zander

I have known Curtis for more years that I could know offhand. More than 13 though since I remember when his oldest son was born. Anyway, welcome officially to the forum. And I am not the avid fly fisherman that he was talking about, that is another one of our friends

I saw more suckers than trout. I zeroed and my friend only caught one 7 inch cutthroat. Water was really dirty and full of moss floating white masses which I had no idea what they were. the river looked a lot different than what I saw this spring up by Cotter. I passed over the north Fork of the White River on the way home today and that looked gorgeous.

So I am meeting a couple of college buddies in Mtn View, AR for a weekend of camping and fly fishing for trout. On this section of the river while fly-fishing do your hooks have to be barbless?

3 days if you go unjuiced.... maybe 2 if you take a bunch of 5 hour energy drinks with you and don't get any blisters. Seriously that is what I would be worried about.

I have two old buddies from college coming up this way to meet up for a weekend of flyfishing. One is coming from Dallas, TX and the other is coming from Shreveport, Louisiana. I was hoping to find someplace around Fayetteville that had good trout waters and a place to camp, that way I could check out Big Smith playing there that nght. But I am open to suggestions. I could also drive down further south into Ark. to make it easier on them too. We will be wade fishing. Thanks in advance. Oh yeah and how much would the non-resident fishing permits cost for trout?

So for a little background, I bought a new fly rod and reel today (fathers day gift to me) and had an itch to try it out. It is a 9 ft 5 wt White River Classic from BPS. The only other fly rod I've ever used is a fiberglass 8 wt. Well I can tell you that there is a world of difference between the two. It took me a little while to get used to it. The slow casting that I do with the 8 wt didn't work on the 5 wt. I got to Taney about 8:30 PM. Started below Outlet #2 throwing an olive bead-head PMS. Had a good hook up on my 3rd and 5th casts. Fish came off though. I think I didn't set the hook hard enough with the more limber rod. Saw Leonard getting ready to take a client out and went down to rebar. The fog had really set in by then and my glasses kept fogging up. I ended up in an area with no current and no takes. By this time I just really wanted to bring a fish to hand with my new rod so I tied on a size 12 tan sowbug and went up to Outlet 2 again. A few drifts and it happened. I hooked into a nice fish. It was giving me a workout. I could even feel my arm burn a little. I couldn't horse him in like I can do on my 8 wt. I thought it was just an average trout though and that they all probably fight like that on a smaller rod. It was peeling line off and made two good line peeling runs. After 4-5 minutes I got it in the net (barely). It was a 19-20 inch rainbow at least, I really don't know how big it was since I didn't have anything to measure it with. I didn't take my camera either. It took a while to revive it and I watched the thick fish cruise away. A little while later I caught a 15-16 incher, full of jumps and thick as well. Tied on a black hibernator and missed a few more. I don't always have the fastest reflexes. Decided to head back about 11:30 PM. Nice night.

Yeah it was cool alright. It was the only one I've ever seen in my life. I was working for a forestry company in Louisiana one summer in college and we blew up a beaver dam to try to save some of the timber on the stand. After blowing it we walked out to keep the channel clear to drain it and that is when I saw the coral snake swimming towards me. At first I guessed it was a milk snake but then I saw the red next to yellow. It tried to swim up to where I was standing on what was left on the beaver dam. I used a rake to send it another direction. I had thick rubber boots on and I knew coral snakes have to really chew on you to bite you since their fangs are in the back of their mouth. I wasn't startled as I normally get when seeing a swimming snake. I felt lucky to see it. Probably never see another one.

Campers and floaters along the Gasconade River are being warned to stay off the river in northern Maries County because a dam could fail. The Missouri State Emergency Management Agency and the Maries County Sheriff's Department are monitoring the dam on Dudenhoeffer Lake, according to the National Weather Service. If the dam fails as runoff from storms continues, there could be an uncontrolled release of water into the lower Gasconade that would sweep through a forested river valley where the Turkey Hill Ranch Christian Camp is located, according to authorities. Because of the flooding threat, the camp has been evacuated and campers, floaters and hikers are being warned to go to higher ground until the dam can be repaired.

