Andrew Schaefer

I'll be fishing Taney next week. I've had some decent luck with dry flies in the past this time of year and I was wondering if anyone has been doing any good before I come down. Also, when fishing dries I've noticed that the larger patterns tend to twist up on lighter tippets. Could a guy get away with a heavier tippet on taney to avoid the twisting without getting a bunch on refusals? What size tippets do you recomend?

sometimes its the spot on the spot type of fishing thats gets some people a bunch more fish than everyone else, but I think it has something to do with pure chance too. I do a lot of ice fishing and sometimes for whatever reason one guy in a shack will be cathing twice or three times as many fish as the guy fishing in the hole two feet next to him using the same setup. I think thats what the old timer fishermen call "holding your mouth the right way"

A lot of diseases will cause growth deffects if the fish caught the disease when it was young but survived. That would be my guess anyways.

What size were they Phil? It looks like a spinner(mating) stage mayfly. One time about five years ago I found a spent trico spinner floating by your dock in august, I scooped it up and had it in my collection for school for a awhile, I forget what happened to it. I wish taneycomo had some good mayfly hatches, but such is life. I'm not much of a bug expert, i usually just use common names and go mostly by size and color, I honestly have no Idea what this is, I'd have to key it out to tell. The dunns are easier for me to id than the spinners because the spinners of many mayflies look very similar. There are a lot of mayflies that hatch in the spring time and they all look pretty much the same to me: blue wing olives, mahogany duns, march browns, hendricksons etc.

thats too bad... the sad thing is that those fish are just one in a very long list. A similar situation is/was facing the snake river sockeye salmon. It sorta reminds me of Iowa's native strain of brook trout. They were thought to be extinct for many years until a sustaining population was found in a tiny spring creek in the northeast corner of the state, its less than a mile long and rarely more than 3 feet wide. Resoration efforts have been underway ever since to get them sustaining in other watersheds, but the results have been mediocre at best. Last time I was at the hatchery I was talking to the manager and he told me that they had to stop collecting eggs and milt from the native strain fish because their population was down after a couple low water years, and now they fear that the population will die out completely.

Well, I've never skinned out a duck pelt, but Ive done a few partridge and pheasants. first, you'll need a good sharp knife and a set of wire cutters. Make a cut from the throat down to the butt, peal the skin away from the breast like you're going to fillet the bird. The make a cut from the but down each of the legs and around the thighs. Pull the skin off each of the legs, then you should be able to free up the tail with the help of the knife,. At this point you should be able to work the skin off the back up to the wings. Pull the skin up off the lower muscular part of the wing, then cut the bone with to wire cutters. Now you should be able to pull the rest of the skin on the neck and maybe the head off. The head can be hard to do but its doable if you use a knife to help it along. I know this whole process is clear as mud without pictures but, basically you skin the thing like you would any other critter. Its easiest to do this with a bird thats fresh and still warm because the skin will come off the meat easier. Ducks are much harder to skin than pheasant and partridge and you'll probably have to use the knife to help it along alot. As far as preservation goes, I use salt, it isn't the greatest deal though, its kinda messy and you can never get all the salt of the hide after its done curing.

Hope everyone stays safe tonight down there Phil. We've been having some bad weather up here too, over an inch of ice in some areas, plus atleast 8 inches of snow. The news people said over 100,000 people in Iowa were without power tonight. I lost power for about 2 hours, I just got off the phone with a friend who lives in the country and he is in his 6th hour of power outage and a tree punctured the side of his house, luckily he has a sunflower heater.

A word about minnows: make sure you know what you've got when you're seining creeks or trapping minnows. There are quite a few rare or endangered species of minnows around, and getting caught with some in your bait well wouldn't be good even if it was by accident.

the most common cross in commercial hatcheries is female GS X male BG. They aren't sterile but the offspring are around 80-90% male so there is reduced overall reproductive capacity. They still reproduce but since there aren't many females it will be at a much lower rate. A lot of farm ponds have bluegill overpopulation problems, but in most cases that problem can be more easily fixed with good predator mangement and increased bluegill harvest than going out and buying some heinz 57 fish.

trout, like most any other fish, will eat just about anything they can stuff down their throats. I'd say the average 18 inch trout could probably manage to get a 6 inch fish down. I've seen bass, which are extremely cannibalistic, eat or attempt to eat other bass that are very close to their same size in hatchery settings. Another time on Taneycomo, my brother and I caught a limit of rainbows, they were all around 13 inches or so. We fished catch and release for a few hours before returning to the dock to clean fish, and when I opened the livewell there was a zoom super fluke floating in the water. The only way it coulda got there is by a trout coughing it up.

Its funny you should mention hybrids Sam. I major in Fisheries management in college and just the other day we were talking about the various sunfish hybrids. Its pretty common for members of the sunfish family to hybridize, especially Green Sunfish and Bluegills. Its pretty difficult to know exactly what you have when you catch one because they will back-cross giving you a fish thats mostly one species or another. The appearance of the fish also depends on the sex of the contributing species.

i see, we just call em' greenies, they rarely get big enough to eat here in Iowa but I've caught some bigguns down on table rock.

what exactly is a black perch? never heard the term before.

You'll love the power trim, it makes it easier to stay on plane at lower rpms. As for the weather, it could always be worse, I had to drill through a foot and a half of ice in order to go fishing today

Trust me, just because you've never seen the warden doesn't mean that he isn't watching you right now. They have tricks and tactics that alot of people don't think of, like watching people on the water from a hidden spot or so the sun is at their backs so you can't see them. Speaking of toothy critters, taneycomo seems like an Ideal place to have a trophy northern pike fishery: plenty of cold water in the upper lake(prefered by larger pike) warm water on the lower lake for younger ones, plenty of forage(stockers, shad, suckers) and aquatic vegetation for spawning!! okay i'm just kidding about pike in taney, stocking non-native species is can have serious consequences, but it is fun to think about.