ozark trout fisher

It's not that I think you're doing anything wrong exactly. Maybe since you have experience ice fishing, you can tell when the ice is of a safe thickness and can do it safely-but the fact is that the majority around here can't. I've often seen people out on ice around here that they should never dream of being on-like when it's only 2-3" thick, or towards the end of the winter, when the ice is pretty thick, but also very rotten and mushy. I'm not insulting anyone, I was just giving a fair warning that folks had better be darn sure the ice is thick enough before they go out on it-and clearly not everyone does, based on the fact that it seems someone goes through every year. In short, this isn't northeastern Minnesota, and most years ice fishing is a pretty dicey proposition. Last year was something of an exception.

The spring is on Camp Mihaska property. I have long wondered if maybe they would grant permission to fish. Has anyone tried? In any case, there's plenty of good public water there. I learned to fly fish on that creek-talk about trial by fire.... I caught 15 or 20 trees for every little rainbow.

That's a good trick, and I've used it before. Often during the summer trico hatches, I'll use something like a #14 Ausable Wulff with a #24 trico behind it-and the funny thing is, I often as not catch as many or more fish on the Wulff as the trico. It's kinda like when I'm nymph fishing, and I get more hits at my stick-on indicator than my nymph (which has also been known to happen to me on the Upper Current) But for the olives, I find that a Parachute Adams of the appropriate size will do the trick at least about 80% of the time. Once you get a quarter mile or so from the popular accesses, I don't find the trout on the Current to be all that selective.

There isn't that much to fishing that hatch to be honest. Just fish a #20 or #22 dry fly on a 12 foot leader tapering to 6x or 7x, and try to get the float as drag free as possible. Also, when you're dry fly fishing on that river, it's pretty much a must to target a specific rising trout. Even during the best hatches, I find that at the least, three or four fish will be taking nymphs or emergers for every one that is taking dries, so it's pretty important to find a specific fish that is looking up. I just fish the parachute adams because I can't see a normal adams well enough in the small sizes needed for that hatch-a regular adams or a more accurate olive pattern would probably be more productive if you can see it. That's all I really know about it, although others more experienced with the Current River and dry fly fishing in general will know far more I'm sure. Honestly, based on your reports you seem to catch more trout on that river than I do, so frankly I feel a little weird telling you about my tactics.

Nice pictures. I wouldn't have suspected the Niangua would be that full of stoneflies. I've only fished there a couple times, but it doesn't strike me as a prototypical stonefly river like the Eleven Point or North Fork. Anyway, thanks for posting. The next time I head down that way I'll make sure to have plenty of Golden Stones in the box.

Nice... The 'bow does look streamborn to me (smaller than stocker size, white fin tips, typical wild trout markings) but I guess you can never be sure. The mayflies were probably Blue-winged olives (aka Baetis)-they often hatch very heavy on rainy, nasty winter days like today. A #20 or #22 Parachute Adams will often produce a lot of fish during that hatch, but mostly smaller 'bows. And the brown is sure a pretty one-it looks like it could have come right out of the Madison. Thanks for the report.

Not remotely. For five years, I lived a half hour from Trapper's Lake in Colorado, one of the most famous native trout fisheries in the country... and if you used the same methods people do at Busch ( bright yellow marabou jigs, Powerbait, canned corn, etc) you could fish all day and never get a bite. You actually have to use flies and lures that represent real trout food. I just can't draw the slightest comparison between fishing a stocked pond and an honest to goodness natural trout fishery. For that matter I can't really draw much of a comparison between fishing a trout park and fishing a real resident or wild trout fishery right here in Missouri. What that has to do with the original topic of the thread...um, well I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with it.

8 of 10. Missed the one about the Red Quill and the Bristol Bay salmon run. I'm a little flummoxed about the animosity against TU. They have been a veritable savior to colwater streams across the country. Trout fishing in America wouldn't be anything like what it is now without them. I'd say their one of the few special interest organizations around that has it about right.

You guys that ice fish out at Busch are nuts..... Do what you want, but people go through every year at Busch Wildlife during trout season (luckily there haven't been any deaths that I know of, but it's just a matter of time), so you might get the idea that it isn't exactly safe. There isn't near enough ice yet for it to be even marginally safe-maybe by late December or January it might be kind of okay. To each their own, but you just might think twice before you go out there. Ice fishing in Missouri, in my opinion, is always a little like playing Russian Roulette. Not worth a limit of stockers IMO. The possible exception to that was last winter, when it froze way harder than usual and there was about a foot of solid ice. That's probably safe, but still I wasn't going out on it. It may be just me, but the idea of dying by falling through ice into freezing cold water doesn't sound like much fun.