Pit vipers have fangs is a constant process of development and replacement since they do often lose them. The real reason they might not choose to inject venom is because it would be a waste of metabolic energy. I agree with Bman about leaving them be if you can. Rattlesnakes I haven't always done that with, but at least I cooked them up when I was done, but even then out of the 30-40 times I've come across rattlers, cottonmouths, copperheards, and once a coral snake after we blew up a beaver dam, only 4-5 went to snake heaven, and I have never killed a non poisionous snake on purpose since I was out of my shoot-everything-that-moves stage with my first BB gun.

After I bought my house I chopped down the two insidious sweet gum trees that were in the front yard. I have been wanting to plant a couple of trees to replace them but the trees at the stores seem to cost more than I care to spend. Plus I am interested in having native trees in my yard anyway. I am looking for some kind landowner to give me permission to dig up a small (like 1-2 inch in diameter) sassafras tree from their land. In exchange I can leave you a small depression the the rocky soil (just kidding I'll fill it in). If you are game let me know! Thanks, Phillip

That is awesome! Can you post your fly recipe for those mulberry flies?

When my father lived in Florida he had a retaining pond behind his house that looked a lot like the pictures you have up there. We tried the whole snagging/raking thingbut the effects didn't last. Grass carp would work but you would have to get the right size and right number to have any effect. Also get ones too big to get eaten by herons. We had our first set of carp eaten by ospreys, so we upsized on our next order.

It was always amazing to me how much harder on average it is to kill a fox squirrel (red) than a cat squirrel (gray). I had shot a little cat squirrel many times and it is still moving like on a soloflex commercial, and sometimes you just have to sneeze at a fox suirrel and it will fall over dead.

There are some studies done from Baylor University looking at the accumulation of pharmaceutical and personal care product chemicals in the tissue of longeared sunfish in some streams in north Texas. They did find that in "clean" streams the fish there are "clean" of these chemicals and in streams where waste water effluent is present the fish there, muscle tissue, liver, nervous tissue all contain trace amounts of these chemicals. Keep in mind with a normal prescription we take milligrams of these chemicals. The concentration they found in the fish tissue was in nanograms/wet gram of tissue. So we can conclude that eating one little bluegill is not going to have the same effect as eating one little blue pill (couldn't resist). Low low concentrations. I bet if we put the beef that we eat through a GC/MS we could find some alarming things in there as well. I would not want to eat the fish more than a couple of times each month (which is more than I eat anyway) but I'd worry more about the other stuff we eat all the time.

It is fine to eat the fish.

Well there are cynics and then there are cynics. To think that we can no longer take legal advice from a drunk guy in an innertube in good faith what is this world coming to? that is funny, I got a good visual on that. I think he is right though. And I'm pretty sure even if a landowner DID check on you, if you had some Glad trash bags and picked up your trash and maybe some of the other trash nearby, they'd probably be appreciative for that.

Put me down for the event Phil please.

congrats on your anniversary. cool pictures as well.

