troutgnat

Gentlemen, For those of you who tie your own. Here are some of my own ties and personal color favorites.

Gentlemen, My vacation is on the books! I will be staying at Bull Run Bluff campground on the Niangua Arm Mar.31 thru Apr. 5th. Plan on camping and crappie fishing every way imaginable. I'll be fishing Niangua Arm mostly but am not opposed to moving to where the crappie are hot. Anyway, sure would be nice to run into some OAF locals while I'm up there. I'll be in a 89' 374 silver/burgandy Ranger with a 150 on the back. If anyone is going to be up there during that time shoot me a PM. I would like to meet some fellow OAF members and company on the water is welcome. Thanks.

Gentlemen, If anybody could squeak out a little info on the crappie I would greatly appreciate it! I'm trying to plan for some fun vacation time. Just wondering what your seeing in the little Niangua Arm? From past experience I know anytime now they should begin to move under the deeper docks off the creek channel especially, in this area of the lake. This is such a blast when they are there. It is the funnest time for jig shooting docks. Really timing is nothing more than a crap shoot against the weather. I've hit it dead on in years past and some years not so good. Two years ago I shot for the 3rd week of March and got skunked with alot of rain and water running chocalate milk in many places. LOZ fisherman your advice on the current conditions please. Thanks in advance!...............Darren.

Gentlemen, I am a penny pincher now a days like many of us in this economy. Often times when I have two days off in a row I will head to the lake prepared to spend the night. I fish hard all day and want to fish the best hours so why burn the extra gas going back/forth to the house with no sleep. Yes I take all the gear and clothes with me and my one burner pack stove and food. I spend the night in the truck in a secluded area, get up and fish again the next morning. I have this down to an art except for ONE thing! I'm trying to find a way to charge my trolling batt's. CAN I DO THIS FROM MY VEHICLE SOURCE? I know they make these A/C adapters for cigarette lighters and I have one. I tried it last time but it didn't last long. I ran an extension cord from my on-board charger to the cigarette lighter and plugged her in. After about 5 minutes of charging it kicked the fuse relay. Can anyone help me out????

Paco, They have been there for weeks now. You may be on the tail end. My last trip was two weeks ago and did very well. Before that I had been catching good females, all 4-5 lbrs. All with eggs though they were not bloody yet. This last particular trip we caught more males full of milt with only 1 female. I'm sure the spawn has or is in process as we speak. Every trip was on average 2 fish but they were good quality. Two pointers: Go early, I mean early, the best bite will be before the sun is up. I'm not talking daylight I am talking twilight! We were fishing by 5am. Also the evening bite was good but again it was right at the last twinkling of blue light in the sky and is over quick! Fish were caught on stickbaits and 3" grubs of different varities. Find slack water next to the current with structure on it. 1/8oz head for slower water and a 1/4oz if their running alot. Good luck!

I know this is late but have been down on the computer for a while. I wanted to say thank you as well to both Bill and Phil, a very great seminar indeed.

The above is true. The "wiggle wart" under the bill is a dead give-away. I was a storm/rapala rep for several years and would like to add the following knowledge: The original wart was a 2 piece "molded" bait, meaning that essentially the bait was in two halves and simply molded or glued if you will right down the middle. This is a dead give-away on the original warts; you can see the seam right down the middle of the bait from the lip to the rear! This was Rapala's so-called reason for "re-improving" the wart. They were prone to some leaks and sometimes being off-centered causing them to run to the side or "kick" on the retrieve. Rapala, owning Storm thought if they went to a one piece body "seamless" molding and a seperate machined glued in lip they would fix the above problems. The problem is they did in fact fix the problem but it is no where close to the original wart and the new warts don't catch fish like the old ones! The new glued in lip by the way is another dead give-away of a new wart compared to the original.

I'll be there with a buddy.

This is good news. Sounds like were getting close! You all can go and fish for winter crappie now.............LOL!

My friend you have opened a can of worms now..........LOL. There are quite a few posts on here about this already, use your search button. There are some recent posts in the Table Rock forum.

I fish a Loomis GL3 9' 6wt for Taney at night which I absolutely love for casting streamers. My primary rod for day use is believe it or not an old Penn Gold Medal 9' 4wt. It's a little softer rod but enough backbone in the butt to cast the distance when I need. I fish 7x on it all the time with no break offs if I do my part correctly. My go to's for Taney during the day are usually an #18-20 scud trailed with #22 wine colored brassie. An assortment of midges and soft-hackles. Some egg patterns when needed. Oh, and sowbugs. If I'm not nymphing the above I'm swinging soft-hackles and midges to surface fish. I can do it all on my 9' 4wt.

