zander

I was wondering if during October and November if there are any big browns which run up to powersite like they do at Taney. I know the numbers would be less. I have also seen in the winter time rainbows darting around in Swan Creek below Shadow Rock, do they go further up into Swan? Anyone ever seen a brown up in Swan? Thanks. Phillip

Glad to have ya. Phillip

My parents lived about an hour south of Amelia Island Plantation, FL (I assume this is the same place) for several years. I think it is too far north for peacock bass. I thought they were around Miami. Snook are a pretty rare catch too there. The best thing to do is fish for reds along the canals or fish for bluefish in the surf. Many more canals than beach in that area. The fishing there lives and dies on the tide so make sure you find out when it is coming and going and fish accordingly. Also whiting are fun to catch and you can catch them in the surf as well. Bluefish and whiting are extremely good eating fish. Good luck.

I stopped by Borders and picked up the issue, got home and flipped through it and I could not find anything on Leonard although there is a nice little write up on Croatia in there. What page number is it on?

I could write a long book full of all the stupid things I have done, but one of the dumbest happened when I was 16 or 17. At that time I had been living in Louisiana for about 9 years after moving down from Kimberling. I had plenty of friends and we loved to hunt. I lived at the end of a subdivision and beyond that were vast cotton fields. The cotton fields were great places for us to go hunt doves and when doves weren't in season, we would shoot blackbirds since they tasted the same as dove and there was open season year-round. I had invited one of my friends over to go hunting with me and I had asked him to bring a shotgun for me. His family duck hunted so they had pump shotguns whereas my dad had only single shot ones. As my friend arrived he took the Mossberg 20 gauge out of the gun sleeve and handed it to me. I stood around in the driveway of my house with the hot sun beating down on me while my friend stood about six feet in front of me putting shells in his other shotgun. I felt the gun start to slip in my sweaty hand and I tightened my grip on the gun and then BOOM! The gun I was holding went off. It was pointed towards my friends feet but thankfully it missed him by a foot or so. The No. 6 shot left a white patch of blasted concrete driveway before it ricochetted up to my father's right rear tire on his minivan. It peppered it I guess because as the neighbors came out of their houses to investigate and we started to come out of shock, the tire slowly deflated. Guns should not be kept loaded and the safety should be kept on and you should check it yourself REGARDLESS of what you are told about the gun. Oh yeah, one of my neighbors was not too fond of me to begin with came out with to see what was happening. He was a cop and probably thought there was a crime in progress. Thankfully the only physical damage was my dad's tire that I had to replace.

Casting at night is definately a great way to practice just like was said because you give your body a feel what is happening with the line. I fished in the dark for the first time in quite a while last week and when the sun went down so did the quality of my casts because I was out of practice and fishing too visually. Good luck you are going to love it.

go north on 177 and awww forget it. here's the link. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&...mp;t=h&z=16

Actually in Stillwater there is a real little clear lake called Sanborn Lake that holds lots of decent bass and crappie. You can put in a little john boat and fish it to your hearts content. It is spring fed from the bottom. that's about 45 minutes from you.

Well you weren't too close to me the other night down there, but you must have been very observant to have picked up all of my fishing skills and methods perfectly in order to give a report like that!

Ok, I remember seeing you guys. It was a pretty evening though if nothing else. After we got done fishing we went to the White River Outpost restaurant and ordered walleye. The walleye was good but the service, "steamed" vegetables, and rice pilaf were making me not want to bite either. I guess there was something in the stars.

I bought my son this fishing outfit from BassPro yesterday and had a chance to try it out with him today. First of all, my son is extremely interested in anything mechanical (I don't know where he got it from) and the see through plastic top of the reel means that he can see the gears moving around when he reels in the line. When you hit the release button there are a bunch of LED lights that light up and flash making it seem very cool to him. As far as the performance of the rod, we were impressed. It handled with ease the monster bluegills we caught today ranging from 3 to 4 1/2 inches, even handling horsing them up through the knotweed. It casts pretty easy and a fair distance which was a limiting characteristic of the SpongeBob fishing pole we had used before. In all seriousness it is a really neat fishing pole for kids.

Me and my father just got back from Powersite. Lots of people fishing, hardly anyone catching. My father caught 2 decent bows on a roostertail until a rock claimed the lure for itself. He had missed several more. I was determined to try to catch a walleye on a flyrod, needless to say I did not succeed but I did miss three strikes on a red and white PMS. Trout were midging pretty hard, no Griffith's gnats on me, so I tried to throw them a size 14 ant but too big for them I guess. We left about 7:00PM.

I can't help you with picking out a pole, but the rule my father has always gone by is that the pole should have at least 1 eye for each foot it is in length, ie a 6 ft pole would have at least 6 eyes but NOt one eye every twelve inches.

An early heads up for any who might be interested. Saturday March 29th from 1:00 PM until 3:00 PM by the Lake Springfield Boathouse and Marina there will be an activity open to anyone (especially youngsters) who might be interested in learning how to fly fish. This is an event put on by Branson Trout Unlimited and JPMorgan Chase Working Families Network. Any TU members or may be thinking about being members who would like to stop by and lend a hand are welcome. Of course there is no charge. There will be casting lessons (blind leading the blind) and maybe even some fishing down the lake for bluegill and bass. Anyone who might have some lighter weight fly rods that they wouldn't mind letting other flip around or that have hula hoops for targets we could definately use those. This is the first of what I hope will be monthly activites that TU and WFN could put on in the Springfield area to help raise money for Branson TU. But that being said - this event is totally free We would love to see you there. Contact me if you have any questions.