Nothing wrong with it. I don't have a problem with the people that fish trout parks-different strokes for different folks. I will say that you could probably get a lot more enjoyment if you fished the less crowded trout streams- and no need to go west, there are plenty right here in Missouri. There is the Niangua below Bennett, the Current below Montauk, and the Meramec River below Maramec Spring. None of these are anywhere near as crowded as the trout parks they border against, and you don't have to drive any further to get to them- and that's not even mentioning the dozens of other good trout streams in the state, of Blue, Red, and White Ribbon persuasion. The fish aren't as easy, and there aren't as many of them, but if you are looking for a truly quality experience on a real trout stream, you're probably going to have to look outside of the parks. Give the areas outside the park a try the next time you head to one of the parks-why not?. I think you'll find the experience quite a bit different and possibly more rewarding.

I am from the general vicinity of St. Louis (about 50 miles out) and only about 20 miles from the nearest urban "trout pond", and I can tell you that I really wish they would quit the winter pond thing. Wasting fish on ponds where they can't survive doesn't seem like much of a management practice. I'd much rather see those fish go somewhere like the Niangua, where they might actually survive the summer. But frankly, I think that any of the trout parks, with the possible exception of a few certain areas in Montauk, are pretty much hopeless. Why fish crowded water when, below all 4 trout parks, there are miles of quality water with many less people? Trout parks have for the most part been turned into channelized ditches. It's such a shame, as all four have the potential to be high quality Ozark streams. Start taking down the rock dams, mill dams, and other stream "improvements";start restoring these streams to their natural state, and I might pay $3 to fish there. But given their current state, I would be more inclined to pay $3 to fish in a pond full of stunted bluegills than a trout park.

Since this topic seems to have gone to falling, filling waders, breaking ankles, and that kind of thing, I've got another one. I was on a medium sized mountain stream in western Montana a couple years back, and saw a good size brookie rising in the seam along the opposite bank. Problem was, from where I was standing, I was getting a terrible drag, and the fish wouldn't look at the fly. I figured if I waded out and stood on a rock in the middle of the stream, I could probably keep enough line off the water to at least get a half-way decent drift. I get out there to that rock, and in the process of getting my foot-hold, I realized that it was way too slippery too late. I slid backwards, and hit my lower back so hard on that rock that I felt my vision starting to dim. I was able to crawl bank to the bank, and while I'm not sure I went out altogether, it was close, and when I finally came to my senses I realized that my back hurt like a son of a biscuit eater, and that my rod was drifting downstream in the general direction of the Big Hole River. It slowed down my fishing a little for the next couple of days, but no permanent damage was done. Never did find the rod though. It sure as heck didn't seem funny at the time, but you I can't help but laugh about it now.

I don't know much about Bennett Spring, but I'd guess that this and last years shortage of hatchery trout was mostly due to the floods in '08. I know it washed a lot of hatchery trout into the spring branches in pretty much every park, which kinda set them back for the next year or two. Last year and some of this year, everyone was complaining about the lack of hatchery trout in the parks, and many were staying away. I was loving it-the parks were less crowded than ever, and there were still more than enough trout around to keep any sane man happy. I have never, not even once, found there to be a lack of fish at a trout park. I've noticed the numbers go down before, but even on the worst days, there were always many more fish than any stream could sustain on a long term basis. I'm of the opinion personally, that it would be just fine if the trout parks cut back their stocking numbers pretty significantly. Maybe the number of fisherman will go down as the fishing gets a little bit challenging. And best of all, you could take some of those fish and stock them in a water where they can have a chance to survive, hold over, and maybe even spawn- like say, the Blue, White, and Red Ribbon areas below the parks. It's not going to happen, but it's good to dream.

I had something similar to that happen to me on the Current last winter. I was fishing just a couple hundred yards down from Baptist Camp, and I got a fly hung up in a deep bankside slot across the stream, and decided to wade over there to get it back as it was the last egg pattern in my box. Normally, I could have made it fine, but the water was up a little and, although I thought I was being careful, but just as I grabbed the fly off the bottom I felt the sick feeling unique to an fisherman filling his waders on a cold day. The air temp that day was in the 20s, and I was completely soaked all the way up to my chest. Not fun... Waded back to the truck, changed clothes, warmed up a little with the truck heater, and got back to fishing. Turned out to be a good thing I got the Glo-bug back, as I caught a couple nice browns on it afterwards.

