? I'm quite curious how the daily tag money is divided up, part to the concessionaire, part to DNR, part to MDC, or does the concessionaire keep it all? and how big are the parts? Why do we have the same guy as concessionaire at multiple parks and why doesn't that change every year with a bid process?

Well that's too bad, RRSP tore out all the tent sites and converted them to concrete parking for those things. Pulled out all the trees that they had planted 30 years ago too, digging electric and water lines. I haven't been over there for months but I suppose the whole place is now as interesting as a Walmart Parking lot. One of the things that I hate about BSSP is having to see the massive parking lot near the stream. They need to tear the bridges out not improve them. Wrench's comment had me thinking about how pleasantly run RRSP was in the 80s-00s and how shabby it seems now, rather like wench's view of BSSP. and wondering if it was DNR spoiling the place or just We The People trashing it.

Would you say that those years of the 70-90s had more users than today?

Maintaining the park falls on DNR, MDC just deals with the fish and the hatchery. Perhaps some stream work that would affect the fish. Any decision about maintaining the park would be one of to do or not to do by DNR which is politically dependent so on the Politicians.

That's a surprise. I would have thought they'd just pile on more time and more money. That is the usual route with low bid construction. Some contractors seem to count on it when bidding. No surprise that the subs are pulling out though they have no contract with the state and the GC is their paymaster. If the GC goes there's nothing left for any of the subs. Probably double the cost of the project by the time another contractor is found and all the work done over, or least fully inspected and repaired, Might take years as has been said, and it might take decades. Entertaining to speculate anyway. Shame that governments use low bidders rather than qualified bidders.

https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2668 The folks in Marionville will dispute that. There was a population of the black squirrels near Bella Vista along L.Sugar Creek in the Caverna/Jane area for years, I don't know if they are still or not.

The hard brown paper towels that you sometimes see in public toilets work better than any soft towel, I think, The coffee filters sound like winner.

they just got into the graffiti while the paint was still wet. i saw a cat jump up on a fresh painted bench and lay down. Both the painter and cat owner were into the bad words.

Not much difference between flyrodding for SMB and and flyrodding for trout. They eat all the same foods and live in similar water. Reading the water is going to require the same skills and figuring out the presentation angles is the same set of problems. Anywhere in the Ozarks is a good place to fly fish with the possible exception of the reservoirs. It can be a bit hazardous to wade when boats are flying by and throwing wakes.

There is a ramp just below the dam. And I have seen boats come up from down river, perhaps from another ramp down about three miles at Bertrand access. But there is a safety zone adjacent to the dam.

All stockers, some are holdovers but they were hauled there too. It's been a decade or two since I fished there regularly, but back then I always caught trout on flies between the dam and Parker and my bait fishing son in law caught bigger trout near Spider Creek. IMO the area is only fit for put and take because it is as Ollie put so scoured out and because the water fluctuates so frequently apparently without schedules. That doesn't lead to great fertility or food growth. And to add to Ollie's list of reasons not to go there, on two occasions the water came up very fast with no warning that I heard. It was kinda scary for a few minutes. When they started trying to mange it as some kind of special fishery, I thought that they had lost the plot. But even back then the guys doing the shocking were finding quite few large trout with one they said exceeded 16#, so some found enough food to grow. The best quality NWA trout fishing back then was in western Benton county in places we can no longer fish or that have been built over.

I think practicing the fly cast should be done in a non-fishing situation, so that you can concentrate on one thing at a time. When I started fly fishing back in the '70s catching fish on the fly was so easy that it took me almost twenty years to learn to cast and I'm still not very good at it. Fish are a major distraction. If you want to catch fish and the spinners are working , just keep doing that. On the other hand if fly casting interests you, lock the spinning rod in the attic, leave it there until you master the fly rod. Take a casting lesson or two and cut the hook off a couple of practice flies, then make those nice casts into muscle memory before going after fish again. When you do go fly rod fishing, the most important thing is not your cast, but where you stand, the location of your feet make the angle and distance of the cast good or bad. And nothing can really fix a bad casting position except moving to where the water is helping rather than hindering your presentation. On whether Rockbridge is worth the price or not, that's up to the individual, it would not be to me, I would not even drive there to fish if it was free because I'd have to pass too many other streams to get there, but it obviously is to each and all of their satisfied customers. And if I were spending that $210 day as a means of learning, I'm sure that I'd be better off to put up some more $$$ and find a guide willing to give instruction. It's good that you enjoyed the outing and now you have an idea of what you like and if you even like trout fishing.

If you smoke in the car/truck and want to clean that film off the windshield, you can use rubbing alcohol/isopropyl to cut it off pretty quick, just soak a paper towel and scrub and repeat, the do the vinegar spray on or wipe on with a clean rag and polish dry with the newspaper. Microfiber or some brands of paper towel might work but I not had good results with either. .