Al, I work in mgt at Walgreens and spend plenty of time in the photolab there. Walgreens has the slide scanner equipment and can do this for you! They will scan them into the Fuji machine and them download them all on a CD for you. You can do whatever you want to them after their on a CD. It is very inexpensive. I would look into this if I were you, it will save you alot of time and money.

Has anybody been fishing for the walleye??? Somebody please give us a report. There swimming out there somewhere!!!.........LOL

Bill, Well done! I wish I had better news to add to this but I got skunked today spite 1 short kentucky on a drop shot. I was in the Indian Point area again banking on finding the drop shot fish again but it didn't happen. The gulls were still there and so were the shad balls but didn't see much of the fish. Spooned and got nothing, drop shotted and got one short all day. I never really had the good wind where I was at until later in the afternoon but was to determined on the drop-shot to give the jerkbait ago. The good news is I learned a lot about my depth finder today though I still could not master the streakn' affect in deep water.

Bill, Thanks for the advice I will heed and give this a shot tomorrow. I'm a loner tomorrow so will not have buddies boat to interfere..............D

Yes, Brook Silverside. I've had smallies in Table Rock spit them up before.

Gentlemen, I put my depth finder to the test on Sat. It was a learning session for both of us, I should say it put me to the test! Anyway, I was drop shotting and really trying to get the "streaking effect". I was able to witness my buddy do this in his rig. He was running I believe a Lowrance X52 off his trolling motor. Sensitivity and almost everything maxed out, a lot of clutter on the screen but you could clearly see his line and weight fall to the bottom and you see fish follow his bait as he moved it up to desired depth. We tried adjusting sensivity very high, I set my upper and lower depth limits, took everything off auto settings (depth and sensitivity), etc. but was never able to see my line and weight though I could still mark fish. Can anyone give me any insight on what to do or do any of you have experience with this model of depth finder.? Is the Lowrance 125 capable of streaking??? This is what I know about my depthfinder: (mounted on bottom of trolling motor properly) Lowrance 125 5" screen 480x480 200kHz single-frequency w/ 20 degree cone angle and built in temp. 2400 peak watts 800' depth capability Thanks to anyone for help and advice!

Joe, Thanks for posting this! It is so COOL! I've been reading up on this technology and have seen pics in the catalogs but this really makes sense of what these new depth finders can do! I assume on your split screen pics these are all the same bit of water just one pic in HD and the other in the color "normal" mode, correct??? Please tell me more!, I would love to be in a boat and actually see this in action. Joe, it is clear to me you know your depthfinders. Could you please read my post on Lowrance 125 depthfinder and see if you can give me any advice. I would greatly appreciate it. I will post something shortly.............D

Joe, I forgot to mention in my post the water temp yesterday was at the high we had 46.1. We found fish late in the afternoon at about 38-40 on 4" dropshot worms. We were around Indian.

Gentlemen, Met the buddies Sat. @ 8am and launched 2 boats out of Indian Point marina. Based on some information from fellow anglers on here (A big thank you to those who supplied me some info!) and a recent report from a buddies buddy we decided to launch out of Indian. Part of that decision was due to accounting for an easterly wind that day. Anyway we tried to fish all your typical jerkbait water. Windy banks, south warming banks, bluff ends & channel swings, points adjacent to deep water, etc........Never got a jerkbait fish! I guess we never got the right combination of the above. We just couldn't find where the jerkbait bite was. We were throwing McSticks and some Rogues by the way. Well, luck did come our way! We headed back up towards Indian. We found a flock of gulls in a large pocket not far from the Marina. We moved in and starting spooning over some deep water. Got bit a couple of times on a spoon but no takers. We decided to move off the main school of bait and tune in on some smaller pockets of shad. Located some smaller bait schools in 40' and zoned in on them with some drop-shot rigs. We started picking up some short kentuckies. My buddy fine tuned his depthfinder and went to work streaking and started picking up fish. I tried adjusting mine but never could get it dialed in to see my line and weight on the screen. I'll get into this on another post shortly. Anyway, I did the only thing I knew to do and that was look for bait and find fish. I consistently started graphing bait and fish at about 30' in 38-40' of water in one particular stretch. I'd mark em' then drop my rig all the way to the bottom and reel up about 2-3 cranks. Every now and then dip the rod a bit to bounce the bait and BAM, fish on! From about 1:30-4:30 had a limit of keepers. 4 big fat Kentuckies and a good 3lb smallie. Ended up being not a bad day! The other guys had two keeper smallies and 2 keeper Kentuckies I believe.

One more here. I will be launching out of Indian Point myself and working between there and Kimberling depending on where I find some fish. I too plan on looking for jerkbait fish unless the fish tell me otherwise. I'm in a 06' white Toyota Tundra and a silver/burgandy 89' Ranger 374V........Feel free to say Hi...............Darren.

Brian, Not necessarily. I have quite a few older ones myself that have no writing under the bill at all...........D