Interesting....I thought those light colored circular things you see in the streams this time of year were good, clean places to step. Just kidding, but I do hope that folks will stay off the wild trout creeks during the spawn. It's a good time to fish the C&R season at the trout parks, or fish one of the larger, stocked rivers.

Maybe... But I don't that it would be too awful crowded on weekdays. Most people are working, and only bums like me who are willing to take off for fishing would be there.

I'd say catch and release fishing winter fishing in a trout park during the week is pretty far down on the poaching scale;I probably wouldn't do it knowingly, but I wouldn't necessarily look down on someone who did. I honestly think it's dumb that it's only open Fri-Monday. Why not be open seven days a week?

I'm with you. I have actually had a person,trying to insult me, call me an "crazy environmentalist". Not a very good insult seeing as how I took it as a compliment. I don't have that much to add, since I've only been here for about six years now-not enough for me to notice any big changes, except for black bass species composition in the lower Meramec system. But I have a lot of family that have spent their life in the Ozarks. My Grandfather would always talk about the pools on the the forks of the Black River that used to be all but bottomless, and after years of gravel mining, atv riding, and such, got shallower and wider and poorer fish habitat-and that was before the dam broke at the headwaters of the East Fork in Johnson shut-ins, one of his favorite smallmouth wading streams in years gone by. He has told me stories about catching lots of good sized smallmouth bass (and some honest to goodness trophy fish) from the lower Meramec below Eureka. That is mostly a thing of the past. He has spoken to me about the great walleye fishing on the St. Francis, Eleven Point, Meramec, Gasconade and Current. Once again, that is mostly a thing of the past. He told me about tracts of land that used to have many coveys of quail being pretty much barren. I know that old timers have been known to exaggerate, but each and every old timer fisherman I've known will tell you emphatically that the fishing has gotten pretty much progressively worse throughout their lifetime. That can't be just a coincidence. As fisherman, we have to stand up to any threat against our fisheries. Dams, gravel mining,pollutants, greedy bureaucrats, industry, overharvest, anything that can make things keep getting worse. When I'm elderly, I do not want to be telling my grand-kids how great the fishing used to be. If I'm a "crazy environmentalist" it's because I desperately want to avoid a very bad reality-one where nature and natural resources are greatly diminished even from their already gravely threatened state. That's not the world I want to live in, and it's not the world I want future generations to live in. Rant over.

Colorado River Cutties certainly are a cool fish. Just about 10 miles from where I used to live in northwest Colorado there was a little mountain lake that I would fish for Colorado River cutthroat all the time-fished for them about twice a week every summer for five years. They are definitely one of the cooler varieties of trout. Speaking of cutthroat, I'll never forget the day I spent on a tiny stream in the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming. The creek was truly tiny beyond what you would think could possibly hold fish, and it was only because I had a wild hair and a bit of adventurous spirit that particular day that I even gave it a try. I literally put one foot one bank, the other foot on the other bank,and casted upstream when fishing it. It had maybe 1/2 to 1/3 of the flow of Blue Springs. But it had some relatively deep (2-3 foot) pot holes, and they were all just full of really nice cutthroat-12 inches all the way up to 17 and 18", and healthy, fat fish too. These fish could not possibly have grown to this size in this tiny little creek-there's a good sized trout stream a mile or two down the valley where they probably came from- but it was still cool to catch and release trout of that size from such a small stream. I believe those fish were Yellowstone Cutthroats, but they might have been Snake River cutts-I'm not sure.

As I said earlier in this thread, I'm not against having some of the ponds being C&R only- I think the regs as they are now are about right. As much as anything, I am just kinda poking fun at the folks who fish these winter ponds and think it's some kind of high sport. These are dumb, pellet fed hatchery trout, that had the unfortunate luck to end up in a pond where they are not going to survive more than a couple months. I love releasing a trout (or a bass, or anything else), and thinking about how it may grow larger someday, and maybe even spawn and create offspring to keep the fishery going. But that feeling is pretty hard to come by when I know the fish is gonna die anyway in a couple of months. So it's fine by me if you have your catch and release winter trout ponds. I'm just saying that I'm not interested in fishing them personally.