I like your posts Taxidermist. And there is no way that your taking of browns is going to put any kind of dent in the brown populations. By having better molds avaialble it might actually encourage others to release their fish to have a mold made from one of yours. I tell you what I would love seeing pictures of smallmouth that you've done. I had a smallie mounted by a unnamed taxidermist here in Springfield and he managed to take a beautiful fish and make it really dull and ugly. do you repaint fish?

I will have to tie some like you guys mentioned. As far as the mohair leeches a have some different colors, and I haven't has a chance to fish them much, as if I am throwing a streamer I tend to throw Leonard's PMS and pine squirrel sculpin in that order. I'll have to fish those more too. They look pretty good to me, my inner self even got tempted to bite it a time or two before my brain reminded me of the hook inside . Thanks again for all of the wonderful input on the topic.

Thanks to CaptainJoe for starting this thread. Seeing some of these older pictures on here really hits home how fishing is not just an enjoyable past time, it is a part of who a lot of us are and where we come from. I fish now because I grew up fishing with my dad, and he grew up fishing with his dad and so on. I found this photo of my father and his dad from 1950 with a big cat my grandfather caught out of the Neosho River (I think). There are stories still past around at family get togethers of my dad's grandfather and the catfish he caught out of the White River pre Beaver dam (they had to move his grave when they flooded the lake). It is a family tradition that is a joy to perpepuate.

One of the first times we were able to get the three generations of Taylor's fishing together. One of the deacons in my dad's church in Marshfield needed some help thinning out the bass in one of his farm ponds, so we were happy to oblige. My son brought in a couple good sunfish and I think a little bass as well. Here is Grandpa and my son showing off their catch.

Thanks for everyone's responses. I'm glad that they do work for some of you, and glad that I am not alone in my lack of success. I will try to tie some and fish them like mentioned on here. On a side note, I walked what I thought was 1/2 mile to work today in the ice storm since my Explorer was totally encased in ice. I marched myself right into my boss's boss's office and told her (ice covering my jacket and pants) that I want all the brownie points I can get for showing up, she promised two coffees and I am still waiting. My boss later did a map quest on my trip and told me that I walked 2.5 miles not .5 miles. No sense burning a sick day for the ice storm when I might catch a terrible case of "salmonid" fever later in the spring. Sounds like a real disease to me:) I'll have to try to cure myself with some soft-hackled unweighted woolley boogers. Thanks again.

I might have to call Jamie and Adam on this one, but I'll go to you guys first. The woolly booger is one of the most popular flies ever. Word on the creek (pun intended) says that it can catch all kinds of fish in all kinds of conditions. I haven't been fly fishing all that long but I have never caught anything on a w.b. I have fished them fast, fished them slow, fished them in shallow riffles and in the deeper holes. I have never even gotten a hit on them. Either the woolly booger is a myth, or I must be fishing them completely wrong. Where and how do you guys typically fish them? I have fished them like a streamer, stripping it back to me. I know it is supposed to be an idiot proof fly but without having to degrade myself further and call myself one, I can't seem to get them to work. What is going on?

I fished behind the dam from about 9:00 AM until a little after noon today. As you can tell from the picture the water is up around 2-3 feet from normal. They aren't running hardly any water at the power plant at the moment so the water is unusally cold. This has affected the bite no doubt. I did see some bass hitting on top on the far side of the river but couldn't reach them due to the fly eating, back cast hating thicket of buttonbush right behind me. I saw bronze backs hitting on top right below the spillway but once again this was out of my reach. If they start running some water through the power plant the bite should really pick up. I threw an olive PMS and some white clouser minnow like flies most of the morning. Next time I will likely use micro-jigs under a indicator and some red and white deciever like flies. A small boat would come in very handy indeed when the water is up like this. I talked to an old boy out there today that showed me pictures on his cellphone of a flathead he had caught last weekend before the water came up. It was around 20 lbs and it had a 14 inch crappie hanging out of its mouth (he said he caught it on a bluegill). He had caught another one that day bigger and had his line snapped 6 times. (grain of salt might be needed here but he seemed honest enough to me). It was a beautiful day though and let me know what wouldn't work and gave me ideas about what might work next weekend.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what I am reading in the article here: http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/08/pf/taxes/r...sion=2008020817 but it says, "Do I have to pay the rebate back? No. And here's why. Your rebate is a one-time tax cut - an advance on a credit you'll receive on your 2008 return." Maybe they are putting in an extra credit for the 2008 season that we will not see if we are getting a credit now. I took that to mean that they are giving us some of our 2008 money now, but maybe they are doing some Enron accounting.

I'll post it here since no one has said it yet, but I'll set up a 529 plan for my son to help with his college expenses. This is not a gift from the gov't to us though. They have made it clear that it is an ADVANCE out of our 2008 refunds. This will most definately be deducted out of our returns next year. Plan ahead for the following year accordingly.

Hehe that is a good one and you are right....fighting a hundred year old is a no win situation for sure. Puts a funny image in my head. In high school we took our senior trip up by Leslie, Arkansas and met a tall skinny hillbilly pushing 90 who was crazy as a loon. He kept asking us if we wanted to go "squat" for a while with his granddaughter. We never got a look at the granddaughter but figured that even with two generations removed from the old fellow it would still be way too much ugly for us to handle:) I normally am off Fridays and Saturdays so if the weather is nice and I can find someone to watch my boy, I'm always ready for a trip down there. Just be careful walking as there is a lot of big chunk concrete making it very difficult to walk under the dam. Phillip