Seth

Keeper is just a bass of legal length that you could keep. "I probably caught 50 fish today, but only 10 of them were keepers. None of them were big though." "Fishing was slow, but everything we caught was a keeper. One was a toad."

@Al Agnew I'd take anything ol snoop says with a grain of salt. Nobody alive besides himself can live up to those 100 keep days that he pulls off every time he goes out. He can toot his own horn with zero proof and call everybody else out with the best of em!

I wonder if the season passes still work in that case or if that's only for the catch and keep season?

Bill Clark of Van Buren, 78, is a life-long hunter of deer, turkey, and small game. He has also pursued elk in Colorado and Wyoming in the 1990s. He and his family own 80 acres east of Peck Ranch Conservation Area where they conduct timber-stand improvements on the heavily forested property and also plant clover and native grasses for elk and other wildlife. Clark says he applied for the elk hunt because he supports MDC’s elk restoration and management efforts, wildlife management in general, and wants to help the herd by thinning a bull. He adds that he frequently sees elk on his property and has noticed an increase in local tourism since elk first arrived in the area in 2011, including an uptick in elk driving tours at Peck Ranch. The feller that drew the land owner tags says he sees elk on his property, but it is only 80 acres so who knows if that's during a different time of the year or what.

A guy I'm friends with on FB went last weekend and caught several trout and smallmouth. Didn't see anything very big though. I'm assuming it's still open 7 days a week like it has been in the past.

4 for 5 now! Only the land owner tag has yet to be filled.

Two more bulls (quite a bit larger) were harvested yesterday. This one was taken on the public land that surrounds the refuge portion of Peck Ranch. This one was killed on private land in Shannon County so I'm sure it was fairly close to Peck Ranch as well.

At the highest levels I think you can only get info from other people fishing the tournament. Outside info from non tourney anglers is supposed to be prohibited.

Of course. The best guy in our bass club has fed us info on days he couldn’t fish and we still didn’t win crap. 🤣

If so nearly all of us would be guilty of breaking that rule. Buddies share info with each other all the time since several of us fish with different partners depending on which club we're fishing.

Yea I'm not sure which one that would be. Hwy 30/Frogs Landing is the furthest down one can trailer in the UMBC tournament. It's held in early June.

The red line is the normal way I run this spot. I took the yellow route like a doofus. Even if I had just stayed left (pink line) I think I could have made it through without any issues. It was literally the worst path I could have taken. Definitely one of the dumbest calls I've made while driving a jet boat.

There are some tournaments held down river, but this is the only one I know of that allows you to trailer back to a weigh in. Most just start from one access and then guys run from there. Yes you are moving fish around, but not nearly like what is done during the UMBC Invitational.

Nope. It looked fine to me. I knew it got shallow there, but I thought the water was still high enough to get over it. The "right" way to run that spot is to head down river for a 100 yards, swing left and run up the right side and then cut over to the middle and go through a gap in a rock dike. It was just a bad decision when I knew better.

The issue you bring up about spots is related to the Upper Meramec Invitational. People can put in way down river at Hwy 30 or Sand Ford where spots are more abundant and then they are hauled up to the Rafting Co for weigh in. In the past I believe spots were set aside and not released back in to the rivers, but I'm not sure that's still being done. There usually aren't many spots brought in from what I've seen though as the smallies and largies tend to be bigger on the Meramec. Spots can swim freely on the Gasconade and Osage are already full of spots everywhere you go so you're not hurting anything on those bodies of water. The biggest downfall of river tournaments otherwise is that a lot of fish get dumped in at one location. I'm sure a lot of them get caught by anglers looking for a meal from the bank on bait a few days after the tournament is done. Weights have been up in recent years so either we're all getting better at catching bass or the rivers aren't be destroyed by the evil tournament angler. There have been 16-18# bags of smallmouth weighed in over the past two weekends on the Gasconade.

What not to do when driving a jet boat.....😆

Why? I can haul fish around all day long in my live well and they are as frisky as when they went in. What would be the point of killing those fish? We've caught the same fish multiple times throughout a year in some of our river tournaments. Those fish obviously had no problem being caught, put in a live well for a while and released again. If a fish is weak or dead when weighed in at the end of the day, somebody will claim it and eat it so it doesn't go to waste.

Sometimes it just sneaks up on a guy. I stuffed my boat worse than ever this past fall in an area I've ran several times on the Osage. The water was falling out and I thought I had enough water left to take a straight shot through a spot that I usually have to swing wide on before cutting back towards the middle. I quickly realized my assumption was wrong. A boat had just went by 5 minutes prior and then we had to wait darn near 2 hours before another boat came by and helped get us unstuck.

If you haven’t ran out of water with a jet boat at some point then you just ain’t using it right!

Congratulations on an awesome fish! I told my buddies that next morning that I had them around a 30 incher but they weren't good enough to catch it. 😆 It's interesting that you guys had better luck on the slow retrieve because I was getting spanked by my buddy using a 2" countdown rapala with a fairly quick and snappy retrieve. My catch rate improved once I went to the faster retrieve. Apparently that boat ramp area is where the browns are. The only brown of our trip came on a jig off the rocks right below the ramp. The only place we could get bit that night was that south bank between the cable and the island though.

Me and two buddies ran down to Lilleys for a last minute trip. We didn’t do the best on numbers. Averaged about 10 fish an hour overall, but the quality was there. There were around a dozen fish between 18-19.75” boated in about 9-10 hours of fishing. One brown was boated. The fish are very colorful and full of fight right now! Most time was spent in the trophy area throwing jigs. Dark colors were. best. The Narrows and head end of Lookout were the two best areas for us.

I thought Phil had some in an aquarium in the past, but I may just be thinking of underwater footage he took of them.

I don't know how I haven't had it yet considering my fiance that I'm constantly around works around Covid patients all the time. She had a minor sinus infection for a few days after being exposed to a Covid positive coworkers, but her tests came back negative. It's hard for me to believe that she was actually negative after being exposed and developing symptoms 5 days later considering she is never sick with anything. I worry more about me bringing it to somebody else more so than myself getting it and suffering from it. That's part of why I skipped Jigfest this year as well as other get together type shin digs in the past month. It's such a weird virus. A big part of my family was exposed to my brother in law during deer season and not a single one of them became symptomatic within that two week window. In other similar instances everybody gets ends up getting it and developing symptoms.

Politics suck. The end. It amazes me how many people will ruin relationships arguing over which group of rich old farts are better for America. Seen it time and time again over the past few months from extremists on both sides. I hate politics and still find myself getting sucked in to arguing over it. Usually I'm just calling people out for being hypocrites though.

That's awesome of you Phil! I'm not going to make Jigfest, but I will be at your place this coming weekend with a buddy. We're going to fry up some pheasant Saturday evening. You'll have to swing by and grab a piece or two.