I am finally going to do what I should have done a long time ago, and become a teacher, a high school biology teacher to be exact. I have been trying to figure out how exactly to do that. From what I have found out, there is a way to get your teaching certificate while getting your Master's in Teaching at Missouri State. My bachelor's degree was in wildlife biology from Louisiana Tech University. In 1998 I went to Oklahoma State University to get my Master's degree in botany. Originally my master's project was going to look at seed dispersal by bison bodies and bison droppings across the plains but my major professor took my first year there on sabbatical in Sweden and didn't bother to tell me. That first year I had my first real brush with teaching since I was on a teaching assistantship. I loved it. I ended up changing master's projects twice more, once to looking at alkaloid production in relation to photocycle by periwinkles (the alkaloids are used against cancer) and then the ethnobotany of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma where I interviewed the tribal elders about their traditional plant usage and then built a traditional plant garden where elders could teach the tribal youth about these things right by the community center. While doing this project I discovered that academic politics is a castle built on sand. New dept head, new priorites and big shakeups. Believe it or not, I had managed to keep teaching for four years while all of this is going on and that is what I really enjoyed about grad school. It wasn't the course work or research it was the teaching. By this time I had accumulated more than my fair share of student loans and it was time for another change. I left grad school with 32 graduate credit hours but no Masters and worked for a year for the university as a molecular biologist on a USDA grant. Grant was up, not renewed, I moved back to Missouri and away from science. well after a while I realized that this is not what God put me here to do. In the Summer of 2010 I will start the Master of Arts in Teaching program as Missouri State and HOPEFULLY be able to find a high school biology teaching job at the same time. I plan on trying to sub as much as possible next year to try to get my name and face out there for potential jobs one day. I say all of that to ask the following, since you (speaking to teachers here) now know my situation, what other advice could you give me that would help me along this path? Thanks for the replies.

Growing up in Kimberling City, I remember eating a lot of bluegill. My dad would just fillet the big ones. I didn't know there were other ways to eat them. Then, part way through my childhood, we moved down to central Louisiana. After fishing with my friends down there, they made fun of me for wanting to filet a bluegill, although amazed I could do it. Down there fish that size only had one way to be cooked and cleaned. Spooning. We would take a regular spoon and rub all of the scales off, cut the heads off and rip the guts out. Roll in fish fry mix and fry away. The fins were left on and were a delicacy. They tasted like potato chips. Anybody up here ever clean fish in this way? In the Wal-Mart's down there they sell "scaling spoons" but I haven't seen them up here.

Two tourists fished in Lake Taneycomo for two days, without any results. The third day, they both got drunk. About the middle of the morning they happened to run into a school of giant crappie, and caught the limit within a few minutes. The boys puzzled a while about the best way to mark this fishing-hole, so that they could find it again. Finally they just cut a notch in the gunwale of the boat, and started to row back to the hotel. Suddenly one cried out, "It won't work! We'll never find that place again!" The other was indignant. "What do you mean, it won't work?" he demanded. "All we got to do is fish under that mark I cut on the gunwale." His friend began to weep. "Don't you realize," he cried, "there ain't one chance in 50 we'll be able to rent that same boat tomorrow?"

We launched at Cooper's during the huge flood last year and we managed, should not be too much of an issue now.

I have tried wet wading there. ONCE. Now maybe others have more insulation than I do on my chicken legs, but it hurt. Blood got cold, legs felt like they were shooting burning fire up through my veins, made me feel a little sick. It sure did take the fun out of the fishing. It sounded like a great idea to me until I did it. Now others have done it and it didn't seem to bother them (according to some older posts on this board) but if I wet wade in Taney again it would be a ways on down from the dam.

from the News-Leader May 20, 2009 The Missouri Department of Natural Resources will hold an open house on Wednesday, May 27, for Roaring River State Park near Cassville and Big Sugar Creek State Park near Pineville. The open house will be held at Roaring River State Park’s Emory Melton Inn and Conference Center River View Room from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Recent accomplishments at Roaring River State Park, such as the renovation of the stone walkway around the spring pool and falls area, the new carpet in the inn and the construction of a new park store, along with future plans at both parks will be highlighted at the open house. In addition to the Department of Natural Resources’ staff, representatives from the Missouri Department of Conservation, which operates the hatchery, and MO PARKS, Inc., which operates the park concessions at Roaring River State Park, will be on hand to talk with attendees. Visitors are welcome to ask questions or comment on the parks' facilities and services. Roaring River State Park is located eight miles south of Cassville on Highway 112 in Barry County

it was a silly pun. Suspended fish are ones that are not on top of the water and not on the bottom. they are suspended in the middle of the water column. Your smallmouth though was suspended by the fishing line. Like I said, bad play on words.