ozark trout fisher

Yes, that's been the problem, and, wins and losses aside, it's why Kim Anderson had to go. Sadly those two games you mentioned were far and away our two biggest crowds of the year. It's BAD. All of that said, last night took all that misery away for a few hours. If I may say so myself, us Missouri fans who have hung tight throughout this run of futility deserved to win a postseason game involving multiple buzzer beaters probably more than any major program in existence. It sure as heck isn't the NCAA tournament, but we got a feel of "March Madness" for one night, and it felt good. It's been a truly hellish three seasons. I love Kim Anderson as a person and a True Son, but we need to burn the memory of these past few years and never speak of it again. Heck, I think he would agree with that. Mizzou doesn't have talent, outside of Jordan Barnett and Kevin Puryear, but otherwise the program is fairly stable in terms of good character kids and a number of guys who will be with the program for years to come. Mizzou can absolutely get back to relevance with a good hire within about two years. It should not be a major problem for a good coach to double the win total next year, and be in the NIT conversation by Year 2. The program foundation that Frank Haith dynamited to the core has been at least partially rebuilt. Now we need someone who can bring in some high-major players. We have to nail this hire though. I am going to be honest: if it is not a high quality coach from a Power Conference program (or, in dream-world, Gregg Marshall) I am going to be very disappointed. This is not the time to get cute. We need to pay $4-5 million if necessary and get to work. I say that because I know we can afford it. Of the teams with open jobs this year, the only one that would have a chance to outbid us would be Indiana, but our top target is their coach, so that hardly matters. Illinois is more attractive, but I've been given the impression by those in the know that Missouri might willing and able to make up for that by paying more. Same story with schools like NC State.

What an effort last night. KA is not done yet. Back to the search...Tom Crean's primary problem is that he is not...Bobby Knight, and IU fans are insane. He built Indiana up from a far, far worse place than even Missouri is in right now. He has won two Big Ten Titles and made a couple Sweet 16s. Let's be real, Indiana is no longer an elite basketball program and hasn't been for a long time. They are much more like Ohio State or Illinois than Duke or Kentucky. That's not an insult, by any means, but Knight's big run was awhile ago. He has done well there, a mediocre season this year aside. If he replicates his IU performance at Mizzou he would be welcome for as long as he wants to stay. And he probably would, in a bad SEC. Go get him.

It is now official now that he will be gone. Such a shame. A good guy, stabilized the program in every way except on the court. After the circus of the Frank Haith era and the end of Mike Anderson's tenure, I would have been down to cool my heels for about five very quiet, trouble-free years of 17-win seasons under Anderson. But unfortunately he wasn't able to come even close to that lowered bar. The move had to be made but I don't think anyone feels good about the way this worked out. The word from people connected to the athletic department is that Mizzou is willing to open up the check-book and offer big-boy money to lure a recognizable coach from another power-conference school. Alden has stuck to bargain-basement hires lately and that produced Haith and Anderson. The new AD (Jim Sterk) will want to avoid stepping on that landmine. So think along the lines of Tom Crean or Frank Martin more so than some guy from the Patriot League. It's safe to assume they'll try to offer a huge check to Gregg Marshall to see if he feels moved, but I doubt that works. He can hold out for Duke or Michigan State when those positions open. If a small-school coach ends up getting hired that's a pretty solid indication none of their top candidates were willing to budge. But I agree with being ambitious. With the program laid this low, they desperately need to alter perception, and fast. It's worth remembering that 3 years ago this was regarding as a good/very good basketball program. Offer enough money and the odds are high Mizzou can get someone who's a lot more proven than you think.

I remember getting into an argument with FishinCricket that took on a fairly regrettable tone. Don't even remember what it was about, but I think he stopped posting much pretty soon after. That was not a good moment or one I'm proud of. Hope that's not why he left the forum. He seemed like a pretty nice guy.

That was a weird month or three around here. Sometimes people think they are being cute when they really, really are not. Also sometimes people are actually just insane. On a forum it's about impossible to tell the difference.

Oh, me neither. Just poking fun. We good. Anyway I will be in the woods put of cell reception for three days starting in about two hours. So we were headed for a pretty one-sided argument anyway.

Okie dokie, bud.

KU sucks.

Unfit to hike? What in the hell does that even mean? I'm calling BS on the "public safety" reasoning. This is political posturing. Maybe I'm wrong. I doubt it. And if I'm right, this is a VERY bad sign for what Missourians are in for the next 4-8 years.

I think the funny thing is that if you got a sum total of every SMB harvested by every poster in this thread over the last 12 months, you'd get a number pretty near 0. And yet we have a 6 page thread arguing about Smallmouth Bass harvest for the millionth time. I contributed at least a page of nonsense to that, I know. It's just funny. All you need to know about fishermen, I think.

If you are talking about living in a floodplain, yeah totally agree. But I'm not sure you can ask people not to live in an area where they could be impacted by the failure of a man-made structure that may not have even existed when their home was built.

I would tend to agree. Aging and outdated dams are only going to become more of an issue. We're not tackling it with nearly enough urgency. But we tend to wait until these things punch us in the darn face rather than trying to be proactive. Even if nothing truly disastrous happens the cost of evacuating 200,000 people is going to be a debacle. Why can't we ever see that we save money by addressing these issues before they reach DEFCON 1 status?

Apparently the Sierra Club as well as a couple of local environmental organizations have seen this coming for upwards of a decade...even predicted that a heavy storm during the non-growing season would cause a damaging amount of erosion to the emergency spillway. Sounds like they should have been listened to.

Also, sampling crews almost always need help. If you question theit effort/ability...it doesn't hurt to see them action before making sweeping judgements.

In fairness, koolaid is pretty good.