White vinegar and newsprint. (black and white print pages only)

cheaper to rent a boat?

I can see that Ok. has a problem with that, but the drainages in Ar & Mo aren't supposed to contain any other similar species (yet!) so could easily be managed as a separate species, if they wanted to.

That is much better than Mo. is doing with the Neosho bass, i was told MDC will continue to treat it as a smallmouth.

I wouldn't know, just wondered that @Gavin had them all on his "no book" list. I think that I've actually only seen three guides in my life and they were all hanging around in or working at fly shops. From conversing with them, the boat might be the best reason for hiring one. I take that back I did meet Davy at the 'Sowbug' when he was giving a lecture there that my son wanted to hear. Too bad the microphone didn't work. So that makes four guides that I've seen in my life. I did see and talk to a few exceptional tiers at that Roundup.

Do they have to take a test now?

Arkansas trout guides are that bad?

I'll tell you my version. Lets say that I drive three hours one way to fish a stream, it would be nice if that stream had fish in it, no? The difference between the blue and the white is how many fish get stocked and how many are there now. At least on the ones that I fish, the white ribbon steams get stocked five times per year and the blue ribbon not at all. So, that sounds like the white would have a lot more fish per mile? Nope. Because the white ribbon streams allow bait and and have a four fish kill limit. Whenever the stocking truck shows up someone always sees it and call all the local trout killers who will be there in minutes using bait and filling buckets, most can't count to four so take six or more and none of them can tell a brown trout from a rainbow, so if any browns under the length limit also get in the bucket. Typically a week or ten days sees 90%-99% of the newly stocked trout killed, leaving not too many in the stream. So these streams fish pretty good five weeks out of the year, IF you get there in the stocking weeks. On the other hand the blue ribbon streams prohibit bait and only allow one fish to be killed and it must be over 18", so given that most of the fish caught are minimally hurt by the flies/lure and immediately released the numbers of fish in the stream stay about the same every day of the year. This means you have a better chance of seeing a fish on any given day than on the white ribbon steams after they have been depleted. The use of bait has some real drawbacks to fish survival, because they often swallow and become gullet hooked or gut hooked and the mortality rate if released is about ten times that of single point lure caught trout, and that is if every fish is released. But because the white ribbon areas have a higher limit the bait caught fish are often killed. I don't think that's true, I'd say that it sets aside the streams that may have self-sustaining populations as places where the harvest is meant to be about equal to natural mortality rates, so that they may remain self-sustaining. And to provide a put and take fishery on streams that are capable of holding trout but do not support natural reproduction. I'm pretty sure that if a white ribbon stream was observed to have repeated natural surviving reproduction that it would be elevated to blue status.

looks like you need rain, or a concrete crew. Or both.

So which rig did you catch the fish on? Like the wrench hinted, ^^^, you have to learn from the fish and details count. It's just like fishing, you might have 100 fish days or ten days in a row skunked. I think it seems a lot slower when using bait, but what does a fly-rodder know? All the waters in the USA are over fished, we just have too many people with too much free time. But the Bennett Spring hatchery is in the middle of a multi year rehab with no production and any stocking is from other sources. https://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/places/bennett-spring-fish-hatchery/bennett-spring-construction-updates This is a detail, but if you want help you kinda have to be specific; a "small hook" is relative- a #2 is small compared to #8/0 and pretty big compared to #8. I used to use #10 when fishing trout with worms and I used to use #24 when fishing trout in ponds with flies. If using an egg, I'd want one egg to pretty much cover a hook shank and to float near the bottom, not lie on it. Perhaps a #12 egg hook.

Pretty much. I think that's the reason for the mono rig and "Euro nymphing lines". Ted Fay used heavily weighted flies that kept his leader-line taut and Humphreys used split shot, but both stood a lot closer to the fish than 40'. It works for you. I suppose bend might be more accurate than hinge, unless the nymph is a floater. In my case, I think that trying to "watch the indicator" distracts me from fishing. It has been a most unsuccessful tactic for me, anyhow. So, I know nothing about Pallot, was he a nymph fisherman?

So it is a suspension device rather than a "sighter". You confused me with "sighter for nymphing". My fault, I guess. I'm not a modern nympher, having learned from Sawyer's and Hidy's books, with some influence from articles about Ted Fay and Joe Humphreys' book, in every instance using the line to detect unseen strikes. So may have knowledge gaps, but my online reading indicates that an "indicator" floats and is a suspension device, or bobber while a "sighter" is visible above and below water and used in contact nymphing. Theory being, I think, that any floating device causes a hinge and interrupts the constant contact between fly and hand. I've never really learned the indicator method, tried it many times with never a strike, so far as I know. But then I never caught many fish using a bobber with bait either., I think I'm just not a good spectator and my attention wanders.