hoglaw

Hope you are all doing well. It's been half a decade since I've been on the forum. Life has been busy. I've got a 5 year old and a 1.5 year old now. The boys are getting older and it's getting closer to time to move from just fishing on the creek to hitting the lakes. I'm in the market for a deep V and am looking at one that has a 2020 200h Evinrude HO. To some extent it seems like motor brands are like Ford vs. Chevy, and each era and size has their plusses and minuses. I'm aware that Evinrude motors are no longer being made, but assume that parts and warranty service will remain available. This particular motor has a 7-year warranty in place. I've always had Yamahas and have never had any issues. The only reason I'm considering this boat is because it's ultimately a "good deal," but the motor on it is what it is. Obviously 2020 is pretty new so not a lot of track record out there, but does anyone have any strong (and educated) feelings one way or the other on the new Evinrudes?

Smallmouth were on beds when I floated a creek on Friday.

I've fished up the river and up war eagle 3 or 4 times this year. I've caught zero females and have not had a good white trip. They're either still prespawn or just aren't going to run. So to hear that they still have eggs is good. Maybe the walleye was a post spawn fish? They hang around upstream and in shallow water for a while I think. They're still being caught up the rivers.

Another year and my time for white bass/walleyes up the river is limited. I had a trial that finished up the week before last and was able to get out on a Wednesday in the kayak. River was extremely low then and I only managed one good walleye (that got released), a few shorts, a few small crappie and one lonely white. I was hoping to get out again tomorrow and kayak down to 45 from Waterford but the graph is coming up and getting muddier, so unless it stabilizes quickly then today's rain probably did me in. I imagine it will get right next week at some point once this cold and wet stuff blows through. I saw folks at Lowes buying tomatoes and peppers like crazy on Saturday. At least one night this week has a low of 34! I always get in a hurry to plant the garden but getting a head start doesn't help anything. I'm sure glad I didn't do it this year. I did plant a bunch of boxes on my deck though. May have to cover some stuff later this week.

I connect nanofil to floro or mono with a double uni. At first I was breaking off too much and didn't have much confidence in it, but now my break offs seem about 50/50 at the lure (almost always tied with a regular clinch knot or occasionally a palomar) or at the leader, which I think means I'm doing it right. I need to learn the alberto.

Man I'd love to but I just can't bring myself to be away fro. Home for a night these days. Our little guy is turning 1 next weekend. I've yet to spend a night away from him. My wife was out of the country on business for a couple nights a few weeks ago, and the first weekend in November she is going to see her grandparents. I'm going to go see a friend whose family bought the Thomas Reservoir down in Hazen. It's a big duck club and I'm overdue for a trip. Should be a good crappie/bass weekend. But it's my first nights away from my son since he was born. Having mixed emotions. LR, next time you're in NWA the invitation to float still stands. Put in or take out right in the back yard. It gets good here when it gets cold.

They just aren't that fun to shoot (to me anyway) but I agree with the comments above that for a wilderness gun a large caliber magnum revolver is probably about as good as it gets. I have a browning semi-auto .22 as well Jason. I can't remember the model (I think it might be the buckmark) but it's an absolute tack driver. My wife has a Walther PK380 that's like lightning, it never strikes the same spot twice. EVER. My favorite shooting larger caliber pistol is my Beretta M9. I can shoot it about as consistently as the .22 and it has a fifteen round magazine. Just a phenomenal gun. I don't think it would be convenient for carrying around every day, but then again I'm not sure why anyone would want to carry a gun around every day. Of course I never understood the whole phone on the outside of your pants or the Bluetooth earpiece thing either. To each their own.

I've done the dock shooting deal a little. It doesn't take long to get good at getting a jig a long way back under them. That part is pretty intuitive. The problem is docks with lots of cables or cover that's past other cover. Getting good at actually working the bait once it's back there is the rub.

Al has a great post somewhere on this board (probably in multiple places) about favoring the discharge over gauge height when it comes to figuring out whether a river is "floatable" or not. It should probably be bookmarked. Right now, the Berryville gauge is showing 64 cfs. While a decent rule of thumb is that anything over the 25th percentile and under the 75th percentile is probably floatable and fishable, the 25th percentile can be a lot of dragging and the 75th can be pretty swift on lots of rivers. BUT, on the Berryville gauge you'll note that the current 64cfs more than double the median flow rate of 28cfs for this time of year (there is also a "median" number but it is irrelevant as it can be skewed by large floods) and soundly between the 25th and 75th percentile goalposts. So even if I knew nothing about the Kings river, looking at the graph would show me its falling very slowly and right now it's absolutely perfect for floating and fishing. Coincidentally, the gauge is exactly 3 feet, so if you know the gauge elevations like Dan does, then you'd know his assessment is spot on. But the great thing about understanding how to read the discharge statistics is that you don't have to know the gauge elevations on any particular stream.

Lance, what is the dock bite like right now? A co-worker has a six stall enclosed dock with lots of hanging structure that's basically impossible to fish (at least effectively) from outside of it. One side of the dock is in about 30 feet of water and the other is more like 10. We were hammering post-spawn fish suspended in the trees underneath it in the late spring fishing either jigs or minnows vertically. I assume they will use spots like that all year long. Are there better/worse times of the year for that kind of deal?

Very stable and comfortable. Yes, they're heavy. Not a great boat for small stream stuff, but better than a canoe for mid-sized water. Reasonable multi-purpose boat. My family has a few (on the Little Red near Heber oddly enough) and they are perfect for that river.

I've quit smallmouth fishing during a couple of CC floats to fish trout jigs to carp. One of the first rods I ever built was for throwing 1/16 jigs to oversized fish. Nicely done ham.