You will not be disappointed with SW Colorado. That area is not really in my wheelhouse but I've been a couple times...it's awesome. Even though it's non-fishing related Mesa Verde is very worth your while. Beautiful, absolutely bizarre landscape even before you consider the ruins. If run-off season is on at the freestones (and it might be) take a look at the Uncompahgre in Ridgeway SP. Spent a few very enjoyable days there, and its a tailwater. Not a ton of solitude but a pretty stream and BIG trout.

A good question and hard to answer. But mostly some combination of the trees, the wildlife that need the trees, and the people who make money cutting down the trees. It may or may not be in that order. I'm just happy to be getting paid to spend vast quantities of time in the woods. A pretty danged good gig, though it won't threaten to make me rich anytime soon. Thankfully, as the rare person in this world who is NOT a government employee I can still mostly speak my mind.

Ok.

I'm pretty sure we're not on the same page. It doesn't bother me when people criticize the MDC. It does bother me when people claim that a study is poorly done because it doesn't support their position (or because it doesn't line up with what they've noticed on the river over the years). I don't think that anyone would be intelligent if they didn't consider angler input, especially from those who have spent years on the river and have observed changes over that time. It's legitimately important and sometimes can give you knowledge with a wider breadth or time-scale than you could possibly get with any kind of formal research. But here's the problem:results from fishermen, wherein you are targeting a specific species, possibly a specific size class of that species, generally fishing in specific stretches and water types (they certainly are not "random") while useful, are not "scientific" in any meaningful sense. Are fish sampling techniques on our rivers perfectly random or accurate. No, of course not, but at least they try to control as many variables as possible. And this is under the extremely unrealistic assumption that you are recording the size and species of every fish you catch while you're out on the water. If you do that while you're in the front of my canoe I'm liable to get pretty annoyed with you. The point isn't that angler input/knowledge isn't important. Quite the opposite. It's just that there is no guarantee that it will relate in a meaningful sense to what is actually going on beneath the water. A perfect (if unrelated example) would be in the case of streams that contain both rainbow and brown trout. On a certain sections of the Current or Meramec River (and this certainly holds true in MANY western streams) browns outnumber rainbows by a pretty wide to extremely wide margin. Yet anglers in streams like this routinely report that a considerable majority of their catch is rainbows. To them it is a rainbow trout stream, and in terms of catching, they're not wrong. In terms of the species composition, they're WAY off. My point is that if you insinuate that a study is poorly conducted because it doesn't match your experience on the river...well, there are a lot of other possibilities you should probably consider first. Maybe that's how I should have said it from the beginning, but when you attempt to delegitimize the work that went into a study like that with one unsupported sentence on a forum...well, that's your right, but it doesn't sit well. And retribution? Come on, man. Reasoned disagreement=/=retribution.

Thank you. Gavin, or anyone else, If you have evidence that the MDC is doing a shoddy job in their sampling work, fine. Present it, I'm interested. If not, saying "I think their studies were off" is meaningless, a disservice to the people who spent a heck of a lot of long, hard hours putting in the work, and generally just kind of a bizarre thing to say. Is there error in every study that ever existed? Sure. So technically you can make this kind of one-liner and never be wrong. But unless you are volunteering to go out their and sweat yourself, forgive me for saying I'd rather not hear it. I've never personally participated in fisheries research but those who do it day in and day out are generally trying their hardest to be accurate and believe me they are earning their generally pretty meager paychecks.

It's worth considering that things might just be a little bit different now than what we're used to dealing with. Now is the time to throw out pretty much all of your old assumptions regarding "policy related things that won't ever happen". I think that's pretty clear.

The most broad, but also the most honest answer, is that I research forested ecosystems. I do a fairly wide variety of things under that umbrella, both in my current job and when I worked more permanently in the Ozarks.

Life is weird sometimes. It turns out my new gig based here in Indiana will "require" me to spend quite a bit of time (and by that I mean at least a couple of months, and possibly longer) this spring/summer living and doing research in the Ozarks. It's totally by chance, and while I knew I'd be traveling a lot and spending time out of state, I didn't know I'd end up pretty much back where I started, at least for awhile, just a few months after I left. . The nature of my work dictates that I'll be spending a lot of time in the hills of the Current River and Black River watersheds...and while I will have to work pretty long and hard hours, you'd be nuts to consider the possibility that I won't take advantage of the opportunity to get on some of my old rivers and creeks. I am pretty amped.

I'm given to understand the situation is rather bleak in Texas. The one saving grace in Missouri is that we do have a strong culture of canoeing on smallish Ozark rivers, and a lot of landowners understand that and accept it, if begrudgingly. In a place like Texas where that is less true, the sight of a floater or fisherman is much more likely to catch a landowners eye. And in remote, lightly used areas (aka areas without a canoe rental or other economic interest in keeping access open) the sad reality is that the landowner basically DOES control access, whether legally or not. Most people are not going to subject themselves to intimidation, threats, or worse, when they can just go one river over and not be bothered. Sure, one might call a sheriff in a more extreme case, but probably not, and even if so, they are likely as not to be told to just respect the landowner and stay away. That decision on a fisherman's part to just stay away is logical, rational, and I wouldn't even encourage otherwise, because it's not worth putting yourself in harms way. With that said, it does allow landowners to basically decide for themselves what waterways can be used by fisherman or floaters, regardless of legality. That doesn't seem particularly healthy, although I don't have a good solution.

That right there is an awesome example of how vocal people who don't hesitate to write congressman can stop some of things before they start. I'm as cynical about politicians as anyone...but those in rural states especially get nervous when they've clearly pissed off large numbers hunters and fishermen. It's worth doing, people. I regularly let mine know how I feel about conservation and public land and that I will vote largely based on their record in those areas. It's not like it's all that much effort, even.