What's the coolest, oddest fish you ever hooked into-maybe something that you weren't at all expecting to catch, or a species of fish you didn't even know lived in the water you were fishing? Mine came on a trip to Montana a couple years back, on a tributary of the Bitterroot River. It was a pretty small stream, about the same size as Mill or Spring Creek. This was before I really became a fly fisherman, but I knew even then that a fly-rod was the only way to go on these little creeks. Anyway, the drill was to swing Woolly Buggers in the mornings while the water was still too cold to trigger a rise, and fish Royal Wulffs in the afternoons. I was after Westslope Cutthroat trout, and the fishing had been very good for them the entire time. Early one morning, I decided to hike further upstream to see if I could find some different, possibly more productive water. Eventually I came to what had to be the deepest, fishiest looking pool on the whole creek. I knew there had to be a huge cutthroat at the bottom of it. I cast my Woolly up into the riffle leading down into the pool, let it get down near the bottom, and gave it a couple twitches. I got an incredibly hard take, and the fish started taking line pretty much right away. The cutthroats and cuttbows I'd been catching had all pretty much been between 10" and 15", so this was a little surprising to say the least. Anyway, the fight went on for maybe 5 or 10 minutes before I got a clear view of the fish. When I saw it, it was a deep green color instead of golden color of the cutthroat. When I landed it, sure enough, it was an honest to goodness Montana Bull trout, and it went a little past the tape on my fly rod that marks 20". Bull trout are a threatened species, and there numbers had gotten to be pretty low across Montana. You aren't supposed to fish for them on purpose (and I wasn't), but I guess it's not all that rare to catch them on accident based on a conversation I had with a local in the campground that night. That was the only big one I caught, but I actually did catch some smaller ones on dry flies when fishing for cutthroat -the little guys look a lot like brookies,and that's actually part of the reason they're threatened. Montana has a liberal limit on non-native brook trout, and people have been known to keep small bull trout they mistook for brookies. Anyway, I'd have to say the Montana Bull trout is the coolest fish I've ever hooked into. What's yours?

I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with calling the hotline if you see a poacher- do it by all means. I'm certainly not defending the people who use bait or keep fish out of season- If that's the impression that my last post gave, that wasn't my intention. It's just that I think the MDC would be better off to spend a little more time enforcing the regs on waters where the fish actually have a chance to survive, and provide enjoyment for more than just a couple months.

One thing I would like to add, since Kayser brought it up, involves the whole shocking thing. I totally believe that you found no fish smaller than 8" while shocking. But I have a question regarding that-do you guys shock up every kind of habitat? I honestly don't know. Because I have noticed in my experience on wild trout streams across Missouri that the young of the year wild trout spend most of their time in very shallow riffles-a place that a shocking crew might think isn't worth the time to bother sampling. Wild trout and stockers do not tend to hold in the same areas. You'll rarely find a stocker a very shallow riffle, but it is not at all unusual to find small wild trout in the same place. And one more point. The trout that had been stocked in Little Piney until 2001 were also once in-bred, genetically compromised stockers. And now they are reproducing just fine. I keep coming back to that example just because it's the most recent case where a hatchery supported fishery was transformed into a wild trout stream.

I am all about catch and release trout regulations where they have a chance to hold over, but not so on the winter trout ponds. They have no year-round fish carrying capacity-they simply are not trout habitat in any since of the word. Frankly, the idea of "conserving the resource" on a water where the trout have absolutely no chance of surviving spring warm-up seems downright silly. I understand that the MDC wants to make the fishery last longer into the winter-and that's certainly not all bad. I think their current system of some C&R lakes and some catch and keep lakes is about right. So I do fish the winter lakes, but only the catch and keep ones, or the others after Feb. 1. The only reason I do it is for a trout dinner-and why not? They're gonna all die anyway come April or May. Quite frankly, I figure I'm doing the trout a favor-being immediately killed and eaten is a much better fate for a trout than dying in the warm waters of late spring. For all other types of trout fishing for me, it's all about fly rods and catch and release, but on the winter ponds it's all about Powerbait and a trout dinner-a little hillbilly trout fishing if you will. Keep the first two I catch, go home, and get the lemon and butter out. And there's no guilt whatsoever seeing as how they're going to die anyway.

I hadn't thought of that, but that does seem to be as likely an explanation as any other. Gavin, I basically agree with you that the fishery is fine as it is. As I said, I'm not suggesting that the river shouldn't be stocked anymore or anything to that effect. I'm just saying the habitat on that river seems pretty conducive to a wild rainbow population. What you said about the fish being the hatchery strain-and therefore less likely to spawn successfully is probably part of the problem as well. It's just that I am a wild trout junkie, and as such I wouldn't mind seeing a few more of them in the Current. I know this isn't agreeable to most, but I'd rather have a river full of 7" wild trout than a river full of 15" stockers. But in any case, I love the Current as it is, a will keep coming back no matter how it's managed in the future. I firmly believe it's the best trout stream in the state.