I slow rolled the bridge by my house and saw a plus sized smallmouth surface to chomp something. I'm sure that's what it was. They seem to be whacking them here.

The mulberry has a good population of big fish, but it fishes very differently (in my opinion) than the normal Ozark stream. Those slower pools hold some oversized and overeducated fish. Very similar to the Big Piney (in Arkansas) in that regard. Still haven't floated the Illinois Bayou but it's on the list. I've floated from Wolfpen to Turner Bend (about sixteen miles I think) in two hours and five minutes. Did that with my wife when it was about four feet. I've done it higher but when it gets above that level the rapids just kind of get washed out. This was huge standing waves and nasty turns. We managed to stay upright except where the two channels come together below Sacriliac (sp?). We went down the drop on the left side and were so thrilled that we made it we didn't pay attention to the current coming back in from the right and it just undercut us in an instant. We were the only canoe that I saw but the kayak folks were having some kind of school out there. The kayakers were calling it quits and humping their boats up the riprap to the highway in droves. It was hilarious. It was probably the most nervous I've been in a canoe and we were definitely in over our heads but it wound up being one of our favorite trips. Not sure I'd want to do it again. I have always wanted to fish the river down below turner bend. There are some long stretches that probably require camping in the summer months. I think there are probably some good fish down there. I've run up it from the Arkansas River almost all the way to the I40 bridge. I've caught a lot of crappie at Vine Prairie where the mulberry hits the big river.

Now that's funny. Let me marinate on that for a while and get back to you.

Go to salvation army and pick up some high tops. Seriously. Or buy a 30 dollar pair of canvass lace ups. Chuck Taylor's are awesome for lifting and creek wading. If you feel like you just have to spend money, I have some simms wading boots that are pretty awesome. I see zero advantage for sandals. I walk through some rough stuff from time to time and wouldn't want exposed toes. BUT maybe I'm missing out.

65 isn't really the "upper" part of the Buffalo at all unless I have my highways mixed up. It's a very long river. Like al said below carver you are fine. There are lots of outfitters and maps available online. If you're going on a weekend that matters. Buffalo is getting more and more crowded. If I were yall with that kind of time I'd do the lower wilderness. You can make that a 3 day float easily depending on waterlevels. I've done it in 3 nights and I've done it in one. Other than the lower wilderness there are tons of accesses and no development. It's a national park so you can camp anywhere. If you've never been then you should go.

The upper part of the river has become a zoo on every decent weekend when there's sufficient floating water. There are a lot of places where you can still catch fish with that many folks on the water. My desire to float the buffalo on summer weekends is about zero...even on the less crowded stretches. Just too many folks for me. If you just have to float the buffalo on a summer weekend, the float that starts at Mt. Hersey seems to be less crowded. The put-in is a long gravel ride (or at least it was last time I did it) and the outfitters don't like to use it as much I assume.

Gender identity and sexual orientation have nothing to do with one another. That's a hard one to swallow, but that's the way it is. There are plenty of transgendered folks who are attracted to members of their opposite genetic sex. I don't know enough about it to say whether it's the minority or the majority, but I do know that it's not uncommon at all. Transgendered folks don't want gender reassignment so they can "stop being homosexual." The gender that a person naturally identifies with and the sex to whom that person is attracted have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

And for every ten people taking pain medication, maybe one or two of them actually need it. Lots of stuff is over prescribed or overused. That doesn't make the underlying condition that those things are meant to treat any less valid. I have a 63 y/o family member suffering from severe depression right now for "no reason" and it has all but ruined his extremely successful life. It's one of the hardest things I've ever had to watch and I feel powerless to help. And here you are recognizing people with "genuine mental disabilities" yet at the same time condemning folks with a different sexual orientation or gender identification - something that is equally genuine and something that they didn't choose. The folks who use analogies of peeping or recording in bathrooms, or indicate that this whole bathroom stuff is going to lead to sexual abuse are just fear mongering and dodging the issue. If you (not you here Wrench...more categorical) don't want to walk a mile in someone else's shoes or don't want to try and learn what it might be like for that person to get by from day to day then so be it. Pedophilia and sexual orientation have absolutely nothing to do with one another. A homosexual is no more likely to be a sexual predator than a heterosexual. The most likely sexual abuser is a family member. I genuinely wish that folks would be honest about this stuff and stop parsing together BS excuses for where they stand. If folks with unconventional gender identities or sexual orientations that are different from your own creep you out and you don't want to be around them, then just own your prejudice and say so.

Swinging bridge, jfk park and Cow shoals come to mind

My wife fishes with me. I'd honestly rather take her than go with just about anyone else. She is also very honest and adamant about her limits. If it's bad cold or raining she says have a great time. I have a lot of great memories fishing with her. My favorite might be last year when she wanted to do the three mile float to the house when she was seven months pregnant. I wouldn't let her drag her kayak over the log jams and shoals, but otherwise she fished as hard as she always does.

I had the exact same problem jtram. I've been working on a family fry for this weekend. Walleye were good to me this spring but not the crappie, at least until yesterday. I've been trying to get a bunch of goggle eye from my creek and keep catching smallmouth. I caught one of, if not my biggest from the creek so far last Friday. A very chunky 18 and change. No wonder I couldn't get any meat fish from that spot.

I cleaned a gob of goggle eye the other day. Every one of them had craw pincers in their bellies. Big ones too. The zinker z cut in half is as good as I've found for the ned stuff. I have very confidence in the TRD and is basically the same thing! Maybe it's just the color.

It's just not possible to cast to these fish from the shore. This is awesome. It's really awesome that they get schooling tuna within a drone strike from the beach. Guarantee it will catch on, at least in some circles. And I'm sure these guys aren't the first to do it.