Seth

Make sure you have the brightness turned up on your device. This what the bathroom hole at Maramec looks like about 15 minutes before the buzzer on opening day. Doesn’t that look fun?! Even I avoid that spot like the plague that first day for at least the first few hours. 🤣

The people I know that really like paddlefish almost always grill or smoke them versus frying. There was one time when I helped out at a church fish fry. We fried up suckers, crappie, catfish and paddlefish. I was afraid all the good stuff would be gone before we had a chance to eat and we would have to eat paddlefish. To our surprise, the paddlefish was gone and they were wanting more! They were all touched in the head as far as I am concerned because paddlefish was the last thing us fryers wanted to eat. 😂

I’ve got two opener memories that always stand out. The first was this guy who was in a motorized wheelchair. He slowly worked his way down to the stream side just before the buzzer. People were courteous towards him and gave him space so he could fish. After fishing a while, the Lord above granted him enough strength to get out of the chair and walk back to his vehicle for a cold beer and sandwich as well as enough strength to make it back to his wheel chair and continue fishing. The other memory was when the water was up a few inches above the concrete. A guy hooked a lunker that he fought up on to the concrete and started seimming around like a salmon trying to reach spawning grounds. The angler and his buddy chased it under a bench and one of them flopped down in the water in front of the bench to trap the fish. They were so excited to get that fish even though they were soaked. 😂 We all know it is a hot mess, but I still enjoy participating in the madness. Even now that i fish all winter, I still look forward to March 1st as it signals a lot of good things are right around the corner such as snagging season, white bass run, turkey season, etc.

I eat quite a few trout but rarely mess with paddlefish. The best way I have had them was to cut them into 1” strips, dip in some melted butter seasoned with cajun and then grilled over hot charcoal for three minutes on each side. I’ve hadthem smoked before as well and it reminded me of smoked salmon.

I should have specified that it would seem like a big waste if they were stocked in areas with an abundance of large predatory fish that could eat them such as flathead or gator gar. As long as they aren't getting ate by predators as soon as they get stocked, then stock away! It would be neat to catch one.

I made a couple videos of our trips on LoZ last year. One was during the infamous Ozark Snagmasters tournament. We were down between the 54-60mm in these videos, which is where I nearly always employ the divers. It lets us cover water much more efficiently and it's a lot easier on the body.

I've always wanted to try it just to see some new water, but it's hard to drive twice as far when I already catch plenty of them on LoZ. If I head to the James, I can always hit Taneycomo while I'm down there too since it's just around the corner. We still still make our annual opener trip to the James, but after we get our fill of that I always try to convince the rest of the crew to head over to Taneycomo for a day.

If I am available, I wouldn't mind taking others out at all. Chances are I will probably be fishing somewhere already. However, I will share as much information about where to snag as I can with anybody who wants to go try and catch some. I get more enjoyment out of putting others on these dinosaurs than myself. I'd rather go catch a crappie or white bass personally.

I took your post as they were possibly stocking the those mirrors somewhere in Texas. If they run that much, that sure sounds like a giant waste of $$$ to me!

If you ever decide to try it again, let me know. I'm pretty good at getting on them on Tablerock and Lake of the Ozarks. Never been on Truman though so I have no clue about up there.

Looks like a buffet for a big flathead.

Same here. I love trout and smallies, but if I had to pick just one then it would probably be hybrids. They fight like crazy and also make great table fare.

If money was no object though, I'd definitely have a pair of 36v Lithium pros since I don't have room for a fourth battery in my bilge. That would be the dream! From a $$$ standpoint though, I paid $200 for a set of Everstart 29DC batteries and got almost five years out of them before I proactively replaced them. They were still working well. Lets figure I get four years out of a set of lead Everstarts, I'd have to get about 60 years of battery life out of them to break even. That goes down when you start comparing AGM's though as though are 2-3x the price of a lead battery. There's just not enough benefit there for me to justify going the lithium route. Hopefully the price comes down in the future and puts them in reach of the average angler.

