Seth

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.

I still go down to Maramec for the opener. Not sure why I do that to myself other than tradition. Watching all the madness is more entertaining than the actual fishing. Besides, there ain’t a better tasting stale donut than the ones they serve at the pavillion for opening day! 😂 Here’s a video from last years opener.

I've enjoyed watching the BPT streams. Today was a lot better than the first day as far as the bugs went. You get to see a lot of fish caught as well as some donkeys. I'm not the one winning the 100k regardless so I don't really care who actually wins. It's all just free entertainment for me.

Ish and Tharp were on some better quality fish. Tharp got 7th and only had 8 fish where as everybody around him had almost twice as many. You get see a lot of fish caught along with some nice fish. I enjoyed watching it myself. Looks like Hack Attack is in 2nd right now and has the heaviest average weight out of anybody in the top 10.

With all of the 20+ feet deep water and piles of wood, I don't know how there can't be some giants living there lives down there. That's A LOT of water to hide in! Member @Trav has several old posts in the Lower Taneycomo section of the forum about how he would target nice browns down lake in that stuff back before the floods struck.

There is definitely no shortage of stocker rainbows in Taneycomo. Throw in more triploids!

They do. There have been several triploids around 20# already caught, but Frank is well estimated to be well over 30#.

Wow! I was assuming Frank was a diploid since he was so big. That is a crazy growth rate!

@Phil Lilley @duckydoty I'm assuming Frank is too large to be a triploid, but I've heard you guys mention that he has been hanging around for over a year now. Does he ever vanish in the fall for the spawning run or just he just camp out around your area?

Great report! Dad and I are headed down this weekend for RAW. Hopefully I'll have a decent fishing report to share next week.

That's the only place I see the big schools of them anymore. The Short Creek area used to be full of them, but I haven't noticed many while drifting along the past few years. Dad and I did catch a couple during the Boswell tournament last year while fishing night crawlers just above Short Creek so there are still a few around. @Phil Lilley do you know if gigging is allowed in the trophy area or is it off limits? I haven't been able to find anything that specifically says you can't gig up there.

I have a bigger net now as well so we don't have any excuses for any botched net jobs this time.