That's how I feel fishing the RAW tournament. Everybody I saw fishing around me had 2-3 pounders except for me.

I ran a 24v on a 1648 with a 50/35hp and don't recall having any issues running shallow. If you fish current, a 24v trolling motor is the best thing you can buy for your boat unless you strictly anchor fish. If I had the room for another battery, I'd run a 36v in a heart beat!

That area has been a hot zone for nice fish lately!

It was an awesome day out on the water and the fish cooperated as well. I was happy with 7.55 considering our best fish wasn't much over a pound, but it sure would have been nice to find one of those 2+ pounders that were being caught all around us. We'll get that kicker one of these days! We fished between Fall Creek on down to the bend just below the old Riverlake docks all day. I threw sculpin/ginger and black jigs the entire time and dad drifted with minnows in the back of the boat. Dad fished night crawlers for a while as well, but the fish showed zero interest. Our total fish caught was in the 40-50 range, with probably a half dozen of those being 13-15" browns. The bite was fairly steady all day, but our better fish came later in the day. Now for a fish story. Dad had never tried minnows and wanted to give them a try Friday so we stopped in at Lilley's and picked up a few dozen before we started fishing. We ran up to Fall Creek and started drifting down stream. He was getting bit often enough that he couldn't fish with two rods. We were probably 100-150 yards above Short Creek near the middle of the lake and he hooked in to something huge. Whatever it was ran around like crazy for a few moments and then became slow and heavy as it headed for the docks and just slowly swam up stream. After several minutes of chasing it down on the trolling motor and keeping the rod down low to prevent the fish from getting caught on the docks, it found a big tree in between some docks. One tree made a perfect arch between the top and the root wad and that fish swam right through it and then turned and kept heading upstream. There was no way for us to get it untangled and eventually we just had to break the line. I've caught rainbows up to 10# and watched dad and several others catch browns up to almost 6# and we've never had anything do that to us down there on Taneycomo. Dad even landed a 20# carp that he hooked on a night crawler off of Lazy Valleys dock many years ago that didn't feel like whatever this was. I can't imagine it was anything besides a big brown considering the area and the fact that it ate a pretty good sized minnow, but we'll never know for sure since we never got a glimpse of it. Whatever it was definitely had a game plan as soon as it was hooked and knew right where all that wood was. At one point, we were almost right on top of it, but I couldn't see down in to the water well enough to make anything out due to the cloud cover. I thought I had the fight all on GoPro as well, but I forgot that I had turned my looping mode down to 5 minutes instead of leaving it on 20 minutes so all I had footage of was us trying to get the line free from the tree.

Zatarains Crispy Southern or Andy's golden fish batter are my two favorites for deep frying. Frying in lard makes them even tastier.

It never hurts to have a back up plan, right?

Trout are one of the few fish I prefer either baked or made in to fish patties instead of fried. If I don't want to mess with the fish patties, I'll rub the fillets down with olive oil, season with lemon pepper or old bay and sprinkle on some parsley before I wrap in foil and bake in then oven. Sometimes I'll lay a piece of bacon on top of the fillet before I bake and then open up the foil and finish it off by broiling till the bacon is crisp.

I prefer the trout that have been in the sytem a while and have the orange hue to the flesh. They taste more like a "fish" than the fresh stockers with white flesh. Most of my friends and family prefer those bland white fleshed trout over those with the orange flesh.

I've started cooking and mincing my trout in a skillet and then making fish patties with seasoned bread crumbs, egg, etc. You can make anything edible with enough spices.

My picks would be in this order. 1) green head olive 2) orange head brown/orange 3) white 4) ginger (unless you're targetting browns as they seem to really like ginger)

Only if the smaller fish are already pretty much dead from having a stringer clip ran through their gills. Fresh fish always taste better anyways.

I need to start working on rounding up some victims for this years Maramec opener.